Poetry Challenge 19: Post Thy Poems… Or Wait a Week
Here we are on the starting date of our rhetorical figures poetry challenge. If you have a poem ready, you may post it below. Otherwise, you can wait a week or so with some of us who are still working. We’re starting slowly; we’re that sort of blog. In fact, I’m about to coin “Slow Literature” – did I, then? Let it be acknowledged a term nicer than euphemism and more honest than insult.
Slow Literature is what we do around these parts. It’s like “slow cooking” and “slow thinking”. It encourages flavor, nutritional density, and what that nice old movie High Society refers to as “respect for human frailty.”
The reference book for this challenge is Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth. It’s a quick, easy, and delightful perusal. That sentence doesn’t sound right? Good catch; neither does “a quick, easy, and delightful read” which comes abominably to mind due to its abominable over-use. Fortunately, it might count as Enallage, which Mark Forsyth defines as “a deliberate grammatical mistake.” Unfortunately, figures of rhetoric are supposed to be witticisms; they aren’t supposed to ossify into obnoxiously omnipresent tab-terms, like “on the go,” curse it.
So is it okay if I describe a book as, quote, “a book”? Thanks.
Elements of Eloquence is a briefly, delightfully, and easily read book. Please buy, beg or borrow it and refer to it in your poems for this challenge. As always, the challenge remains open forever.
Slow Literature 
Practice lines:
Alliteration, Polyptoton, Hendiadys, Scesis Onomaton, and Transferred Epithet
She that laughs and he that lingers
in the circling of the circle;
ringed about by fringed light-fingers
and impinged by smoky purple;
in the bond and loving circle
of the hanging lamp and myrtle.
Polyptoton
She fell lovesick then of moon-grazing
And of her knee-struck desire of desire
Antithesis and Syllepsis
It is easy to write a sentence. It is hard to serve one. It is also hard to serve a tennis ball, though for the shy it’s much harder sending it back to the chef.
Some jokes are a bit off. Others are simply offal.
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E P I P H A N Y
See how, my love, the wash and sea soft glow
and glimmer in the light and brimming play,
where all the watered shine and comely grow.
See how the silent sun descending low,
commits to surging depths its gold and ray,
and sets, my love, the wash and sea aglow.
And see the sweetest of the blowing blow
the weary surface, cheering surf and spray,
where all the watered shine and comely grow.
And how the thundering joy and dazzling bow,
in well-pleased hymns, limn not of shade nor gray
nor aught, my love, but wash and sea’s soft glow.
Look! See the plunging, rising from below:
see nothing dark nor doubts beneath dare stay,
where all the watered shine and comely grow.
But see, my love, the mighty undertow
that draws from strand and binds in one bright wave.
See how, my love, the wash and sea soft glow,
where all the watered shine and comely grow.
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