An Aeronaut to His Lady by Frank Sidgwick

An Aeronaut to His Lady

I
Through
Blue
Sky
Fly
To
You.
Why?

Sweet
Love,
Feet
Move
So
Slow.
--Frank Sidgwick

Sonnets have some definite rules attached to them, but they don't all have to look exactly the same. For instance, there are several different accepted rhyme schemes available, which subdivide the style into schools. Sonnets based on the original Italian style are generally known as Petrarchan. They start out with eight lines called an octave which are generally rhymed a-b-a-b, a-b-a-b; or a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a. The sestet, the last six lines, have the options of c-d-e-c-d-e or c-d-c-c-d-c. The English or Shakespearean sonnet generally has three quatrains and a couplet a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g. They're also usually written in iambic pentameter which adds even more structure. Then there's the Spenserian sonnet which uses the a-b a-b, b-c b-c, c-d c-d, e-e scheme. Then there's all the variations on those schemes.

It's safe to say, though that there are 14 lines, and a specific rhyme scheme.

Here's another quote from the article "How Does a Poem Mean"

Just for the frivolous pleasure of poetry, if you like, there is a marvelous sonnet. It is one of my favorite tricks in poetry—a skeletal sonnet. You have probably studied the sonnet at one time or another. Here is a trick played on the sonnet. This sonnet contains one word per line—nothing but the rhyme scheme. That is about as thin as you can get with the sonnet. I have tried for years to find another 14 words that would perform this trick well. No luck. This is called “An Aeronaut to His Lady”:

That is all there is to it. But in those 14 words the poet has observed the a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a, c-d, c-d, e-e rhyme scheme. The first eight lines ask a question; the next six lines answer it. That is the octet and sestet. It divides properly, and the tone of it is the tone of the sonnet. That is a tremendous lot to get into 14 words.

Now supposing instead of that he had sent a wire, saying, “Walking too slow; am flying, love.” You see what would be left out of it. All the joy of the performance. And that is the difference.

Nothing in Heaven Functions as it Ought by X. J. Kennedy

Nothing in Heaven Functions as it Ought

Nothing in Heaven functions as it ought;
Peter’s bifocals, blindly sat on, crack;
His gates lurch wide with the cackle of a cock;
Not with a hush of gold as Milton had thought;
Gangs of the slaughtered innocents keep huffing
The nimbus off the Venerable Bede
Like that of a dandelion gone to seed;
The beatific choir keep breaking up, coughing.

But Hell, sweet Hell hath no freewheeling part:
None takes his own sweet time, nor quickens pace.
Ask anyone, “How come you here, poor heart?”
And he will slot a quarter through his face—
There’ll be an instant click—a tear will start
Imprinted with an abstract of his case.
--X. J. Kennedy

Welcome to a week about sonnets. Our first is from an Ensign article called, "Liberating Form" by Marden J. Clark. I think his comments are a good way to start out the week because the sonnet is all about form. If you want to call it a sonnet, you have to have 14 lines, and one of the expected rhyme schemes. As Clark shows more elegantly below, it is a restricting rule, but it lends the finished whole a powerful elegance.

I just thought of an analogy. If writing poetry is like dancing, writing sonnets is like dancing the waltz in a ballroom competition. There are plenty of other legitimate forms of dancing -- from folk dance to tap to the almost formless "modern dance" -- but there's something eternally fascinating about watching the two bodies in perfect synchronization gracefully sweeping around the floor. The gentleman's tuxedo and the lady's flowing ballgown and high heels, far from seeming restrictive clothing, lend a sense of occasion to the dance. In the same way, sonnets aren't the only form of poetry, but they certainly are an elegant and impressive one.

Here's what Marden Clark had to say about the sonnet in his article, "Liberating Form"

It’s a simple enough poem, at least on the surface. This particular kind of sonnet came to us from the Italian poet Petrarch. It “scans” with a rhyme scheme of abba abba cdcdcd. The rhyme scheme divides the poem neatly into two parts: the eight-line octet and the six lines of the concluding sestet. In this sonnet form the octet traditionally sets up some kind of problem or question or situation, the sestet somehow answers or responds to or plays against the octet. In this poem the picture of hell in the sestet plays against that of heaven in the octet.

We may be struck by the unusual qualities the poet imagines in heaven and hell and the images he uses to make us see each. We may even be struck by the unusual subject matter for a sonnet. But we recognize the traditional sonnet form used without too much variation.

I describe the poem as a sonnet not to give a lesson in poetry but to get at something else. The sonnet is a highly restrictive form. Each of its fourteen lines, almost by prescription, has ten syllables with five accents in each line. The tight rhyme scheme almost dictates a poem of two parts. The form is artificial and prescriptive. There are those who feel it restricts them, ties them down. And yet some of the most lovely, most spontaneous, most energetic poems in the language are written in the sonnet form.

Where does the energy in this poem come from? Partly from its ideas, of course, from the inverted views of heaven and hell, from the unusual and sometimes powerful pictures it makes us see. But these ideas stated in ordinary language would not have had the force they have in this tight form. The poem gets most of its energy from what the poet does with the form: from the way the poem works within, yet strains against and plays with the conventions of its form.

Without the form, what do we have left? “Neither heaven nor hell is what we think it is; people make mistakes in heaven, but that is better than hell, where nothing goes wrong because no one is free.” But where is our energy? We could get some of it by adding details. We could even build up a prose form that would get quite a bit of it. But this is a remarkably energetic sonnet, and prose can hardly catch its vigor.

Because of the rigid form, the poet can make subtle statements by the way he uses it. In the octet, for example, the accents do not come in perfect order, and the rhymes slant—huffing with coughing. But in the sestet, there is not one departure from the rigid form: the poet emphasizes that in his idea of hell, the soul as automaton cannot deviate from any norm. Prose could not demonstrate that contrast. The rigidness of form emphasizes the deadness of hell, but the form itself pulses with life.

The major energy of the poem, though, comes from the way the two parts play against each other. Our first reaction to this whimsical view of heaven may be negative. We may think the poet doesn’t like heaven. But when we look back from the orderly but mechanical hell the poet pictures, where no man takes his own sweet time, nor quickens pace, suddenly one’s own sweet time becomes very sweet and precious indeed. The imperfections of this poet’s heaven are humorous, but they become precious because we recognize that they result from freedom.

That, I presume, is mostly what the poem is “about”: the meaning of freedom, not so much in the afterlife as in this world. It is easy enough to make a prose statement of that meaning: the price of freedom is a certain amount of inefficiency; lack of freedom may produce efficiency but its price is infinitely greater: the soul becomes a mechanism. Latter-day Saints, of course, can see a parallel with the two plans in the preexistence. But the plain statement, contrasted with the poem, is insipid. All the paradoxical qualities of heaven and hell, all the fascinating contrasts set up by the two parts, all the nuances of sound and rhythm and image are lost.

And the prose statement obliterates an additional source of energy in the form. Since the sonnet is traditionally a love poem the poet gets an intriguing irony out of using it for what seems at first to be a theological discussion. But the irony goes further: the form suggests that because God loves us he gives us freedom, even to err—the poem may be a love sonnet, after all!

And here we come again to perhaps the most intriguing paradox in art—and in life: Form—the form that seems to restrict, to limit, to hold one in—is the means of liberating creative energy.

PS. I love the image of gangs of slaughtered innocents huffing the nimbus off the Venerable Bede. It makes me laugh. Also, in the picture, the guy in the middle with the video game is not intended to be Jesus, but some guy named Brian who just died.

A Considerable Speck by Robert Frost

A Considerable Speck

(Microscopic)
A speck that would have been beneath my sight
On any but a paper sheet so white
Set off across what I had written there.
And I had idly poised my pen in air
To stop it with a period of ink
When something strange about it made me think,
This was no dust speck by my breathing blown,
But unmistakably a living mite
With inclinations it could call its own.
It paused as with suspicion of my pen,
And then came racing wildly on again
To where my manuscript was not yet dry;
Then paused again and either drank or smelt--
With loathing, for again it turned to fly.
Plainly with an intelligence I dealt.
It seemed too tiny to have room for feet,
Yet must have had a set of them complete
To express how much it didn't want to die.
It ran with terror and with cunning crept.
It faltered: I could see it hesitate;
Then in the middle of the open sheet
Cower down in desperation to accept
Whatever I accorded it of fate.
I have none of the tenderer-than-thou
Collectivistic regimenting love
With which the modern world is being swept.
But this poor microscopic item now!
Since it was nothing I knew evil of
I let it lie there till I hope it slept.

I have a mind myself and recognize
Mind when I meet with it in any guise
No one can know how glad I am to find
On any sheet the least display of mind.
-- Robert Frost

I chose this poem today for two reasons. First, as an example that a poem doesn't need to be about something big or significant to be worthwhile. I don't think you need convincing of that, but later in my post you'll see why I wanted a poem about something "insignificant."

The second reason is in the last two lines. I don't know if he meant to have a double meaning here, but I suspect he did. All too often people write or say things that look like there was no real thought behind them.

The rest of my post today is going to be from an article I found in The New Era archives at LDS.org. It's called, “How Does a Poem Mean?” by John Ciardi.

When I began teaching at the University of Kansas City in 1940, I spent a lot of time on the trains, going back and forth between Kansas City and Chicago. My salary just about kept the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe rolling. I would often find myself in the club car with the world’s traveling salesmen. They meet there. They would begin a ritual—a very tight ritual. It always seemed to have the same opening phrase. They would say, “What are you in?”

One man would say he was in glue, and they would talk about that for a while. Another man would say he was in brass doorknobs, and they would talk about brass doorknobs for a while.

Then they would turn to me and say, “What are you in?”

At first I used to invent things. I had a feeling that it would take too much explanation to tell a club car full of salesmen that I was a poet.

But one day, for the fun of it, when the question came to me, “What are you in?” I said, “I am a poet.”

I found that it took very little explanation. As a matter of fact, there was a long silence, in which people detached and regrouped. After a suitable interval, I went into the main body of the car and sat down. Soon a salesman slid into the seat next to mine and began talking in a low voice. He had something that he wanted to say to me that he could not say to other salesmen. This experience was repeated many times. Often the salesman would have a poem in his wallet. I think I have seen some of the world’s most miserable and most uninspired poems out of the wallets of salesmen.

Always they would make the terrifying mistake that all bad, over-enthusiastic poets make—the assumption that if the subject is large enough, it does not matter whether or not the poem is good. If you can just take the largest possible subject and begin the poem “Truth is … , “Beauty is … ,” “Life is … ,” you have got to end up beautiful. I am afraid such a poem is more likely to be a disaster. The size of the poem is not determined by the size of the subject. It is determined by the size of the mind that is trying to enclose it. The value of a science is not decided by the size of the subject it studies. Otherwise microbiologists would be insignificant people and only geologists would really count. They deal with mountains and whole continents.

I had a lovely exchange at the Saturday Review with, I guess, a sweet lady. I had rejected some of her poems. I have to reject a lot of them. I get about 500 a week, and I can only accept two. But she took my rejection personally, as many people do, and wrote me a hot letter. I had not remembered the poem, but she said, “I suppose you rejected my poem because it was about God.”

I had to reply. “Dear Madam: No, I did not reject your poem because it was about God. I rejected it because I could not conquer a feeling that you were not equal to your subject.”

I think it is likely to go that way often. The impulse of the poem is fine, but there is another life behind it. An oration is not a poem. A poem is some sort of a living performance. It comes out of live sources in us. And everyone has these live sources. But, for example, great human feeling will make nothing out of the cello until your fingering arm and your bowing arm have gone to school. I submit that it takes at least as much discipline to write a poem as it does to play the cello well. The feeling is there, yes, but the communication of the feeling is a skill—a way of doing. It starts with joy but involves difficulty. I think it does, in a way that was best stated by Robert Frost when he spoke of “the pleasure of taking pains.” That is the aesthetic joy.

Bilbo's Last Song (At the Grey Havens) by JRR Tolkien

Bilbo's Last Song (At the Grey Havens)

Day is ended, dim my eyes,
But journey long before me lies.
Farewell, friends! I hear the call.
The ship's beside the stony wall.
Foam is white and waves are grey;
Beyond the sunset leads my way.
Foam is salt, the wind is free;
I hear the rising of the sea.

Farewell, friends! The sails are set,
The wind is east, the moorings fret.
Shadows long before me lie,
Beneath the ever-bending sky,
But islands lie behind the Sun
That I shall raise ere all is done;
Lands there are to west of West,
Where night is quiet and sleep is rest.

Guided by the Lonely Star,
Beyond the utmost harbour-bar,
I'll find the heavens fair and free,
And beaches of the Starlit Sea.
Ship my ship! I seek the West,
And fields and mountains ever blest.
Farewell to Middle-earth at last.
I see the star above my mast!
--JRR Tolkien

I don't find this one as sad as Legolas's poem about the sea. Bilbo is old and tired and done with living in this world of woe. It's like the difference between the funeral of a relatively young accident victim, and the funeral of a great grandparent who lived a full live, and has finally succumbed to a terminal illness.

I like how this poem, though obviously written for a specific occasion in this particular book, can easily be moved out of its original context. Rather than losing something because you don't know the backstory, it gains a universal quality. It's not just about Bilbo sailing away to the undying lands with the elves, it's about anyone saying goodbye to this life, and sailing off into the sunset, over the horizon to "the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns." To me, one measure of a good poem or song is how universal and specific it can be at the same time. In musical theater, for instance, you could have a great song, but if it makes no sense outside the context of your show, it'll be tough for it to get very popular, whereas if it's universal, then people could imagine that this love song is really talking about their particular love, and so they'll want to sing or listen to it a lot (an exception to this is "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" -- which, when you think about it, doesn't really make much sense in context to begin with).

I also like the idea of using a sea voyage as a metaphor for death. Tolkien is certainly not the first to use it. So many people sailed away, never to return, that it's a natural connection to make. It's also comforting to imagine that for the traveler, it's just the beginning of a new adventure. Somewhere out there, on a beautiful South Sea island, they're enjoying peace and comfort not generally available to mere mortals.

To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell

Warning! This poem has some decidedly PG-13 imagery. Proceed at your own risk.

To His Coy Mistress

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shoudst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear
Time's wingéd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honor turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
--Andrew Marvell

This poem starts off sweetly enough -- that's the part I had heard before looking up the whole thing to post here. The man is waxing poetic as he tells his lady how he'd love to spend eternity letting their love slowly grow. I really like this imagery. I've though a lot about the idea of living forever, and I've come to the conclusion that it would only be worth it if you had someone to share it with as you both grow and change.

The second section also begins with a reasonable concern. The speaker reminds his lady that they are not going to live forever, and so they'd better hurry things along. About the middle of this stanza, I realized that he's not talking about marrying this girl, he just wants to satisfy his lust at the expense of her "quaint honor." The poem just got a whole lot less romantic to me. The image of the worms is in especially bad taste.

The third section picks up the pace without changing the meter. A neat trick accomplished by using shorter words, and longer sentences without much punctuation so the reader feels out of breath after a couple lines. Here, the man drops all charade of being a gentleman with a bald faced plea for sex right now. In one of the comments I read about this poem, someone said they hoped the scene ended with the lady giving him a well deserved slap in the face.

While looking for this poem, I found a neat site that has an in-depth analysis of it using several different methods. I'd encourage you to give it a try, since I only touched on a few of the technical aspects here, and almost none of the historical.

The Swing by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Swing

How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!

Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
River and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside--

Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown--
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!
--Robert Louis Stevenson

This is one of my favorite poems ever. I love how the lines have a swinging rhythm so you feel like you're really going up and down as you read it aloud. I like that it's a simple poem about a simple pleasure. I think it's a shame that "one of the pleasantest things that ever a child can do" is seldom possible for adults to do in the same way. Swing sets at parks are designed for children. As an adult, you can sometimes manage, but generally, your hips are too wide to be comfortable between the chains, and your legs are too long to pump them adequately on the downswing without running into the ground, and the chains are too short to let you really get going as high as you'd like. I suppose it makes sense from a safety and liability point of view -- an adult swinging high and trying some silly stunt like jumping off or doing a backflip out of the swing could really hurt themselves, and a child on an adult set would also potentially be in more danger. All the same, I really enjoyed swinging on the one Mike and Dad put up in Riverside -- even if I did worry constantly about the seat breaking.

Labor Day by Nicholas Gordon

Labor Day

Labor is the burden of our being,
A weight that weds us firmly to the earth,
Blessed servitude that serves a common meaning
On which each may erect a sense of worth.
Remember, then, the beauty of a calling
Demanding both integrity and skill:
A dancer in the drifts of early morning,
Yet traveling towards sunset through sheer will.

Labor’s a commodity, like fish,
As children are fast-frozen and filleted,
Beating down the price. Fortunes are made
On selling to us all so cheap a dish.
Remember how the world is being run,
Determined by the market’s iron laws
As slaves and children jingle in its jaws.
Yet there is nothing, nothing to be done.
--Nicholas Gordon

There were a bunch of poems at this guy's site, all in the same Labor Day acrostic format. Some of them were more cynical than others. I've given you a taste here. I like this style of acrostic better than the "L is for ____" style. I think it's more natural. You could read these and think they're regular old poems, until you look down the side and see the words spelled out.

Thinking about my post yesterday, I realized that I may have come across as thinking that there aren't employers who oppress laborers today. This is just plain wrong. There are people who desperately need unions and labor laws that are enforced. Even in the United States, we still have sweat shops that use mostly immigrant labor where the working conditions are horrible and the pay negligible. I'm sure that migrant farm workers have difficult working conditions and low pay. Many of these places get people to work like this because their legal status in the country is questionable. That's one of the most important reasons to me to have immigration reform. I don't really care what the laws end up being so long as they're enforceable, and then enforced.

What I object to are policies like protectionism or cushy union negotiated contracts that keep prices artificially high, and unfair labor practices (like those used by Wal-mart or the sweatshops) that keep prices artificially low. I wish there was a better middle ground where people were paid a living wage with decent insurance benefits (so they can afford to go to the doctor or dentist) for doing worthwhile work. That's what Labor Day should be all about.