there's so much that's truly glorious in this - from the cracking first line
onwards

The octet is huge, powerful, rich with metaphor and allusion, yet also an
accurate description of this striking landscape.

The first line of the sextet is superb. The last is a sound goal - the walls
as something more than physical barriers.

The weakness is in how you get from the first line of the sextet to the
last. I wonder if you are trying to pack too much into a sonnet? It ends up
sounding like notes for a much larger work. Can you focus it down or do you
need to free it from the form?

Terri

----- Original Message -----
From: "Arthur" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, March 18, 2002 8:37 AM
Subject: New sub: Dry Stone Walls


>                       Dry stone walls
>
> Harsh as the dialect, hewn from millstone grit
> or limestone they piece and parcel-out the shires.
> Wind-fingers probe between stones' ill-fit
> Moss-sodden, lush, under dripping birches,
> or pale as a picked bone, isled with lichen,
> they stride up flanks of fells, true to contour.
> The sinuous mass and loom and sweep of them
> bars the land like silent sentries, grim and dour.
>
> Some mammoth greed conceived this lift and haul
> heft and shift of a task, that bewilders,
> humbles us, such toil and craft in each wall.
> Sack-draped backs hunched under drench of centuries,
> men and stone, bent to deny, heaved like moles,
> to shape these  monumental barriers.