Hi, Shahzeb Akhter.

Thank you for introducing me to this from Tennyson. I hadn’t read him before, and it was much better going into his work with your poem as a guide.

I liked a great deal of this. I’ll try to keep focused on line breaks, as per the prompt, but I wanted to first point out what I saw as the strengths of what you’ve accomplished.

To start, the way you toy with the phrase “never now” is really interesting in the final stanza. In the first line we get “never, now;” a few lines later, after the provocative image of the lover Paris returning to Oenone in the wind “sway[ing]” her “locks” (loved this gesture and the image you found to render it), we get, “I never feel lonely, never now.” Like she’s trying to convince herself that this is in fact true. Solitude gets personified in the next line; the poem ends with the suggestion that, though Oenone plans to return to the gravesite, Ida shouldn’t wait for her. She wishes to move on, to find, in solitude, a sense of indifference to the past.

According to the reality of the poem, so far as I understand it, Oenone is alone. She’s tried to become ambivalent to the losses of war, just as “that egg born” has learned to do. But Paris is in the wind, and her mother is in her grave. The loss is ever-present. The cottages and the voice she thinks she hears are the only signs of life beyond the edges of this scene. But she “thinks” she hears someone calling. It’s not for certain whether she has. And the cottages are “unchanged, unaffected” by the forces that have her seeking indifference.

The way the details of the cottage and the wind and those almost-voices make particular the state of Oenone’s emotions is really good writing. I wanted a little more of such clarity when it comes to “that egg-born”, and to the context from which Oenone is speaking. I wanted to read “that egg-born” as the child Oenone had from Paris. I’m not sure if this is accurate; if it were true Oenone has a child, she might feel isolated or bound to the child, more connected to the world. I didn’t get a sense she had any attachments; more to the point, I got the sense she was trying hard to eradicate all attachments. This led me to believe perhaps “that egg-born” referred not to a child but something else. Perhaps something in the Tennyson I didn’t catch when I read through it.

Now, to the line breaks.

On a technical level, I liked the mix of end-stopped and enjambed line breaks. I was especially fond of this mix as it took shape in the first stanza. The way you broke from “the incessant pines…” to “blue and vacant” was wonderful for the way it created suspense. I guess this would be an example of an annotated line break, where the next line adds context to the first.

I thought your last stanza might learn a bit from your first, especially because you’re already playing with the repetitive inversion of “never now” in that stanza. The first sentence of the stanza might play with both enjambed and annotated breaks, becoming in the process something like this:

I don’t turn back now, never; not
to take so much
as a glance.
Nor will I narrate it again.

I think “nor will I narrate…” has more power, more ambiguity, if it were to become its own sentence. The way I broken the lines lets “never, not” show up more visibly at the end of its line. Breaking after “so much” was a good choice because it really forces us to read Oenone’s ambiguity clearly: has she taken in too much suffering, or does she really seem capable of never again looking back at the past? Breaking as I’ve suggested you do above would bring this distinct movement of thought into the fore by separating it from the sentence, making it distinctive of Oenone’s quandary.

These breaks would pave the way for others:

But I never feel
lonely, never
now. Solitude my companion,
never leaving back.

I think I heard someone calling,

You could begin a fourth stanza with the line I’ve isolated above. It’s a new movement in the narrative. And the power of the white space between it and the line “never leaving back” might reinforce her indecision.

I’ll leave off there. I hope you’ve found my comments helpful, and I hope you know I really enjoyed this poem a great deal, as I’ve enjoyed the others you’ve written which play with myth. I’m a bit terrified as a poet of trying such an approach to myth, and I’m a bit impressed by how continually well you do it.

If you have any questions, let me know.