Have any of you experience the?

Question

"Nightmare of Love" - -hopefully an acrostic sonnet

Inside of me is the image of you,

A disesase that spreads with every word said.

Memory, madness, your wishes imbue

Affliction and ecstacy painted red.

Fearing now a union I once thought blessed,

Righteousnes has lost essence and meaning.

Avoiding the demon whom you caressed,

I flee from you and hide, soul keening,

Damning you into h**l and back again!

Offering my blood for your redemption,

For I love you still, in spite of your sin,

Yet mortality gives no exemption.

Our future held a vision once so sweet,

Ultimately, it ended with defeat.

Answer 1

This is true of many but no less custom fit to the one who wrote it... I do not offer words of wisdom in regards to your work, only words of relation... I can see the fear in the words but I do not know the reason for them... I know that the emotion of love is one of the scariest things... once, I was not afraid but that was because I was ignorant... now that I see what "love" can do to someone, I know it deserves to be feared... your words capture the emotion well, as they always have...

Answer 2

This is exquisite.  I am stunned.  I first acquainted myself with the acrostic, to which I felt i could relate so well. Then upon reading this fascinating poem, I realized that perhaps the experience transcended my own.  The poem speaks of a once blessed love that has been tainted and corrupted.  It is the ultimate tragedy, and the ultimate acrostic sonnet.  Thank you.

Answer 3

When I saw "ecstacy" I thought, "I am in ecstasy when I "c" your "s." I did not get any farther than that. Such are the perils of Miss Pelling.

Answer 4

Sadly this happens too much in this era, to both women and men.  A sad tale worded feelings so well. Kudos

But, sucess is the best revenge, I tell my son.

Love is not the nightmare, Certain people know not of love.

Answer 5

You got to the point with this!  lol  The last stanza stated well.  My compliments

Answer 6

once i gave up on one of my dogs.

but that wasnt going to work.

it was all like this poem amazingly.

he ran across the street at the wrong time.

the other two dogs missed him,

sniffed his bowl all the time till i finally made it disappear.

they lived along time..

Answer 7

Just killer...that's all...

Answer 8

What I love about this poem is the fierce and unresting tergiversation to its subject it shares with much of your work.  The relentlessness of the ambivalence, more than its uncouth fierceness, qualifies it for the genre of correct Shakespearean sonnet.  For the point of ecstasy, and its spelling, I must disagree with Mr L; clearly you meant the to connote the Greek verb antho, I bloom, whence (if I recall) the name Eustace (good blooming), spelled with a 'c,' rather than histanai, to place, the root of ecstasy with an `s.'  Or did not you?  The opening of the poem follows Shakespeare's sonnet 24 very closely: `Mine eye hath played the painter and hath stelled/Thy beauty's form in table of my heart;/My body is the frame wherein 'tis held...'  Yet the new spelling of ecstasy gives the reader the opportunity to interpret your opening more literally than Shakespeare's version could be taken.

What I do not like about this sonnet is the vagueness of its action, and indeed, how everything, even the plot, seems to be a moving allegorical whim of the speaker.  It is not that I object to fantasy, but that this poem rambles among ideas and symbols (perdition- lines 5-12, then dropped; disease and discourse, line 2, then both dropped; blood- lines 5-10, dropped in the couplet; war/defeat: introduced in the couplet), but leaves most of them as loose ends.  As in your poem `All My Love,' sacrifice and rebirth is the central and pervasive theme; yet oddly even it does not manifest in the couplet, while in Q1 you treat four or five disconnected ideas, but pass on this till Q2.  I am not saying this loose poem does not make sense, or even that it is not a good poem; indeed, starting around 1750 the sonnet in England was revived, really, only with its formal shell intact, and this could fit that amorphous mold.

What are almost good are Q2 and Q3: although the temporal framing of line 5 is apparently overkill for this poem as a work in itself, and the idea of union is only allegorically explored, `righteousness has lost essence and meaning' is a plausible, if vague, entry to the metaphysical shenanigans of Q2 and Q3, including apparently a noncommittal murder and resurrection.  `Avoiding the demon whom you caressed/I flee from you and hide, soul keening' is good, if it points back to the idea of line 1: it is again an extremely Shakespearean use of logic in a symbolic poem.  Apparently when you write, condemning you to death `and back again,' this is an example of prolepsis, since the second half of this line logically occurs after the next line: `offering my blood for your redemption.'  This is an extremely effective use of a poetic technique that was a favourite of Virgil's, though perhaps that was not your influence.  In my view, `in spite of your sin' is far, far too weak a locution to use so late in this poem of increasing intensity; it might have been appropriate in Q1.  `Yet mortality gives no exemption,' actually makes no sense, because you did not just `offer your blood,' but actually proleptically revived the addressee in line 9.  Moreover, temporal `mortality' in line 12 is such a fall from the eternal perspective of `redemption' earlier in the quatrain, that this buttresses the unpleasant sense of a poem losing steam, and reneging on its allegory -- I don't know how familiar you are with Philip Pullman's books, but all of his fantasies seem to do the same thing in their last chapters.  The couplet, finally, is so literal, and such a little squeak, that I am filled with disappointment as this wonderful but perplexing sonnet ends.

As usual, I am afraid I find the acrostic merely a distraction.  It is a very trivial and, to me, unpoetic locution.  If the acrostic itself were an interesting use of language, I might feel differently; but as it stands I can hardly see you writing the trivial phrase horizontally, which you instead have writ large.

I am sorry if parts of one or two of my last reviews have been harsh; I am certainly saying everything I think, as I read your poems, which I do not always do because I rarely see these ideas as relevant.  I have really taken great pleasure in reading your new poems in the last few days, and I hope you will not think my critiques are merely heckling.  Best wishes for your writing--

Answer 9

Love as Nightmare!! Again you have expressed something in a unique way.  A very strong poem.

Answer 10

Beautifully written! Reminds me of my ex (except for the "I love you still part.)...the jerk.

If you have time check out my bunny stories!

Answer 11

This is poetic. I love your poetry. I think you are a poet of extreme talent.!

Answer 12

great emotions. agrees with siren