Stars Are Many and the Dark Is Deep

Hardly fair to ask my year nine students to write poetry and not give it a go myself. Distracted myself from necessary corrections and wrote a villanelle for myself. For those not familiar, the villanelle is a very structured form of French poetry that fell out of favour and was often dismissed as pretty but essentially pointless--until Dylan Thomas came along and wrote one of the greatest poems of the 20th century in that style: Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.

I'm no Dylan Thomas. I don't even pretend to be a hack poet. But here you go: Mike's Untitled Villanelle! This bloody thing took me over an hour to write (maybe two!), can you believe it?

***
Untitled

At night across my heart I feel it creep
Empty spaces nearer home catch the sky:
Yet stars are many and the dark seems deep

Solitude and angry thoughts deny me sleep,
Double bed with a single pillow: why?
At night across my heart I feel it creep.

Against the glass those cold distant lights sweep,
The answer must lie with a woman’s thigh.
Yet stars are many and the dark seems deep.

Cheerful pub glow, and company we keep,
To then return home and try not to cry.
At night across my heart I feel it creep.

Whatsoever a man sows shall he reap,
I observed the winds and the clouds that fly.
Yet stars are many and the dark seems deep.

And I am deeper yet; I will not weep.
To those empty spaces I turn my eye.
At night across my heart I feel it creep,
Yet stars are many and the dark seems deep.

***

Yes, I cribbed from both Robert Frost (Desert Places) and the Bible. Rough as this thing is... any comments? (And no, please, don't read too deeply into it, eh?)

Not sure what I was trying to get at. I think I began intending it as a bit of a lark and half-way through tried to take it seriously. Started by looking at possible rhymes, actually--a villanelle requires an awful lot of them (7 for your 'a' and 6 for your 'b')--and maybe was thinking of my recent posts on my main blog and words like 'dark', 'lonely', 'night' came to mind... which I admit is very, very cheesy. You'd think I'm an angsty 14 year old. A 14 year old _girl_ for chrissake! But the difference between a 14 year old and an adult (that would be me, I think) is, I hope, that I can at least try for something a bit deeper. (Trying in no way assures actually achieving any depth.) So I wanted to start with some of that depressing, lonely stuff--which immediately made me think of Robert Frost, for some reason, even though I haven't read or studied his stuff in years, but with that whole star and depth thing suggest that there's always more to it--an infinity of options, alternatives; and since it all only 'seems' deep, I figure that'd be my backdoor in case someone accused me of bullshit.

Meh, it's not all bad, I'd like to think. The biblical reference is a bit obscure... not the sowing and reaping ("whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap"--Galatians (ch. VI, v. 7)), but the wind and clouds ("He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap"--Ecclesiastes (ch. XI, v. 4)), which is to say... I haven't sown a thing, and therefore I'll reap nothing as well.

Not sure if the ending is optimistic or not. Am I turning my eye towards those deeper spaces I'd like imagine are within myself? Or turning away from them? Eh, who knows?

I wish I had rhythm. Sigh. I'd hate to drop a whoop-ass can of scansion on this thing. Not that I quite know how, that is.

Enough beating up my own work. Maybe with some revision and serious thought I could salvage it into something mediocre. But, you know: "Double bed with a single pillow: why?" I mean... c'mon! And how seriously can you possibly take any poem that mentions a woman's thigh?