Today’s Poem: Swans

Sadness is a gift and a charism

Edward Lear, Domestic Swan, c. 1860. (Lear, 1812–1888, was not only a writer of nonsense verse but one of the great ornithological artists of the Victorian era.) Wikimedia Commons.

If hendecasyllabics are hard to write in English verse, it’s not because the meter itself is difficult. All poets need to do is to get an eleven-syllable rhythm bouncing along…