How slow is triple unanimity!
That lofty goal of undisputed truth
That three must reach in no more time than one.
And so the order handed down to me:
Recuse the lot if they be so uncouth
That none persuade the rest before the gun.
But I was lost, the cases like a sea;
Extended kindness, as if to a youth
And gave them extra time to judge and run.
Apologies, I register a plea:
No fun.
As I'm sure all of us would consider it unreasonable to cram the
200-word-apology minimum entirely into sonnet form, I fill out the
requirement by quoting from Wikipedia's description of the unusual
form selected:
The curtal sonnet is a form invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and
used in three of his poems.
It is an eleven-line (or, more accurately, ten-and-a-half-line)
sonnet, but rather than the first eleven lines of a standard sonnet it
consists of precisely 3/4 of the structure of a Petrarchan sonnet
shrunk proportionally. The octave of a sonnet becomes a sestet and the
sestet a quatrain plus an additional "tail piece." That is, the first
eight lines of a sonnet are translated into the first six lines of a
curtal sonnet and the last six lines of a sonnet are translated into
the last four and a half lines of a curtal sonnet. Hopkins describes
the last line as half a line, though in fact it can be shorter than
half of one of Hopkins's standard sprung rhythm lines. In the preface
to his Poems (1876-89), Hopkins describes the relationship between the
Petrarchan and curtal sonnets mathematically; if the Petrarchan sonnet
can be described by the equation 8 + 6 = 14 then, he says, the curtal
sonnet would be:
12/2 + 9/2 = 21/2 = 10 1/2
