Rewriting Poetry III

So it’s been a while since I last posted on my probably insane attempt to rewrite a Medieval poem. This is because, looking over what I’ve written, I’ve been unsatisfied about its length. I think I mentioned two or three stanzas? It’s all very interesting as an exercise, but having to struggle through it is pretty demanding on the reader, and to stick it in the middle of an adventure fantasy novel is even moreso. Having had some time and perspective, I think I’m getting too wrapped up in the creative challenge of recasting the poem, and I’m not doing what’s best for the poem itself (not to mention the book it has to fit in).

So I’ve decided to cut the poem right the way back in terms of what it’s actually saying. Less is more. From the numerous variations in the poem, it looks fairly obvious that someone once had a clever little idea for a short poem that got to be quite popular, and then a few hundred years later someone else read or heard it and really ran with the idea, probably in order to impress a patron.

All that aside, art has to be functional, and the form has to fit the function. What I want to convey is one idea coming from one character which is: we are all mortal, material beings and, in the long view, nothing more than clumps of earth that get to move around for a short time. This in mind, and keeping the rhymes I’ve developed, I come up with this:

Earth that walks on earth, must from the earth earth grow

Earth that earth may eat, so earth in earth earth sows.

But if the earth the earth won’t eat, then earth in earth shall go:

A hole in earth shall other earth make, then earth in earth earth stows.

Which is pretty durned close to what we started with, only going with food rather than treasure, which was a little more obscure (and harder to rhyme anyway). It’s still pretty confusing, so I’ve decided to explain it away as a riddle. Not all riddles have one-word answers, some of them describe a scene in a confusing way and demand the explanation from the listener (like the “Two legs sat on four legs” riddle from Tolkien’s The Hobbit.) And quite possibly that’s what the first poem was anyway.

So I’ll pop that scene in the book along with the ‘answer’. It’s a pretty long way to go for only fifty words (and only twenty-four of them different to each other), but that’s poetry for you!

At least that’s been my experience whenever I’ve written it.