Too peevish for poetry

The first poem in Wilbur's Collected Poems begins:

The Reader

She is going back, these days, to the great stories
That charmed her younger mind. A shaded light
Shines on the nape half-shadowed by her curls,
And a page turns now with a scuffing sound.

At "these days" I'm already wondering "so not next year?" and "is this worth munging the pentameter already?" And at "shaded" and "shadowed" I'm going, "huh? By 'a shaded light' you mean 'a lamp', right?"

But the fourth line is great.



Here are the first two stanzas of the opening poem in Timothy Steele's new book, Toward the Winter Solstice.

Daybreak, Benedict Canyon

Thick fog has filled the canyon overnight
And turned it to a sea of milky gray.
The steep-sloped chaparral and streets below
Are drowned from view; hilltops across the way
Form a low-lying archipelago
Upon the fog’s smothering gulfs and shoals.
The scene, in the uncertain pre-dawn light,
Recalls those Chinese landscapes on silk scrolls

In which mists haunt ravines, and clouds surround
Remote peaks fading to remoter skies.
The scene suggests, too, the apocalypse
The earth may suffer if sea levels rise.
This very deck might be a ghostly ship’s
And I a lone survivor, cast by fate
Out on a flood as lifeless and profound
As the one Noah had to navigate.

Here I'm saying:
Look, Tim (may I call you Tim?), you can't say "the apocalypse the earth may suffer", and "if sea levels rise" is metrically lame. But you really don't want to end a stanza on a weak-ass rhyme like "fate/navigate", esp. if you have to resort to prose like "As the one" to set it up. And the stanza I didn't quote - I can see it twirling around singing "I feel pretty" but it's not.