Sonnets Are More Than Pretty Rooms
by Mark Raymond
Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Sonnet 1: Folger Shakespeare Library, https://digitalcollections.folger.edu/img19615
Fourteen lines (or not). A set rhyme scheme (or not). Shakespearean (not his invention). Petrarchan (ditto). The sonnet is all about a pattern, a recollection of a pattern, in whose confines everything is ordered, but whose very orderliness can force things ajar—configurations of rhyme and meter jamming sense, an unnatural mash-up, a bit of a monster, like old hybrid roses whose perfection is almost too heavy for this world, meant to be pruned in reclusive gardens, while free verse cruises by, trafficking uninhibited in the open-pollinated streets.
Fourteen lines (or not). A set rhyme scheme (or not). Shakespearean (not his invention). Petrarchan (ditto). The sonnet is all about a pattern, a recollection of a pattern, in whose confines everything is ordered, but whose very orderliness can force things ajar—configurations of rhyme and meter jamming sense, an unnatural mash-up, a bit of a monster, like old hybrid roses whose perfection is almost too heavy for this world, meant to be pruned in reclusive gardens, while free verse cruises by, trafficking uninhibited in the open-pollinated streets.
But sonnets are more than pretty rooms. To a lot of readers, they’re foremost love poems (Shakespeare’s sonnets are bestsellers in this line), and that’s not a wrong answer, but it’s complicated. Poets’ relationships with the sonnet form hit all the pluses and minuses, the trade-offs and commitments and thrills of our romantic lives, from courtship and matrimony to hook-ups, catfishing, and ghosting. Writing sonnets is a partnership with tradition. It can be casual or committed, exhilarating or transactional, a bit of cosplay, a friend with benefits or schoolmarm with a ruler disciplined.
At its most rigid, the sonnet has a tradwife and courtier vibe: reading them is like catching the bouquet. But let me tell you, the sonnet’s not proud. Like a building who’s weathered the centuries, you know these bright and gentrified rooms have been used for all sorts of past liaisons and affairs, from boudoir to office space, gossipy parlor to locked closet. For all its tight quarters and load-bearing walls, the sonnet is really a flex space. It accommodates and transforms, while always holding onto something that keeps the poet honest, a sliver of ornamental molding or a floorplan that no renovation can improve. Some sonnets sport a perfumed air as cloying as Valentine’s roses, but it’s their bones, their roots, that hold us. Portions of the sonnet pattern might get lopped off, there’ll be no “kissing rhyme,” maybe no couplet to land on, but the poet’s still flirting with a legacy design and a legacy desire. They’re the ultimate swipe right, holding out hope that this’ll be the one, even if you’re otherwise ill-suited, something about them reminds you of someone long ago, why you started writing, your ideal reader, a folie à deux.
Petrarch sonnet, 'Orso e non furo mai fiumi ne stagni', from 'Canzoniere e Trionfi' by Petrarch, c.1470 by Italian School.
The July Third Fig looks at the sonnet. We asked Maine poets to give their thoughts on the form, as both readers and as writers. How do they engage with it? Do they love it, hate it, revel in it, respect it, or is it complicated? For poets today, what are the risks and rewards of turning to this old-fashioned yet surprisingly updatable form, a venerable design that’s still fresh with modernity, human-centered yet intricate with artifice, like the distantly complex heavens of a watchmaker god?
Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnets get special attention. Her success with the form reads like an allegory of the (woman) poet’s struggles with the literary canon and tradition. Women writers were the first to revive and revamp the form after it had become passe, a genre left for dead, in the early eighteenth century, although by the nineteenth century they had to contend with what was called the “poetess” tradition (and the Victorians were especially fond of talking about the “flowers of rhetoric,” an old-fashioned trope about tropes that kept the language lush even as mores were changing). Modernism bulldozed a lot of Victorian terraces and their teacup gardens (the Blitz didn’t help), and Millay’s verse, adept as it was (and even as popular as it was), ended up in a cul-de-sac of Modern Poetry, anthologized, but formally out-of-step with the freedoms verse was taking, the postwar boom and anxieties of the midcentury modern, the academic-critical complex with its seven types of ambiguity (because you can’t get ambiguity in six types), and by 1950 she was dead.
Millay was, in a sense, the last poetess (a belated Romantic, in fact), and by midcentury the critics had learned to hear Emily Dickinson’s true voice, which could eerily ventriloquize our modern-day ambiguities, as a cunning clairvoyant at a seance should (although Dickinson tended her own flowers as craftily as Etsy, the way any New England Renaissance poetess would). Emily, almost in complete isolation among the canonized poets, never wrote a sonnet, not even a crumb of one.
Shakespeare’s Sonnets, edited with notes, by William J. Rolfe, with engravings (Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1883).
The sonnet often has the vibe of a crypt about it, like coming across pressed flowers and antique love letters in an old book, more dust than perfume. Yet poetry’s “living line,” which playwright-poet Ben Jonson attributed to Shakespeare’s verse (and Jonson knew Shakespeare’s sonnets and might be alluding to them here), has carried through the sonnet tradition in decidedly human terms. The end is both literary immortality (it’s Shakespeare after all, although most poets aren’t above engaging the hopeful trope that their own flowers of rhetoric won’t wither away) and the interpersonal connectivity of literary influence. This influence which picks up the metaphor of bloodlines and heritability. Jonson’s followers were called the “sons of Ben” and a slew of Shakespeare’s sonnets generate a “procreative” theme—the sequence’s “fair young man” will “live twice”: in his own progeny and in the poet’s “rhyme.”
Millay’s influence lives on in the generations of poets who credit her sonnets as an inspiration in their own writing, including (Louise Bogan, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, who all stress the relationship 1), placing Millay prominently in the generative line of the American sonnet. What the American sonnet is isn’t exactly clear. Some poets treat the term as if it were its own distinct genre, often an unrhymed fourteen-line poem that still contains a volta, that turn of thought within the form’s phonetic pattern which marks a sonnet’s characteristic flex inside its own space. Yet it’s hard to imagine a British poet writing an unrhymed fourteen-line poem somewhere in Cumbria and calling their work an “American” sonnet. All the rules of genre are ultimately socially mediated—they have no force without some consensus between communities of writers. Like the magical thinking of democracy itself, what makes an American sonnet is the social contract of the Republic of Letters, along with a strong whiff of smoke-and-mirrors nationalism, a bit like the Gulf of America.
As we’ll see, the community of Maine poets has much to say about their writerly lives among the afterlife of sonnets and the influence and inspiration of Millay. Millay herself, handling the form with daring precision, can also be seen as more of an experimentalist than she at first glance appears. While a formal traditionalist in most of her best-known sonnets (she can do the Shakespearean and the Petrarchan), Vincent, with typical American impudence, messed around with the form in surprising ways, showing there’s still life in the sonnet ideal, and that the DNA of the sonnet was vital to her larger poetic project.
See The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays, edited by Dora Malech and Laura T. Smith, University of Iowa Press, 2022, p. 38.
Interested in this topic? Read more about what a sonnet is by Mark Raymond, here.
