Castle - A Sestina

[Evangeline Carter]

First, let me explain. This kind of form is called a sestina. It's of a particular structure. There are six stanzas and six lines to each stanza. The ending words are what's most important. Each line is numbered. In the stanza following the first, you have an end-word pattern requirement of --

Never mind. This is already getting complicated. Here's a great site to explain it.

http://www.baymoon.com/~ariadne/form/sestina.htm

They're actually really very fun. It's like a puzzle. Try it some time!

This was for a creative writing assignment. I believe Apollo's poem 'Blood' came from the same class. The word I had to work off of was castle.

I know the i's are lower case. It's part of the format I decided to use.


once you were my Castle.
you were my Strong-Tower.
a fortress of rock and Stone
safety, security, Solitude.
you were my Armor.
you were my helm and Sword.

yes, you were my Sword,
like you were my Castle.
and i took for granted that Armor
because i thought you were my Strong-Tower;
my wonderful, ageless Solitude.
there was safety in your walls of Stone.

but time wears even Stone
and dulls every Sword.
and time stole my Solitude
and tore down my Castle.
it took my Strong-Tower
and broke my Armor.

now there is no Armor.
there is only dust and Stone
and a broken Strong-Tower.
there are dragons, but no Swords.
i am in the dark ages with no Castle
and no where to go for Solitude.

how i miss that blessed Solitude,
kept from the noisy world by your Armor.
i miss being inside my Castle
miss how you courted me in those walls of Stone.
miss the nights when you would set aside your Sword
and bed me in your Strong-Tower

our relationship in that Strong-Tower
Was nurtured in our Solitude
like a crop, before the Sword
left, along with the rusting Armor.
lancelot, with his heart of Stone
left guinevere with no Castle

i’ll no longer mourn your Sword or Strong-Tower
i‘ll make my own Castle, and a new Solitude
without your ill-fitting Armor, or your pitiless heart of Stone

[Kale Allerion]

Wow, that's really good!

One question (not judging you, just curious): Why did you choose to leave the "I's" in lower-case?

[Evangeline Carter]

It was laziness, but not the type you'd think. The assignment was this:

Choose one word from a provided list, and write down all the words it makes you think of. Write a poem using those words, but implement at least patterns that chance the structure or the emphasis of the poem.

The structure was easy to take care of, but I couldn't think of something I wanted to do that wouldn't hurt the pattern of the poem. So I decided to emphasize the end words even more by giving them the ONLY capital letters in the poem. Thus robbing the i's of their capital status.