The Lovely By John Donnelle Analysis
By now, the magnitude of loss has grown almost too great to bear—the speaker has lost cities, realms, rivers, and a continent. These are literally huge things—huger than watches or keys in terms of matter alone—but the speaker is able to wave them off by claiming that “it wasn’t a disaster” to lose these, either. Whether we believe the speaker or not is subjective. Some may read the last line as jovially dismissive as the rest of the speaker’s dismissals to this point—a “whatever,” to use modern parlance. But what is strange in this tercet are the two words that the speaker has avoided mentioning: “lovely” and “miss.” Why “lovely” and not any other adjective—one that could suggest size, like “massive,” or prestige, like “central?” They may not be the prettiest examples, but they avoid emotion, for the most part. So why leave the door open for an
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But the poem does not—in content, rhyme, or rhythm—maintain much sense of measure, at least not in the first two lines. A poem that has tried to keep control suddenly turns toward a “you” in the first line of the quatrain, and admits “love” for that you (or at least its gestures) in the second line. If the speaker has been trying to control their losses to this point, then the “you” erupting onto the scene (via the huge dash) seems to upset the speaker’s control. Their syntax becomes tougher to parse, with an enjambed parenthetical breaking up what ends up being a badly punctuated run-on sentence. And the rhyme, as I have already noticed, slants not only in the ‘A’ rhyme (“gesture”), but the ‘B’ rhyme cannot come up with a simpler word than “evident” to finish the poem. Thus the pattern of the ‘A’ rhyme being “right/wrong” continues here with the slant, just as the ‘B’ rhyme creates the potential for a new pattern of multisyllabic rhymes (were the poem to keep spinning—but of course it does
But the poem does not—in content, rhyme, or rhythm—maintain much sense of measure, at least not in the first two lines. A poem that has tried to keep control suddenly turns toward a “you” in the first line of the quatrain, and admits “love” for that you (or at least its gestures) in the second line. If the speaker has been trying to control their losses to this point, then the “you” erupting onto the scene (via the huge dash) seems to upset the speaker’s control. Their syntax becomes tougher to parse, with an enjambed parenthetical breaking up what ends up being a badly punctuated run-on sentence. And the rhyme, as I have already noticed, slants not only in the ‘A’ rhyme (“gesture”), but the ‘B’ rhyme cannot come up with a simpler word than “evident” to finish the poem. Thus the pattern of the ‘A’ rhyme being “right/wrong” continues here with the slant, just as the ‘B’ rhyme creates the potential for a new pattern of multisyllabic rhymes (were the poem to keep spinning—but of course it does