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English
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Published:
2017-05-14
Words:
140
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1/1
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The Nerve to Speak

Summary:

A Pantoum (poem form where each line is used twice) based on the play "Dom Juan" by Molière. From Sganarelle's POV.

Notes:

I'm posting this a day early, in case anyone's paying attention to my "Monday at 2:00 AM-ish" posting schedule and actually waiting for a Person of Interest fic. This week was hectic and I wasn't able to attend to my normal writing enough to get something done that my beta reader could work with. Ergo, I dug into my older material and pulled out one of my best poems, which still qualifies as fanfiction. (I updated the punctuation a bit here.)

 

 

I didn't really expect to be posting poetic fanfiction. I sorta find fanfic poems to be a turn-off, honestly. But here it seems reasonable.

 

If you're at all interested in my poetry, or non-fanfic short stories, or Shadowrun nightmares, they're on my Deviant Art account (Arkylie).

 

http://arkylie.deviantart.com/art/My-Best-Pantoum-588267955

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

Had I but had the nerve to speak!
I wished that he would mend his ways,
But in the end I proved too weak
And rendered to him only praise.

I wished that he would mend his ways:
To that one hope I stoutly clung,
And rendered to him only praise.
He held the girls; I held my tongue.

To that one hope I stoutly clung;
He never heard my soul's lament.
He held the girls; I held my tongue,
Pretended I was calm, content.

He never heard my soul's lament;
I stayed a servant, played my role,
Pretended I was calm, content --
I might have saved my master's soul!

I stayed a servant, played my role,
But in the end I proved too weak.
I might have saved my master's soul,
Had I but had the nerve to speak.

Notes:

In college I got free tickets to see Dom Juan. I fell in love with the character of Sganarelle, the harried servant who wanted both to just be out of the situation and to see his master not damned for his sins, but had neither the self-control nor the intelligence to manage to make the situation better.

Seriously, Dom Juan was my fandom for a good long while. I even memorized some of the speeches in French. (I had a French copy of the play -- its original language -- but loaned it out to a classmate in Tai Chi class and never saw it again. Oh well.) No reason fanfiction can't encompass classical literature.

In the Mozart opera (Don Giovanni), the Sganarelle character is Leporello. There are some distinctions between the two, although I'm not sure I could put words to them without research I'm not going to do right now (aside from Sganarelle being likely thin and Leporello being likely stouter). But they're both interesting.