THE MARVEL(?) // Week Two

I think poetic analysis was easily my favorite part of any high school English class. Analyzing novels and writing papers on those novels was entertaining and challenging, but each paper that I wrote would leave me feeling drained while poems solicited the opposite effect. Each poem I read through invigorated me, and each paper was fuel on the fire. I've been able to enjoy nearly every poem that I read in a classroom setting - even the ones that I had no hope of fully understanding - but for me "The Marvel", by Keith Douglas, fell far short of its name. I guess I'm not exactly a hardy seafarer, but the images described often failed to take me anywhere and when they did I found myself too hung up on the other aspects of the poem to fully appreciate them. The form that Douglas used was easily the poem's biggest detractor.

I can appreciate the skill it takes to craft a poem with true rhyme, and I can appreciate the beauty in a poem altogether without. But half rhyme, which is employed for the first five of the eight stanzas in "The Marvel", completely takes me out of the immersion that most poems provide. It probably stems from the fact that to me, when I read the work out loud in my head, a half rhyme sounds like it's clearly been forced. In fact, it sounds like a mistake on the part of the author and that also completely ruins my poetic experience. The rhyme scheme is also unintelligible throughout the poem. Instead of struggling to come up with a halfhearted terza rima or his own homebrew pattern, I think it would have improved my reading experience if Douglas had done away with rhyme entirely and flaunted his free verse proudly.