Silence

"Don't walk away in silence" - Ian Curtis, Atmosphere
"Betrayed by words I'd never heard, too hard to say" - Bernard Sumner, Temptation


She said no words and tied her hair
Into a knot to bind despair.
He sat and drained his wine glass dry,
The last refuge that he could try.


Sooner or later one must break
And bring the words to mark the wake
Of love that they observed for now,
Her eyes her heart's funerial shroud.


The eulogy was silence, still,
An hour, a lifetime, felt its chill;
Of all that withered and had died
The coldest was triumphant pride.


She rose. He could not meet her eyes
As she collected her goodbyes -
The things she took, their life's debris,
Split firmly into "You" and "Me".


He watched her going through his glass,
His only fear had come to pass,
And felt the emptiness inside
And out, announcing his new bride.


So torn in two without a word
In silence, what was "Us" interred.


Background


I wrote this around the 30th anniversary of Ian Curtis' death, and the break-up of a relationship I was in. I was given the title "Silence" to write on, and I came up with this - I had endings on my mind, clearly.


Technically


This is in long ballad metre - couplets of iambic tetrameter (She saíd | no wórds | and tiéd | her haír etc) arranged into quatrains. A relatively relaxed structure, the direct rhyming couplets and the ballad metre make it perhaps more suited to song than to reading. I think the quatrains followed by the single concluding couplet shows that I was still under the influence of the sonnet when I wrote it - a large amount of my output for the year surrounding was in sonnet form. Perhaps the switch from pentameter to tetrameter - a more homely, ballad metre - reflects the down-to-earth subject matter, although some of the phrasing is more than a little awkward. Oh well, writing is evolution.


Links


The two quotations at the top are from the Joy Division song Atmosphere and the successor group (on the singer and writer Ian Curtis' death) New Order's song Temptation. (The songs are to YouTube.)


And because it's in ballad metre I did it as a song, actually the first thing I ever recorded. So yeah, if you want, it's on MySpace. Don't judge me...