POETRY BLOG: “Tennis With a Net” VII
Don February 15th, 2008
VII Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on “the growth of a poet’s mind.” I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.”
The great abysm of ignorance out of which we have to crawl to become civilized human beings is no less astounding than the almost equally great abysm we still occupy after we have done the crawling of which we are able. We confront two inescapable but somewhat paradoxical facts: We are truly capable of learning and knowing real truths, and one of the most important truths we learn (as Socrates realized) is the depth of our ignorance. Because my love affair with the sonnet is one of the central facts of my poetic history, and because if I skipped only one of them it would appear rather strange, it cannot be hidden: There was a time when I did not know that fourteen lines of iambic pentameter do not a sonnet make (especially when one of them is trying awfully hard to be tetrameter!). Nevertheless, the unfortunate title I see in my notebook forces me to admit that I thought this was my first attempt.
SONNET no. I
The clouds are troubled, bubbled, boiling steam,
Scarce a foot above my head, it seems.
And the almost sunlight seems to bestow
Upon the windblown, futile-falling snow
A forlorn sense of loneliness, betrayed
By robust wind, who with his unseen blade
Cuts the clouds asunder to reveal
A fleeting ray of sun that makes me feel
One moment of warmth to contrast with a day
Of all-too-often Indiana chill.
(Don’t think I don’t enjoy the stormy touch
Of wind and cloud and snow upon my soul.
But e’en a healthy man takes just so much
Before he runs the risk of catching cold!)
Several of the earlier poems are certainly more successful, even if we discount the fact that this one fails to be a sonnet—neither Shakespearean nor Petrarchan nor Spenserian. The archaic “e’en” to make the scansion work is cheating in a modern poem that has no reason or excuse for Elizabethan diction, and the change of tone in the last quatrain is anticlimactic. I will do better. I promise.
Donald T. Williams, PhD