Fleeting

I wrote this sonnet based on a love story I wrote during my senior year through a compilation of journal entries, letters, and other miscellaneous texts. The plot centers around a writer, Gerard Laroche, falling for a ghost, Elaine Gardiner, who haunts his home in Nottingham from one fateful night. The idea for my story stemmed directly from George Roux’s breathtaking painting titled “Spirit,” created in 1885. The sonnet reflects three major segments of the story through each quatrain: the moment they met, the time they spent together, and the period after Elaine eventually passes into the afterlife. In one of the journal entries, Gerard tells Elaine he will write her a poem for Christmas (naturally, since a ghost has no use for any physical gift). However, instead of writing an ode to Elaine, I wanted to write a poem from Gerard’s retrospective view after Elaine’s disappearance. A prominent motif in my story and included in the sonnet is music and the piano, as the first time the two meet is when Elaine plays the piano in Gerard’s study. I decided to toy around with the different elements of music such as the sweet melody or dissonant chord to symbolize the happy and melancholic events of the timeline. In regard to the structure of the sonnet, I found the iambic pentameter to be quite difficult to navigate around because I wanted the sonnet to have a somewhat imperfect rhythm like in natural speech. Instead, I opted to use it as a guideline to try to adhere to; though, if a certain line had a sound I liked without the iambic pentameter, I decided to let it be. Other than this, I was mindful to maintain the natural Shakespearean sonnet aspects in the rhyme scheme and syllable count.