The metaphysics of the fourteen line sonnet are not
particularly complex ones. Beneath the structural surface of meter, and prosody
in general, the fourteen line sonnet both embodies, and is, a wave on the
ocean, and a manifestation of a wave-on-the-ocean dynamic. An impulsive complex
in the poet’s brain, mostly made of affective rather than intellectual
material, coalesces to hurl itself into brief gestalt shape, as it crashes down
in the produced little song. A sonnet sequence, like Astrophil and Stella,
takes the wave-on-the-ocean principle and makes of it a catalog of affective
consciousness, an imaginative diary of moods. Shakespeare, Donne, Keats,
Milton, Wordsworth, even, later, Edna St. Vincent Millay— all are voices
employing the sonnet to index a unique form of sensation— first, the mood (lunar,
tidal), then, the will-to-text embedded in the mood, encompassing the reach
back to other indexes, other catalogues (especially Keats to Wordsworth and
Shakespeare), gaining heft from evidenced histories, before giving way to
actual liquidity, in the collision of text produced into fourteen line
container, compression and brevity sealing the simplicity of a literary history
which has a unique charm and charisma. This, because when executed skillfully,
the wave-on-the-ocean effect creates a correlative sensation in receptive
readers, who feel themselves buoyed up, then down again (to more ocean, or the
shore), all with a sense of gracefulness and gratefulness that the poet has
again moved a bit of water, which can be imagined as a synecdoche for the
entire ocean of texts, or books. If the fourteen line sonnet is a refutation of
the discursive, it also dually offers itself to humanize literature, and,
implicitly, discourse, with a purification of one kind of form or essence
(affect), against the excesses of the unlimited, of boundlessness, built into
discourse, which purify discursive possibility in turn.
The invention of a genuine literary form is rare. What
appears in the book Something Solid, and which I call a double sonnet— a
twenty-eight line poem, one fourteen line sonnet on top of another— must, of
necessity, manifest a slightly more complex metaphysic. A wave-on-the-ocean, if
it were merely to become two waves on the ocean (two moods), would be
redundant. Rather, what a double sonnet is attempting to accomplish is a larger
ocean wave (still compressed, still brief), capable of moving in the direction
of, even if not able fully manifest, discourse, and the discursive or
intellectual. The wave is built to rise higher, with greater authority, into
the air, so that affect can reach around for other tools of the trade or craft—
imaginative creativity (metaphor), perspective shifts, bits of dialogue— and
employ them in a redistribution of literary resources, so that the sonnet may
take new ground. Now, the sonnet’s sense of completion, and the correlative
sensation of completion in readers, hinges to something new— a sense, in the
middle of the double sonnet, of sitting on the crest of the wave for a few
moments, opening up whatever view fits the poem’s intentions. This means that,
by the time the wave exhausts itself, the experience does not have to suggest,
when interrogated, a paucity of interesting ideas. Rather, interrogation of the
double sonnet is designed to reveal a slow motion version of the original
model, so that the reader can assimilate, encompass, and re-imagine data as the
poem itself is experienced, in real time.
To synthesize: are there reasons to prefer the original
model? Yes— those who enjoy the game of extreme brevity, of seeing how much
data can be compressed into a small space, how much velocity packed into a
quick ride, may cling to possibilities inhering in fourteen lines. This
extends, also, into the poetry crowd who fetishize tactility, materiality in
general, the anti-cognitive. It is not just the original sonnet that holds up
the proverbial cross to discourse; some forms of poetry, as an entire
enterprise, do an analogous task. Keats, here, is an exemplar. What poetry
represents a commercial pursuit follows this predilection through. For those
otherwise attuned, who relish the idea and ideal that poetry become synonymous
with developed intelligence, the double sonnet should at least be an entity
commensurate with the original model. By taking games cramped by tininess, like
the volta, as initiated in Renaissance Italy (as, at the conclusion of
the octave or the beginning of the sestet, a turn or twist is added to the poem
thematically, as a point of emphasis), or Shakespearean or Petrarchan rhyme
schemes, and replacing them with freedom to establish novel games, or just to
develop whatever topoi are at hand, the double sonnet opens up a region of
pure, unmolested literary promise: the strengthened wave, or the slow, sure
wave (slow, sure mood), that can stand being freighted with the armatures and
artilleries of the new century. See Frequencies.
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