This was written for a Revel where the theme was "death." It won second place, I think because the first place poem was much more directly about death. (and rather gory) My approach to the theme was more subtle, with a personification of death as a soldier's secret mistress. While the other soldiers give their love to mortal women, my nameless soldier thinks always of the death that will one day come to him.

When I wrote this, I had just read a mystery novel called "Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair" by Ellis Peters. It revolved around a murder committed at a weekend seminar for folk-singers. While I didn't particularly like the story -- I read mostly historical mysteries -- the ballads that became a part of the story sort of stuck in my head, and I found myself singing them. So when I went to write my Revel poem, it naturally fell into the form of a traditional ballad.

Dark Mistress has more structure than many of my poems. It is divided into units of three verses, one unit about each phase of the soldier's life: a young recruit, a warrior in his prime, a veteran going home, and an old man. Each unit has a verse from a third-person point of view setting the time and place, a chorus of question and answer between the narrator and the soldier which differs only in half of one line each time, and a verse of the soldier describing his relationship with death personified. It is finally wrapped up in a single quatrain which makes clear the identity of the soldier's phantom mistress.

As a ballad, Dark Mistress is meant to be sung. (try it!) Not surprisingly for my poetry, the rhyme scheme is ABCB and meter is iambic, with four feet in the A lines and 3 in the B/C lines. The choruses are actually the same style as the other verses with no line break after the A lines. I could have written them in the same format, but by combining the lines I had a visual difference which sped those lines up a bit in the mind of the reader, just as I envisioned the performer singing them at a slightly faster tempo than the plain verses.