Challenging Poetry

. . .it's a design element

I thought I saw a marching band
run circles round my hall,
I looked again and saw a snag
run ladders down my shawl--
“Oh well,” said I, “I'm glad it's now
the strangest shawl of all.”

Prompt ▼

Make a mistake! (Write about a mistake you’ve made and/or literally make one (or more) in the poem!)

You can probably tell something about my process without a note, but I thought I'd explain two things:

1. This structure was inspired by the structure (oh, what am I kidding, it's a parody) of Lewis Carroll's A Strange Wild Song  

2. A ladder is a place where a long column of stitches in knitting comes out (like a run in a stocking) making a column of yarn crossing the space in parallel lines (like a ladder. For what it's worth, any piece of knitting can have a dropped stitch that ladders down like you'd see in a stocking. It's so annoying when it happens when you're not meaning it to (yes, I have dropped stitches on purpose--scary) and they can be fixed but it usually takes more trouble than it's worth. My attitude toward mistakes that I can live with (yes, sometimes I rip it out and repair) is to say, it's not a mistake, it's a design element. It's something that makes it unique.