(02-24-2012, 10:37 PM)tectak Wrote: NEW AGEGood morrow, sir! I shall momentarily share with you a superior snigger on the "rhyming couplets" issue before suggesting that (despite your rhyme scheme being perfectly correct) it wouldn't actually be a bad idea to stick another couple of lines in there if you fancy it -- the closing lines as they stand are fine, of course, but it could handle a nice summative couplet.
We will to angry days come old and sour, -- now, I know there's a school of thought that loves inverting syntax in formal poetry, but I don't subscribe when "to angry days we will come old and sour" is perfectly iambic and not mangled!
so write a lasting note from you to me.
And let the ink, sure fading, mark this hour,
the date, the second yet, whilst we can see. -- yet and whilst, though not incorrect, are filler words and I think you're missing an opportunity for a strong image here
Our future, though ahead, no glory holds; -- aargh, inversions! I'll leave it alone... except to say that of course the future is ahead, there must be a nice adjective you could use instead
yet happy, carefree, unconcerned were we. -- now in this line, the inversion works well -- I'm not against them altogether, you see!
For all the stealth with which our time unfolds
we cannot loose the past from which we flee. -- a couple more whiches and you'd have the cast of Macbeth...
Read then the note when comes that day, -- this line's lost a foot!
that on us lays its heavy crippling hand, -- to avoid the syntax issues that are starting to convolute this quite a bit, you could consider "that crushes us with heavy, crippling hand" or some such, adding a bit of action
that breaks our backs and turns our thin hair grey:
we knew it’s coming, yet we made our stand. -- "knew" seems the wrong word here to my reading, what about simply "saw" or "heard"?
TK 1999
PS. I didn't have any problems with tenses... maybe it's just that I'm warped...
It could be worse
