Musical Love

By

Chelsea Robertson

The deepest type of love for musicians 1

Is met the best by those in music’s trance;

Keeping in mind my love for music’s dance,

I seek the same of my own companions: 4

My drummer boyfriend caused aggravation;

My bassist boyfriend loved an acquaintance;

My singer boyfriend prided annoyance;

I chose the wrong band-mates, wrong musicians. 8

The great guitarist that I’m now dating..

He’s so very polite, and just so sweet,

And works so hard to take good care of me. 11

His hair and bright, green eyes radiating

Do naught but make his whole idea complete.

I’m important…how great it is to be. 14

In this poem I saught to describe my current love situation as I have been feeling it. I remember it being mentioned that in petrarchan sonnets, there is typically a change in between the octave and the sestet. I saught to follow this by first describing my past love and then my present in order to compare the two. The beginning of the poem was intented to say that a musician is best loved by another musician, and since I am a musician myself, I have tried to find that quality in the people I have dated. I then describe my past boyfriends as categorized by the instruments they played and say that I’ve obviously been dating the wrong kind of musician. The sestet then begins and I move into a description of my current happiness with the new musician: my guitarist. I describe my guitarist by how wonderfully he takes care of me, how sweet he is, and even a couple of his best physical features for his complete package, then comment on how great it is when you feel important (something that I get with my new boyfriend, but not with my old ones).

While the poem is primarily iambic, most of the lines end in trochees. This actually works well since most of my lines are intended to be individual ideas, and therefore, endstopped. So, the falling rhythm fit well. There are several other variations in the iambic feet such as in line 12 where the part of the line says “bright, green eyes”. This was done intentionally to emphasize the magnetude of how important the eyes were.

I followed the rhyme scheme listed in Leonnard for Petrarchan sonnets: abba,abba,cde,cde. This scheme was very hard to follow since the words that were critical to the meaning of my poem did not have easy words to rhyme with. I had a hard time finding words that both rhymed and meant what I needed them to mean. I did use fairly plain language for most of the poem since I am a fan of writing that way; I did, however, include more complex wording and fancier word composition to make it sound higher than normal speech.

Overall, I think I accomplished my goal fairly well. The need for formality caused several changes in what I had originally wanted to say. The rhyme scheme changed a lot of the poem, but was not too terribly bad. The iambs created problems because even after I spent so much time creating a rhyme scheme, sometimes I would have to reword my sentence for the iambs and would have to find new words that rhymed. Again, though, I think that the writing went well. I love to read formal poetry, but am not a fan of writing it since I feel restricted on my expression. This was one of my first attempts at writing any of the stricter forms of formal poetry, so I think that I did fairly well.