Metaphor... as a way of thinking.
Marriage is a bungee jump – by Walter MacDonald
This Moment – Eaven Boland
Two poems by Hafiz
Two poems by Naomi Shihab Nye: Burning the old year; Boy and Egg
What fun to see how MacDonald develops the idea of marriage as a bungee jump!
Just as bungee jumping and marriage are unpredictable, uneven, so is the use of rhyme and slant rhyme.
The final two stanzas: strain/pain; vows/now
echo the rhyme of the opening quatrain: canyon/minion; brushed/enough.
The leap to the next quatrain
... The ropes felt new enough
and he swore he measured them, the fall to the rocks
a lovers' leap eighty stories long.
The end, in a long leap -- prepared for in the penultimate stanza contains two breath-holding enjambements...
Hand in hand we stepped up
wavering to the ledge, hearing the rush
of a river we leaped to, a far-off
cawing crow, the primitive breeze of the fall,
and squeezed, clinging to each other's vows
that only death could separate us now.
**
The contrast of Boland's "This Moment",
breathless, fragmented, is a different sort of suspense.
Masterful. We reviewed her reading last Thursday...
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