How to Read Poetry Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster

Author:Thomas C. Foster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-02-08T05:00:00+00:00

OCCASIONS FOR WHIMSY

MOSTLY, WE’VE BEEN talking about poems that take the form seriously. But the sonnet also invites fun, and even fun at the form’s expense. Here is American poet Billy Collins’s “Sonnet,” which may be the best-known sonnet of our time:

All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,

and after this one just a dozen

to launch a little ship on love’s storm-tossed seas,

then only ten more left like rows of beans.

How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan

and insist the iambic bongos must be played

and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,

one for every station of the cross.

But hang on here while we make the turn

into the final six where all will be resolved,

where longing and heartache will find an end,

where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,

take off those crazy medieval tights,

blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.

This particular model takes a lot of liberties with the form, including jettisoning rhyme, varying line length and meter, and making the form itself the subject of the poem. That seems pretty disrespectful, doesn’t it? At the same time, it is the best explanation of that form you will ever read. Besides, the disrespect is playful in a way that reminds us that the form itself is a type of play. Playful and instructive—what a concept!

What Collins does here is use the form to discuss and demonstrate how it works, while at the same time embedding a typical subject. The first time or two he counts down the lines left—something most young people assigned to write a sonnet have done, usually the night before it’s due—it merely seems like a stunt. Saying “All we need is fourteen lines, well thirteen now,” that line being finished, may be cute but doesn’t augur well for a poem of substance to ensue. But even as he counts down, he introduces the notion that the first eight lines establish a topic, even as he hints at an eventual theme of love. So when at line nine he says that “we make the turn” toward resolution, he explains how a sonnet is traditionally structured while leading us toward that resolution. Having been so irreverent early in the poem toward the idea of sonnets, he brings us back to its founding father (Petrarch was not the inventor but was certainly the first truly great sonneteer) and his constant subject, his beloved Laura, calling him back to bed. Let’s credit Collins with generosity in giving Petrarch the consummation he never achieved in life; Laura and the poet may or may not ever have conversed, much less cohabited, and the resulting sonnets are entirely taken up with longing and romantic anguish rather than fulfillment. Along the way, Collins has great fun in dismissing rhyme as a quasi-religious exercise (“the stations of the cross”) and rejecting the metrical regularity he describes as “iambic bongos,” something of an improvement on Heaney’s “iambic drums” from a couple of decades earlier. As with much of Collins’s work, his impulse toward parody unmasks sometimes-unconsidered possibilities in the form.

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