Felm shu Sonso (felm ʃu sonso)
Soɾalec tsyɾy owen
Tatlasen, oshenve
Men—tlammeɾo shu
Shenve—en morin hu
en men operc yc en
Mutsalm mēvorn:
Lu felm shu sonso. I, in a crowd with only
People who
Do not know me, am afraid—
Afraid of being heard—
I leave for
I have something that I
Do not want to set down:
This love of loneliness.
Felm shu Sonso is an example of Yvelse netso shu βel ("block poetry" in English) wherein a poem has a set number of consonant characters in each line. The most restrictive form of this poetry has a number of characters in each line equal to the number of lines—in the case of Felm shu Sonso, eight characters are in each of eight lines. When written without spaces or punctuation, such poetry takes the shape of a square. The poem was written in the year 438 3C, by Velsen poet Felm Namekeeper (Felm Wetavushuɾu). Born Vesha Namekeeper in a small village in eastern Astra in the year 409 3C, Namekeeper begun publishing poems in his early twenties. He was known as a social recluse—while he partook in society and spent most of his life in the midst of Cavalli, a modest-sized city, he is recorded as having no close friends and limiting social interactions to those required to get through day-to-day life. Many of Namekeeper's poems are observations of mortal life and society, and nearly all of them are written in either free verse or traditional Velsen poetry formats such as block poetry. Felm shu Sonso is one of the few poems in which he explores his own mental state. Namekeeper died unmarried at the age of 68, with nearly two hundred published poems and an unknown number of unpublished ones, only a few of which have been found. The only known complete anthology of his work is kept in the Library of the First Crow.
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