Severn poem revision

After visiting Keats' house in Rome, I wrote a bunch of material, that sort of clustered into two poems that I remember. I worked around with them but still found them unsatisfactory. I think I was putting too much in there; too many significant details in a way that didn't really cohere. Or I was saying things that sounded deep and significant but...without my own conviction that it accurately represented the situation behind it?

Oh, I don't know. It was a bit didactic in places. Anyway, I needed some stuff to show for workshop and more recently I'd been working around with the Severn poem again, and I made it way, way simpler. And hell, there are still three stanzas which each have a somewhat distinct content I think. Whoops, four.

I played around with the line breaks...I was pretty much writing iambs unintentionally. I got it so that in the first stanza there's five, then there's four, then three, then two, though all are iambic, and it's a matter of breaking the lines in ways that amuses me and/or that I think is meaningful or interesting. (i.e productive secondary associations, that thematically fit, not just arbitrary ones.)

In one version of the poem there was all this language about false and fakery and such, and the repetition of that made it seem like... I don't know, that that was a theme. Like... I was calling Keats fake or something? I dunno. It didn't really make sense in terms of the thrust of the poem, and that wasn't something I felt as true anyway, so I revised it to not have it be that way.

I don't like the line breaks in the last stanza, I kind of like them long. Maybe I'll change it back, but I sort of like my 5 4 3 2 thing, and the line breaks kinda work, in their own way... I guess since they are basically just two blunt sentences, I want to have them just spill out and rest there, instead of coming out all choppily.

I should try to rework that Shelley poem, maybe along similar lines (e.g. scrapping a lot of it and making it a lot simpler). I dunno, I don't think I've ever really workshopped that with people.

Oh yeah, and I have to check Severn's biography. >_>