(written 12\/88; Webbed 10\/96)<\/p>\r\n\r\n
Inside, stately masquerade.<\/p>\r\n
Outside, rumbling cannonade<\/p>\r\n
Shakes the huts and hovels in the hills around the hall.<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n
Inside, princes prance and preen.<\/p>\r\n
Outside, peasants grim and lean<\/p>\r\n
March to different drummers from the music at the ball.<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n
Inside, wine and pale champagne;<\/p>\r\n
Outside, blood and mud and pain<\/p>\r\n
Fill the fallow fields with dead, obscuring living sight.<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n
Inside, placid mannered mannequins are dancing in the light.<\/p>\r\n
Outside, tattered canvas canopies advancing through the night<\/p>\r\n
Batter down resistance with a vengeance-hearted hand.<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n
Inside is parading and the mindless masquerading<\/p>\r\n
of a hundred primping popinjays, the cream of upper-class.<\/p>\r\n
Outside is the clamor of the fighting and the hammer<\/p>\r\n
of a hundred horses' hoofbeats as they surge across the grass.<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n
Inside there is dancing and the ruffles and romancing<\/p>\r\n
of the lords and ladies whirling to the music's stately strains.<\/p>\r\n
Outside, fancy ornaments from long-forgotten tournaments<\/p>\r\n
lie twisted, crushed and broken near the shuttered windowpanes.<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n
Inside, barricaded gentry think they're safe within the walls.<\/p>\r\n
Outside, unrelenting men remove the stallions from the stalls,<\/p>\r\n
Set the buildings burning, ride away across the land.<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n
Inside, panic fuels the fire;<\/p>\r\n
Outside, flames are dancing higher;<\/p>\r\n
Music softly ceases and the ceiling starts to fall...<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n
<\/p>\r\n\r\n
Inside, all is calm and still.<\/p>\r\n
Outside, from a distant hill,<\/p>\r\n
Sound insistent trumpet calls to summon men to fight.<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n
Down here, war has ravaged all.<\/p>\r\n
Up there, past the shattered hall,<\/p>\r\n
Stars continue dancing in the music-haunted night.<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n
I wrote this in a \u201cMetrical Phonology of Poetry\u201d linguistics seminar at Swarthmore. Some of it is a little overdone (mixed metaphors, overblown diction), but on the whole I think it works.<\/p>\r\n
I\u2019ve always liked Lewis Carroll\u2019s dictum \u201cTake care of the sounds and the sense will take care of itself.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"parent":19769,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-5468","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5468"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20687,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5468\/revisions\/20687"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/19769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}