* You are viewing the archive for July, 2024

Sapphic stanzas

I’ve written several poems in an English approximation to Sapphic stanzas. I think the most successful so far is an ecological poem published in Acumen. You can read it by clicking here https://acumen-poetry.co.uk/edmund-prestwich/

For those who don’t know what the Sapphic stanza is, it’s a form strongly associated with and perhaps invented by the Archaic Greek poet Sappho of Lesbos. Greek poets composed in long and short syllables. English poets writing Sapphics almost invariably replace these longs and shorts with stressed and unstressed syllables. The Sapphic stanza then consists of four lines, three of eleven syllables and one of five. … Continue Reading

Yeats, A Meditation in Time of War

A Meditation in Time of War

For one throb of the artery,
While on that old grey stone I sat
Under the old wind-broken tree,
I knew that One is animate,
Mankind inanimate phantasy.

 

These thoughts may be too trivial or obvious to bother putting down, but on my morning walk I was thinking about the strange way this poem clings to the memory and imagination. Perhaps interestingly, when I got home I found I’d misremembered it – I’d left out line three. Now, I wouldn’t swear that it wouldn’t be a better poem without it, old wind-broken trees being something of … Continue Reading