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<author>
<name>William <index>Beckford</index></name>
<date>1760-1844</date>
</author>
<title>Elegiac Sonnet to a Mopstick</title>
<source>Picked up from <uri>http://sonnets.org/beckford.htm</uri>, with grateful acknowledgement.</source>
<remark>This outrageous homoerotic ditty by the author of <worktitle>Vathek</worktitle> is another <foreign>tour de force</foreign> of the sonnet form. Very much a poem of its day (the early nineteenth century or even late eighteenth), this sonnet displays its consciousness of itself in every whimsical rhyme. Lines 6, 7, 9 and 12 fit the strict, though varied iambic patter only by virtue of elisions on <quote>even</quote>, <quote>ever</quote>, <quote>many a</quote> and <quote>thou art</quote>, pronounced <called>e'en</called>, <called>e'er</called>, <called>mennya</called> (this one is perhaps arguable) and <called>th'art</called> respectively — a metrician's inside joke. The mop handle, a <quote>birchen bough</quote>, once in a blissfully Narcissistic state of Nature, gazing on its own reflection in a pool, but now stripped and forlorn, is compared to what the speaker's breast or <stress>heart</stress> will be when Philisto is gone — not to the more obvious anatomical alternative. And yet the final trope (we recall that the moves between octave and sestet, and between final quatrain and couplet, are called <called>turns</called>, and here we have a turning or troping of metaphor along with the rhyme) is suddenly and unexpectedly poignant, as the helpless mop is compared to the speaker's whirling thoughts, of all things: and so the sonnet, strictly within form yet flashy in its variations (consider the alliterations on <called>t</called> in the couplet, or how the final line is varied by a choriamb in the first two feet, <quote><stress>Turns on the twist</stress>ing</quote>), by <called>turning</called> makes a joke about itself.</remark>
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