Night’s Geology - Edit3

[dukealien]

Edit1

What gets you through the tunnel and the night
Is much the same: there’s dread it frees you of,
Fear of abandonment, like rocky height
Above, weighs down, no breath, no light, no love.
Hope’s not enough:  you must own confidence,
Belief in science, that this tunnel’s roof
Is like each other’s, bored through rock as dense,
That’s crushed no one – a tested, public proof.
You likewise trust the pillars of your mind -
Revealed religion, ideology -
Because they’ve helped so many souls to find
Safe passage through each night’s geology.
    To engineer is human; so’s belief:
    The stress of life, like stone, wants strain relief.

Thanks for the the very fine critique - right to the nitty-gritty of meter.  (And thanks/mea culpa to the moderator - I'm as guilty as the others, for responding in kind.)

The usual excuse/rationalization/reason for off-meter is "substitution," that is, a trochee for an iamb (or the like) when the change-up in emphasis supports the thrust of the poem.  The third quatrain has no such excuse - I always knew "Likewise" was wrong, just had to have someone point it out.  In edit1 (above) I've altered two lines to slot "likewise" into a metrically correct location and suppress the offending "pit-props."  Hate to lose "shoring up," but so it goes; "Revealed" is a bit unnecessary, but the desirable "Romance" there would also be off-meter.

On the other hand, I respectfully disagree on "ideology" and "geology," not because the latter is a whiz-bang that also appears in the title, but because I really do pronounce them as /././ and ././ - though the last syllable is indeed less accented than the first/second respectively.  So for the time being they stand as is, though if others find them objectionable I'm willing to reconsider - the title can, after all, stand on its own if necessary.

"You trust the pit-props shoring up your mind
Likewise, religion, ideology,
Because they’ve helped so many souls to find
Safe passage through each night’s geology."

As a whole piece, I like it's construction and the subject matter. That is not to say whether I disagree with it or not. The four lines I have quoted above are what make this piece difficult, however. The fact that is a sonnet is clear. And sonnets have rules, and this fits the rules much better than many of the pieces I see. But lines 9, 10,  and 12 all have small inconsistencies. The syllable count is all fine, but that is not where meter is entirely measured. 'Pit-props,' being hyphenated, is naturally spondaic, and I can't seem to "destress" the word 'props' as I say it. 'Likewise,' isn't exactly an iamb in my dialect, but maybe it's different in yours. It's forgivable. But 'ideology' does not fit at all. It's completely unnatural to every dialect of English I've heard to stress that final syllable. The same goes for geology, and most words that end in the letter Y, as far as I know. Iambic pentameter is so common in English poetry because it is so natural to the English language.

[small portion deleted after reading above comment]

I suggest tweaks to those three lines, and anything else that has to be tweaked to follow along with such changes.

(also, this is my first time commenting in mild critique, so I'm not sure if this is too much or too little)