On Tuesday, May 6, The American Scholar launched a website experiment in writing crowd-sourced poetry—in this case, a sonnet. David Lehman wrote the first line and selects subsequent lines from among those submitted by you. Here's the sonnet to date:
How like a prison is my cubicle
And yet how far my mind can freely roam
From gaol to Jerusalem, Hell to home.
Freedom ends or starts with a funeral.
Say what must die inside that I may not
The fifth line of our poem in progress comes from “MQ”: “Say what must die inside that I may not,” a line that sustains the funereal motif in the previous line, introduces a fruitful dichotomy between “inside” and out, rhymes internally (“say what” and “may not”), and ends with a clause that may be either transitive or intransitive—you may insert a period after “not” or extend the thought into the next line. All this in perfect iambic pentameter, a quality also found in runner-up Joe Lawlor’s “How deeply mourned, I wonder, would I be.” Lawlor’s line has further virtues: it echoes the poem’s opening and leads us to a conditional while leaving its terms blank.