The assignment for Day 5 includes the following:
- Prompt: fog
- Form: elegy
- Device: metaphor
Elegy
Originally requiring specific meters, nowadays elegies come in all shapes and sizes, though they are united by their (often melancholic) focus on loss and longing.
As much as it can mourn something that’s gone forever, it can also celebrate it.
Elegiac couplet: a hexameter (six syllable) line followed by a pentameter (five syllable) line. No rhyme required.
Metaphor
A comparison of two concepts not usually thought of together, without the use of like or as.
Writing Process
I intended to write my elegy in elegiac couplets. I gave it a try. I really did. But those syllables just wouldn’t fall correctly into place.
I did, however, manage to work in the concept of fear. There are also a couple of metaphors here: fear as fog and the window of my mind.
The Fog of Uncertainty
“It’s diverticulitis, just as we thought,” the doctor says.
“But there’s also a spot on your pancreas.
We have to find out what that could be, and so
We’ve scheduled an endoscopic biopsy for next week.”
Spot. Biopsy. Fear washes over me,
Fogging my normally clear, intellectual mind.
Pure animal fear, that shatters the fragile pane
Between logical restraint and primal despair.
The fog hangs on for a week while I await
The day of the biopsy, then thickens for seven more days
While I await the results. “Benign,” the doctor says.
The fog pulls back, retreats, disappears. I am free!
