Monday 11 December 2006

A Calendar of Sonnets: January

O winter! frozen pulse and heart of fire,
What loss is theirs who from thy kingdom turn
Dismayed, and think thy snow a sculptured urn
Of death! Far sooner in midsummer tire
The streams than under ice. June could not hire
Her roses to forego the strength they learn
In sleeping on thy breast. No fires can burn
The bridges thou dost lay where men desire
In vain to build.
--------------------O Heart, when Love's sun goes
To northward, and the sounds of singing cease,
Keep warm by inner fires, and rest in peace.
Sleep on content, as sleeps the patient rose.
Walk boldly on the white untrodden snows,
The winter is the winter's own release.

Helen Hunt Jackson

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The first thing that strikes me is the use of run-on lines. I find it particularly irritating when a poet uses excessive run-on lines in a form which involves a regular rhyme and rhythmic scheme; a sonnet, especially, does not deserve such treatment.

There are several kinds of pauses in a poem: the first kind is one that stems from the use of punctuations, which I would call auditory stop; the next kind is visual, the most obvious being found in a line break. The fact that the eye has to reset to the left side of the page means that the mind naturally registers a pause, and any reading (silent or otherwise) will pause at least slightly upon seeing a line break.

Here, the placement of visual pauses works to the poem's detriment. I bring up the particularly poisonous example of "thy snow a sculptured urn / Of death!”; because of the language, the reader's mind naturally registers a pause at "sculptured urn". However, on reading the next line, the reader finds that it is, after all, a run-on line, ending in nothing less than an exclamation mark! Obviously, the break is very unnatural. In addition, since one tends to mentally end the sentence at "urn", the result may be one reading out "and think thy sculptured snow a sculptured urn. Of death!". Worse, the sentence ends on the first iamb of the next line! In the use of the iambic pentameter, the mind naturally breaks the five iambs into two and three iambs, and less often into three and two iambs. Breaking up the five iambs into one and four iambs hurts the flow even more.

However, the poem is, rhythmically speaking, not past redemption. More specifically, the ending sestet is very nice. "To northward, and" breaks the line into two and three iambs, which flows better. Most lines end in either a comma or a full stop, allowing for the coincidence of a visual and an auditory pause, and in the previous example, a language-based pause.

As for other points of the poem, I particularly like the last line, as it contains repetition and an internal rhyme, two things befitting an obsessive form as the sonnet. The alliteration with the previous line doesn't hurt either. In fact, the sestet is rife with alliteration and repetition, taking for example the sibilance in "sounds of singing cease", and "sleep on content, as sleeps". All of these give a nice effect of focus, a concentrating of energy on a message or subject, and a mental buildup to a conclusion.

That is all. I have nothing to say about the actual content of the poem.

This article is contributed by Derrick Ng

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