The AllPoetry contest was "Rewrite and Repackage an Old Poem".

This was an easy pick to change forms for the contest, as the structure of The Wanderer is much looser. Its rhythm is irregular but IMO it has a very strong rhythm when read out loud. It also has end-line rhyme, but scattered irregularly, every end word rhymes except the repeated line and the two lines at the end. I know the decision was deliberate, and it reflects the lines "Their soles in fragments fall and track/Across the world,..." but I don't remember which came first. Possibly simultaneously.

Given it was already late in the day and the contest closed in 15 hours, the choice of rewriting The Wanderer and turning it into a sonnet was fairly obvious. I have no problems with sonnets, I can do rhyme and rhythm easily. I prefer the Italian form.

One of the other poets on AllPoetry thought the Italian style was more difficult to write well because of the tightness of the number of rhymes (5) compared to the Shakespearean form. But I like the balance of the former, and I think I can do it easily. The one word that I used that I probably would not have thought of and found on RhymeZone was "gentiles", and so appropriate. Most of the rest came all by themselves, particularly the two tercets. The path of the story follows the original fairly well - The Wanderer has the same balance of time and focus as an Italian Sonnet even though it looks nothing like one. The wandering and the encounter in the two quatrains, the death and resolution in the two tercets of Ahaseurus correspond to the two longer and then the two shorter verse in The Wanderer

I'm just happy it worked, and so quickly. I didn't time it, but possibly an hour at most. Some one commented "No deed done with a good heart is ever wasted" to which my reply was "Yes, but time spent on a poem that doesn't work at all comes close. Even then, you can learn something. Had it not worked, the lesson would be "don't attempt a serious poem late at night and you need to go to bed". But the consensus was that both poems worked equally powerfully.