Polyglot

[blank|verse]

Ok, fair points, Prince; it's difficult to un-read this now but I still think there's enough ambiguity in the first stanza to make it work as it stands. One possible compromise might be to re-order the stanzas; but whatever, I feel the extra line is clumsy and unnecessary (and again, with apologies to hack for, um, hacking his work to pieces):

Polyglot

Although I can say,
in several different languages
"Show me your hands, or I will kill you,"

I have never learned to ask,
in any foreign tongue,
"How are things in your grandmother's village?"

[PrinceMyshkin]

Ok, fair points, Prince; it's difficult to un-read this now but I still think there's enough ambiguity in the first stanza to make it work as it stands. One possible compromise might be to re-order the stanzas; but whatever, I feel the extra line is clumsy and unnecessary (and again, with apologies to hack for, um, hacking his work to pieces):

Polyglot

Although I can say,
in several different languages
"Show me your hands, or I will kill you,"

I have never learned to ask,
in any foreign tongue,
"How are things in your grandmother's village?"

As I recently PMed Hack, I have been enjoying your and my vigorous difference of opinion re the appropriateness of the original final line, but as to your suggested re-ordering of the stanzas, I think that comes mighty close to being criminal!

Putting that 1st verse last strikes me as anti-climactic. Furthermore, in this arrangement the speaker would appear to be indicting or apologizing for himself.

[hack]

While I agree that the final line is problematic, it is a quite different poem without it.
The line can be taken as a rather flip, and even incongruous remark. That is not the
intent though. It is meant to be a wistful recollection of something that, on reflection,
should have always been obvious to the speaker, but was not. It is not an indictment,
but a revelation. Perhaps it is too clumsy to say what I mean to say. The matter of
staying true to the actual conversation is only important in that I wish to express,
with some economy, what I thought was the gist of the comment. The first verse is,
in fact, a condensation of a longer, and more profane, original thought...peace...

[Delta40]

well i think it works the other way round as the last line is now tacitly obvious and more complete as a result. Your words here have created an unseen sentence.

[blank|verse]

Gah! I give up!!