The sonnet, a formal verse form, is still capable of commenting on contemporary life.

Its favoured subjects, of course, don’t change: life, love, introspection, constancy and inconstancy, and age…

i. sixty talks to eighteen

Unfearless, at eighteen, of gravity and time,

Of mirrors, of insurance, and the cold

Facts of economics, they show that old

Indifference of the young to the actuarial

Warnings of the strong chance that passion

In its firm and quite inevitable fashion

Will falter and will fade, as arterial

Silting slows the blood, and the human colt

Becomes the drayhorse; why should they

Pause to think of what others say

They should do? It’s not their fault

The world is as it is, our self-created mess.

We’ve one thing, though, that they’ve not got:

We can with ease reflect on what is not.