Sonnet for Dennis Ritchie(edmundjorgensen.com) |
Sonnet for Dennis Ritchie(edmundjorgensen.com) |
Thanks again for the response. It's great to see that there are other hackers out there interested in poetry.
Your ghost performs the world’s computation."
Beautiful!
- rhymes are abba abba ccd eed
- lines must be Alexandrine
This last rules implies a lot of things :
- each lines must be exactly 12 syllabes
- the caesura (either between the sixth and seventh syllabes (for two hemistiches lines), or between the forth and fifth and between the eighth and nineth (for three parts lines)) must respect a lot of rules which makes it pleasant to read (for instance, the syllabe just before it cannot be feminine (roughly, it means it should not end with a 'e', but it's a lot more complex than that))
- rhyme genre must alternate (either a and d and feminine and b, c and e are masculine or the reverse)
- maybe some other nasty things I don't recall right now.
But here's his original letter: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-10-18/news/chi-11101...
Someone brought up a similar point in comments on the poem itself--I added a direct link in the attribution.
I learned some of that in middleschol or highschool (in France) and for a few details by reading the french Wikipedia. But more importantly I have a friend who is very knowledgeable on this kind of subjects (a3_nm here on HN), which is really cool.