Post 5 Jania Stevenson

New Song

By Devin Johnston

As sweetness flows through these new days,

the woods leaf out, and songbirds phrase

in neumes of roosted melody

incipits to a new song.

Then love should find lubricity

and quicken, having slept so long.

The bloodroot blossoms, well and good,

but I receive no word that would

set my troubled heart at ease,

nor could we turn our faces toward

the sun, and open by degrees,

unless we reach a clear accord.

And so our love goes, night and day:

it’s like the thorny hawthorn spray

that whips about in a bitter wind

from dusk to dawn, shellacked with sleet,

until the sun’s first rays ascend

through leaves and branches, spreading heat.

I have in mind one April morning

when she relented without warning,

relenting from her cold rebuff

in laughter, peals of happiness.

Sweet Christ, let me live long enough

to get my hands beneath her dress!

I hate the elevated talk

that disregards both root and stalk

and sets insipid pride above

vicissitudes of lust and strife.

Let others claim a higher love: 

we’ve got the bread, we’ve got the knife.

In this poem, the author is talking about a new love he is experiencing. Everything is new and better because of this love that has just awakened inside him. Days are sweeter and songbirds are singing a new song. This poem uses a rhyme scheme of AABCBC DDEFEF GGHIHI JJKLKL MMNONO. He uses feminine rhyme for the most part in this poem with words such as "ease" and "degrees". This feminine rhyme probably represents the woman he is in love with in the poem. In the last stanza he uses a perfect rhyme with the words "talk" and "stalk", but instead of talking about the perfection of love, he's actually talking about the imperfection of it, saying that you have to let your pride go in order to find a real "higher love."