It’s the lovers’ death scene in Romeo and Juliet through the lens of Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard.

I know mixing form, language and character rather than characters or plot isn’t necessarily what’s intended by these kind of mashups, but the poem had been knocking around in my head so here it is!

Wow. I’m … stunned. This is intricately beautiful. “Eternal moonlight of the spotted mind” is such a clever twist of phrase …

Forget intention. The best part of Ficly, to me, is to see how rules and forms are bent and broken in new and surprising ways.

I feel undereducated to leave a comment on a poem like this. :)

I don’t know the Pope (that sounds funny), so I can’t speak to the characters themselves, but the language is gorgeous in many places. The meter seems a little wobbly, but I suppose that could be me not understanding the form rightly.

The wobbly meter will be entirely my fault. Never blame the form!

The poem – ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ by Alexander Pope is here: http://www.monadnock.net/poems/eloisa.html for those who are curious. I’m going to assume you know who Juliet is. ;)

Nicely done, Spiderj. The meter is quite good – I beat it out and it hits iambic pentameter 90%. Only the second line is weak, the rest (that are off) are only off by one. Check out Shakepeare’s count, he’s off by 1 frequently.

Only complaint, having skimmed the Pope poem; it’s in first person and yours is in third. If you did that on purpose, I take it back.

Very nice capture of Pope’s style and Shakespeare’s story.

The second line is weak – I wrote those first four after putting together the rest and they were intended to be a little bit broken. Almost like the moments before an overture, warming up, throwing around the imagery willy nilly. But claiming there’s an overture in a 1024 character poem is probably the most pretentious thing I’ve ever said so I’ll shut up now!

The change from first person to third person was intentional though – it’s to reflect the change from “Eloisa to Abelard” to “Eloise and Juliet”. If that makes sense.

Thanks for the comments – poetry is definitely not my strong suit so it’s useful to get comments.

I have a little bit of awe reserved for people who can write poetry. Especially in odd meters.

Full marks.

And how can one not love Eternal moonlight of the spotted mind! as a twisted line.

I like it, what else can I say. I personally like the ending phrases. It just does it for me and I like poetry and this is good.

There was clearly so much thought put into this. I would have made it a bit more conclusive by making the last line an Alexandrine. If I were talented enough to write something like this, I mean.

Wow. You truly rose to the challenge. And here I thought it was (based on the title) going to be Eloise from the Plaza Hotel!

spider this was sick with baddass.
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