Insipid words have tainted ev'ry breath
I've taken since this horn of mine appeared.
Among my strong dislikes with "fear" and "death,"
I place the song of love. It's just so weird!
In fact, I'll break the sonnet's pattern now,
Inserting lines in ways it won't allow.
I've had my fill of sentiment, and how!
But love itself is vast and beautiful,
An inner, thrumming pulse that mitigates
The pain of life, that sparks the dutiful,
Contains the mad, and balances the fates.
It touches ponies softly, privately,
For good or ill and spreads my canopy,
Alive with love from sea to shining sea!
Ah, Shining... How that pony won my heart!
Without a sappy sonnet, primly penned,
But unpretentious doggerel, his art
So plain and practical, the perfect friend.
For I am no award, am not a prize
Presented to a stallion's hungry eyes:
I rule the twin domains of truth and lies.
"The heart is fickle!" "No, the heart is true!"
Denying both, I state the simple fact:
The heart's an organ pumping blood for you.
It's in the brain emotion gets unpacked.
The magic's all electrochemical,
Reactions never theoretical,
Intangible, or hypothetical.
Deception, honesty, both right and wrong,
I dance that thin and twisting razor blade
Between a couple's panting, wordless song
And wailing grief when one has been betrayed.
Complexity's too hard to sing about;
That's why this double not-a-sonnet's spout
Is whirling like a torrent spilling out.
I've seen it all but barely understand
The hundred billion ways that love can flow.
Believe me, though, that each of them is grand—
Or drenched in pain no other ponies know.
Romantic? Sure. Resigned, I guess, as well,
A horse upon an endless carousel:
The "ups" and "downs" don't tickle or repel.
We'll end with couplets. Yes, we need a pair
To braid our double not-a-sonnet's hair
And tie a bow so sweet and debonair.
Enchanting; awful: love is both these things,
And I, of course, manipulate its strings.
Unduly harsh? Perhaps. But love's endured
The worst the world can give. So rest assured:
Both suffering and joy get quickly blurred.
You claim your heart is broken or athrob?
I'm here to help. Don't thank me: it's my job.
These are nice poems, I like them.
4735932
Thanks!
They're way too much fun to do, so I plan to keep doing 'em till I run outta characters.
Mike
4736627
You're Welcome, my friend.
This is one of the best characterizations of Cadænce I've ever seen in the fandom.
It's done in a poem.
You are a wizard, aren't you?
FimFiction Please follow Sparity
Those are the childern of Spike & Rarity
Garnett is Spikes son from the warepony Sheriff of Ponyville/ Incomplete
Ruby / Clarity are daughters Growin up But thats another story short & Sweet.
Lavender Too from another I think with that one she has a brother .
Thank you Sir, May I have another.
You have some well writen work,
4739967 [ca-DAYNSS]. Well, then.
4739967
Thanks as always!
I guess I'm with Skywriter when it comes to Cadance--I just wanna see her end up as fully-rounded as the other characters on the show. I love the use of the letter "ash" in her name there, too: ding-dang modern English keyboards, not giving me a way to type it...
4740164
Thanks for the explanation!
I'll hafta go looking these stories up, I reckon.
Mike
There's a line from a poem that fascinates me, Poe's "Israfel:" Where Love's a grown-up God. One would think you'd expounded on just that theme.
You seem to be breeding back to the sonnet's precursors, which were not fixed at fourteen lines. But I see what you're actually doing. You've taken two poems--call them extended Shakespearian sonnets, because they each incorporate an extra quatrain--and interleaved their quatrains and final couplets. This is reminiscent of Occitan(Provençal) forms, especially the sestina though it's nowhere as complex as that.
And then interleaved into that you've got a running commentary--precisely as if some unwitting scribe had copied out both the poem and interlineal notes from another, [EDIT] earlier hand all at once, not knowing they're two different things.
This is a practice which I've come to call "deep Medievalism:" creation of an archaic atmosphere not through sham-antique (or even real antique) grammar and syntax, but through a knowledge of and adroitness in emulating medieval thought and practice.
Tolkien did this. So, apparently, do you.
4747665
A sonnet from Cadance:
Seemed way too simple, so I started looking for ways to kick the traditional structure around a little. But the more I thought about Cadance as a character, the more I realized that she would want a reader to know that she knew what she was doing. So that's where the commentary came in.
That for me continues to be half the fun of these things: matching poetic forms to individual characters. I'm working on one for Derpy right now, and I've come to realize that it's gotta be something iambic but written with trochees instead so all the accents are a half-step off...
Mike
Nicely done, Cadence really comes through here
4844552
Thanks!
Professional therapists do a job I can't even imagine doing, and I wanted to see if I could do something with that aspect of Cadance's character.
Mike
4748304
We need something in one form of poem that gets mistaken for another; Facestealer's Lament
(Chrysalis/the Swarm)
We also need on that rises, complex and insanely hard to understand; Madness' Ascent
(Sombra and his Stairs)
Thanks for pointing me here as well. I really enjoyed it!
This is crazy in all the right ways.