Poetic Forms: Lament

Hello Everyone!

Welcome to week nine of poetic forms, where every week I introduce a different type of poem and invite you to give it a go! As an added incentive to take part, the best poem every week is featured on the Writing Gooder blog on Sunday afternoon, alongside a brief analysis by myself.

To enter a poem, make sure it’s written in this week’s style and then either post a link to it in a comment below, or post the full text of the poem.

This week’s challenge is a little like last week – next week I’ll give you a more concrete form, I promise! – in that there isn’t a set structure for this form of poetry. We’re going to take a look at the Lament. This is a form of poetry which many poets choose, though often without realising it. Let’s take a look at the example first, though it should be noted that this is an extract of Gunn’s Lament and not the full poem:

Lament

Thom Gunn (1929-2004)

Your dying was a difficult enterprise.

First, petty things took up your energies,

The small but clustering duties of the sick,

Irritant as the cough’s dry rhetoric.

Those hours of waiting for pills, shot, X-ray

Or test (while you read novels two a day)

Already with a kind of clumsy stealth

Distanced you from the habits of your health.

    In hope still, courteous still, but tired and thin,

You tried to stay the man that you had been,

Treating each symptom as a mere mishap

Without import. But then the spinal tap.

It brought a hard headache, and when night came

I heard you wake up from the same bad dream

Every half-hour with the same short cry

Of mild outrage, before immediately

Slipping into the nightmare once again

Empty of content but the drip of pain.

No respite followed: though the nightmare ceased,

Your cough grew thick and rich, its strength increased.

Four nights, and on the fifth we drove you down

To the Emergency Room. That frown, that frown:

I’d never seen such rage in you before

As when they wheeled you through the swinging door.

For you knew, rightly, they conveyed you from

Those normal pleasures of the sun’s kingdom

The hedonistic body basks within

And takes for granted—summer on the skin,

Sleep without break, the moderate taste of tea

In a dry mouth. You had gone on from me

As if your body sought out martyrdom

In the far Canada of a hospital room.

Once there, you entered fully the distress

And long pale rigours of the wilderness.

A gust of morphine hid you. Back in sight

You breathed through a segmented tube, fat, white,

Jammed down your throat so that you could not speak.

    How thin the distance made you. In your cheek

One day, appeared the true shape of your bone

No longer padded. Still your mind, alone,

Explored this emptying intermediate

State for what holds and rests were hidden in it.

    You wrote us messages on a pad, amused

At one time that you had your nurse confused

Who, seeing you reconciled after four years

With your grey father, both of you in tears,

Asked if this was at last your ‘special friend’

(The one you waited for until the end).

‘She sings,’ you wrote, ‘a Philippine folk song

To wake me in the morning … It is long

And very pretty.’ Grabbing at detail

To furnish this bare ledge toured by the gale,

On which you lay, bed restful as a knife,

You tried, tried hard, to make of it a life

Thick with the complicating circumstance

Your thoughts might fasten on. It had been chance

Always till now that had filled up the moment

With live specifics your hilarious comment

Discovered as it went along; and fed,

Laconic, quick, wherever it was led.

You improvised upon your own delight.

I think back to the scented summer night

We talked between our sleeping bags, below

A molten field of stars five years ago:

I was so tickled by your mind’s light touch

I couldn’t sleep, you made me laugh too much,

Though I was tired and begged you to leave off.

The aim of the lament is to write a poem which expresses grief, often related to a death or a deep seated regret. If you want to make it a little more difficult, then you can mimic Gunn by writing in rhyming couplets. I also don’t mind if you decide to write a parody of the form; I’m very interested to see what everyone comes up with!

Good Luck!

** Image owned by Enokson at Flickr.