Q: Of what use is yesterday's line? A: As the needed setup for today's rhyme
Morning Thoughts #282
More constraints, yes, but also the opportunity for a form better defined. To no longer be limitlessly young, at the age now where I’m more a poem than prose. Some things, out of necessity, must rhyme. And yes, limits are now placed on the meter. I must fit this thought to this length of line, this length of time. The time left allotted, the place, the beauty comes from this fit. The perfect word for the rhyme, the closest match to meaning. Nothing compromised, because the form itself cannot be compromised.
Hold yourself to this standard. The life left to live is still a poem waiting. You may no longer have the seeming boundless possibilities of blank youth. You’ve waited, you’ve taken this path, then turned back, then taken another, then slowed your pace out of anxiety.
Become now the villanelle. This and that aspect of yourself, this past-defining event, oh, it can’t be totally erased. It will need to fit into the structure. No longer a life of blank verse ahead of you, and yet the future is even richer for that fact.
This isn’t a limit on yourself. You are the limit, what is unchangeable. The aspects of yourself you cannot diminish can still be made to rhyme with a greater fate tomorrow.
Why this line from yesterday? Because it was a setup, as demanded by the structure, for the line you are about to write, which now lands that much more forcefully, which is to say poetically, because of the setup demanded.