Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Someone's Watching: a painting and a sonnet





















I first apply a yellow colored cream.
I rub it in, a drink that quenches skin.
Foundation hides and smooths out all the seams
concealing every blemish on my chin.
A "Stay Matte" powder takes away the shine.
Two shades of shadow meet before the brow.
Around my eyes, with brown, I draw a line.
I use mascara on my lashes now
which always with mouth open I apply.
Then sweep the blush across my naked cheeks
and line my lips, no lipstick must get by...
to blot with tissue is the old technique.
How false to wear a painting on your face;
I feel I must to keep up with the pace.

















Not to ruin the post with this little addition, but do any of you realize what a pain in the butt it is to write a sonnet?!?!?! I mean! It is freaking HARD!!! It follows a certain rhyming scheme, but the iambic pentameter is the hard part. There are 10 syllables in every line and the stress syllable falls on all the even syllables, which means that the words that have more than one syllable are pretty tricky- they have to fall in the right part of the line so that the stress syllable is in the right place. For example: In line 3, I use the word "foundation" and the stress syllable in foundation falls on the second syllable: foun DA tion- so that second syllable had to be an even numbered syllable on the line- Since foundation was the first word, it worked out well- You can check the whole sonnet- I think I worked it all out and everything is correct, but I have to tell you... it is so much harder than I thought; I actually thought the sonnet was much more difficult than the painting- KUDOS TO SHAKESPEARE!!!!

2 comments:

Jeff said...

FINALLY, shakespeare is getting some recognition. i've been trying for years to get people to appreciate his work. let's just hope that others will feel the same way we do, windy.

Jeff said...

and, i think you did a good job on your sonnet. it's a lot better than the one we wrote about 9/11.