Challenge 348 Response:
“Night Visitor”
by Arnold Hollander
Thank you for mentioning me. I decided to try answering some of your challenges regarding your wonderful poem. I loved the title.
Challenge c. The final stanza has both feminine and masculine rhymes. The feminine words “anonymous” and “posthumous,” where the next to last syllable is accented and the masculine words “tea” and “me,” where the stress is on the final word.
Challenge d. I took it to mean history can only be viewed and people can only ruminate about it.
By the way you once wrote that you were not a poet. Your work belies that and I'm glad.
Arnold Hollander
Copyright © 2009 by Arnold Hollander
Thank you for the appreciation, Arnie; you’re very kind. I still maintain I’m no poet: whenever I try writing poetry, I feel self-conscious and start mocking myself.
“Night Visitor” is not a parody of your poem in issue 347; rather, you provided the inspiration. As for literary influence, all I can think of is my complete collections of Ogden Nash and Burma Shave signs. Maybe I can call it a career and let it go at that.
The question about rhymes is my way of having a little fun at my own expense. In the last stanza, I think the rhymes are regular. I would say “anonymous” and “posthumous,” which makes them rich feminine rhymes. “Tea” and “me” are masculine rhymes, of course, though a purist might say they’re simply assonances (only the vowels match).
The mixture of rhymes I was thinking of is:
- In the first stanza: “sleeplessly,” which is feminine, is made to rhyme with “tea,” which is masculine.
- In the second stanza, “window,” which is feminine, is made to rhyme with “Hello,” which is masculine.
You’re right about history. We might like to get to know history first-hand, to invite it in for tea, so to speak. And I wonder if memory isn’t the same: it’s archived, fragmented, not of a piece; a recollection is more a reconstruction than an experience.
Memory and history are narratives. Mark Bastable’s “Flick Book” turns the idea upside down and reveals the role of choice: Patrick remembers his life in advance and, in the end, decides he’d rather make up his own narrative as he goes along. Actually, political debates are quite similar: facts don’t win the day; it’s the narratives that are persuasive — at least until facts expose them as hallucinations.
I seem to keep coming back to one of our unofficial mottoes, which quotes Canadian novelist Tom King: “Stories are all we are and all we have.” The ghosts of memory and history as well as their stories — be they complete or, as in your poem, mysteriously unfinished — remain, whatever their names may be.
Don
