Fanfiction: Ursa Departs (Avatar: The Last Airbender)

[nebroadwe]

Title: Sonnet: Ursa Departs
Fandom: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Character(s): Ursa
Pairing(s): None.
Rating: G
Word Count: 107
Warnings: None.
A/N: I was mugged by a sonnet on Friday and spent the weekend recovering from the shock and then pummeling the mugger into (barely) postable shape. Sonnets are hard -- and I'm not sure why I keep diving into seventeenth-century poetry and poetic forms when I write Avatar 'fic -- cf. here and here -- but perhaps it has something to do with being an English major. Concrit welcomed with pretty rooms (and bonus gold to aery thinness beat to anyone who spots the reference :-). Crossposted from nebroadwe to avatar_fans and avatarfic.
Dedication(s): For William Shakespeare, il miglior fabbro.

---

She's never gone but where her going's known
Nor come but where her welcome is assured --
Hawk-heralded, by rumor's wings outflown;
What's needful to her comfort long procured
Or whistled up in haste; her way prepared
By liv'ried outriders, as fits her state;
Her hosts all deference, no effort spared
To earn her gentle protest of surfeit --
Till now, when with laborious steps and sore,
She gains the ridge's broken summit, spent --
Behind, the royal court, her home no more;
Ahead, the desert of her banishment --
Like an explorer at the utmost North,
For whom all ways are one, and that one, forth.

---

[Acknowledgments: Avatar: The Last Airbender was created by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko; copyright for this property is held by Viacom International, Inc. All rights reserved.]

Comments

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Figuring out what the "turn" was gave me fits for a while; I had Ursa arriving at the house on Ember Island for a while (all empty and damp and cheerless), but I realized pretty quickly that I couldn't do that in six lines. Then I tried summarizing the hazards of travel, but I couldn't get the rhymes to work. So she just struggled up the hill and paused for a minute to realize that she could go anywhere and it was all unknown territory. I'm a little bummed that I couldn't tie the end more closely to the beginning, but maybe next time ...