Edit 6: Longing

[dukealien]

My first attempt at a Petrarchan sonnet. Would like to know how it reads.


Longing 
 
Cicadas sing the artless words that two 
familiar strangers stifle with esprit, 
to both of us in soothing secrecy. 
It isn't through a cithara—but through 
a sycamore, the dappled grass and dew— 
the two misapprehend the chances we 
provoke, for clay; but through their artistry 
I sense those artless words belong to you 
 
and me. I wish to watch the clouds again 
for possibilities we'd ponder till 
we sink alone into ourselves. And then 
we're in the shade and hear the flowing creek 
and ravenous cicadas, on the hill. 
I nudge your leg with mine and now I speak.




Minor edit: changed "start to" to "now I".

This is quite fun, and contains some nice images.  However, your question is how it reads.  With that, there are a few problems.

There are unexpected words ("clay" for example) but what throws me is rhymes and phrasing.  The A rhymes in the quatrains are uniformly strong, but the B rhymes are, to me, uniformly weak.  Compare, for example,

familiar strangers stifle with esprit,
to both of us in soothing secrecy.

with (and forgive the rewrite, purely to give an example)

familiar strangers stifle with esprit,
to both of us in soothing jacquerie.

(The sense is compromised, but more than the final consonant is rhymed.)

That same line (L3) also exemplifies my problem with the phrasing.  There's nothing wrong with continuing a sentence or idea over a line break, but the full stop at the end of L3 leaves me hanging:  the A rhyme is still coming, but it's with a different idea.

And finally, and please don't take this too seriously on your first Petrarchan sonnet, when I read (or write) a Petrarchan I look for problem and solution:  problem stated and restated in the quatrains, solution in the remainder.  Spanning the gap after the quatrains seems to break this a bit, and I'm not sure what the problem solved by breaking the static with speech is.  In this, the structure of the last six lines can be your friend:  the turn (to solution) at their start, and the surprise of solution realized at the end can be facilitated by the reader forgetting what the last line has to rhyme with.  Here, "speak" is a nice surprise rhyme with the apparently unrelated "creek" - well done.   (I favor CDECDE for the last six lines because it gives the reader even more time to forget where the E rhyme has to end up.)

But that's just my reading; others may (and will) differ.  Write more of these, some perhaps with a specific problem to solve (oops, you're married - what now?) and see about closer but unforced end-rhymes.

Just my two cents.