Mede Any Excuse

Plato said, “At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.” It’s like that with children too. As a parent we understand the poetry. My youngest child just turned 18 years old. I feel proud to be her Mum, just like I feel proud to be Josh and Dan’s Mum too. They are three of my most beautifully written sonnets without ever having put pen to paper.

A Sonnet

A sonnet is one of the poetic forms that may be found in the lyric poetry of Europe. The term ‘sonnet’ was derived from the Occitan word ‘sonet’ and the Italian word ‘sonetto’, both meaning ‘little song’. It’s a very apt description for Mede. By the thirteenth century, it had come to signify a poem of fourteen lines that followed a strict rhyme scheme and specific structure.

She was a ‘little song’ for as long as I can remember, managing at three years old to keep all and sundry entertained using the stair-method. At the time we were living in a multi-level terrace in Sydney’s inner suburb of Erskineville, Erko to the locals.

The Terrace had five levels, each of them divided by a set of six stairs, library and Office on the lower level in from the garden, one level up into the lounge from street level, second level to the kitchen, third level to master bedroom, fourth level to children rooms and bathroom and on the fifth spacious guest/attic room.

Mede levelled up at one because young though she was, she had three levels covered by staging her singing debuts on the stairs between the street-level walk-in and the kitchen where she naturally got those coming up from the lower level or those coming down from the top levels.

Mede and Will

She did her show stopping songs with all the experience of a seasoned performer. Each stair represented a pre-set song in her head. Hers was like a duke-box list. As a mother, I never tired from it, I really didn’t. Children singing is and was always to be encouraged in my house. We had a rule, human voice wins out hands down over CD’s, tape recorders, television. It just was that way in our house.

The literary conventions associated with the sonnet have evolved over its history. Sonnets writers are sometimes referred to as ‘sonneteers’, although the term was also used rather derisively.

Shakespeare

One of the best-known sonnet writers was William Shakespeare who wrote 154 of them. He was obviously a man with abit of time on his hands! A Shakespearean, or English sonnet consists of 14 lines, each line containing ten syllables. The rhyme scheme in a Shakespearean sonnet is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG in which the last two lines are a rhyming couplet.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
– William Shakespeare

This is serendipity, I picked it off the Tree of Life, it’s Shakespeare’s 18th Sonnet. In any case, Happy birthday darling girl. Stair songs aside, I don’t Mede any excuse to write a beautiful sonnet. You’re mine, right from my heart.

UPDATE As at 31 March 2015, Mede is now 24 years old.