Note to the reader:  the final line of this sonnet APPEARS to break the rules of sonnetry since its ending in this posted version spreads over into an extra line.  But that is only apparent since in the Microsoft Word document of this sonnet there is not an extra line.

Ode on a Grecian Urn

Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem

Perusing many poems in a book

For college students, he was hit by one.

It was as if a prairie journey took

Him, raptured, zinging him right past the sun

And all it planets and its comets flung

In duneless outer space.  The poem whizzed

Him round and round like Saturn’s rings . . . each . . . hung . . .

In frozen floating with his blood’s veins fizzed.

The ode, since faultless, launched him, heart and tears

To orbits in its beauty, in its rhyme,

Its cadence and its images through spheres

Perfection always wants past worlds in time.

  “Impossible,” he pondered, this one set

    Of words and rhythm, . . . yet, . . . then .  .  . yet .   .   . and yet   ,    .    .    .

©  Phillip Whidden