Day and Night
When you were dead to me, the living turned
To ghosts, became a bunch of gibbering sounds
And movements day by day. The living churned
Around me on the streets and on my rounds
Of work and food, and even through my bed.
But they were just pollution in the air,
Brief chills, or stains left lying by my head.
The world was crowded, yet … no one was there.
Nor could I kill you off in sleep, my love.
At night you lived and filled my life again.
My mouth woke every dawn to call your name,
And nights you rose from depths to dreams above.
My every sleep sang out the one refrain
Of ache and curls–and nothing was the same.
I think the “answer” as to whether or not this is a sonnet is buried within your parenthetical disclaimer at the end. There you say it is a mixture of Shakespearean and Petrarchan forms. Indeed! So, yes, it is not wholly a “Shakespearean Sonnet,” to use the term to apply to the form only, nor is it in form fully a “Petrarchan Sonnet,” but I would say it clearly is “a sonnet”! And the Elizabethans, for example, would TOTALLY say that it is! As you know, historically the form has been broad or fluid. AND, of course, in other senses a poem in a much different form can still be “Petrarchan” with its imagery or themes, etc. So even a “Shakespearean Sonnet” in rhyme scheme or form might also be a “Petrarchan” sonnet in terms of its use of various Petrarchan conventions, surely. To quibble, that is, upon the technical/narrow use of the terms to describe rhyme scheme alone, which would be to miss so much else!
You are right. A former student of mine at Newbold told me tonight that I was born in the wrong time. She meant that although she likes my poetry, I am writing real poetry in an era when the well of poetry has been poisoned. (An opposite is true.) My rejoinder (if I were to engage with her in this matter) would be that it’s sad that many people who could have been real poets have been poisoned so that they aren’t.