I know you hate similes... you know I don't share that irrational prejudice of yours and will ignore it!
Your alteration to L4 changes the grammatical sense, because at the moment it refers back to the previous lines and I don't want shadows to have an independent clause of their own. "As" isn't lazy, it's an adverb -- exactly the same part of speech as "eternally", incidentally, but in this context it's providing a different link as it doesn't require the addition of another verb to make it work. In other spots, it's a preposition -- might as well be upset by every of, to, for, on, or that!
The same goes for L13. Aside from the fact that your example totally screws up the meter and squishes a whole stack of illogical words together in a way that I'd whack a student for, it doesn't say what I want it to say. And personally I'd find "our summer" way too trite and sick-making (it might even make me puke!)
So, as you can see I haven't just discarded your suggestions because I don't want to make changes, I've discarded them after thinking carefully about word choices and why they were made in the first place (or rather, the 51st place since I never remember how many edits a poem goes through in my head before it even makes the paper). I'm happy to hear from you, and even happier to have my words challenged, but happiest of all that I feel confident I've done reasonably well with this
Your alteration to L4 changes the grammatical sense, because at the moment it refers back to the previous lines and I don't want shadows to have an independent clause of their own. "As" isn't lazy, it's an adverb -- exactly the same part of speech as "eternally", incidentally, but in this context it's providing a different link as it doesn't require the addition of another verb to make it work. In other spots, it's a preposition -- might as well be upset by every of, to, for, on, or that!
The same goes for L13. Aside from the fact that your example totally screws up the meter and squishes a whole stack of illogical words together in a way that I'd whack a student for, it doesn't say what I want it to say. And personally I'd find "our summer" way too trite and sick-making (it might even make me puke!)
So, as you can see I haven't just discarded your suggestions because I don't want to make changes, I've discarded them after thinking carefully about word choices and why they were made in the first place (or rather, the 51st place since I never remember how many edits a poem goes through in my head before it even makes the paper). I'm happy to hear from you, and even happier to have my words challenged, but happiest of all that I feel confident I've done reasonably well with this
It could be worse