This is a masterful narrative sonnet, taut and economical, with a classic volta between octave and sestet. The opening is in medias res, without a wasted word. In the octave one hunter observes another—his belt and burlap sack evidence of his skill at rabbit or perhaps squirrel hunting, his threadbare clothes of his poverty—across the “old walls” of race, class and a painful history. I admire the way “old walls,” as in “Mending Wall,” have both literal and figurative force. While the octave is relatively adjective-heavy, it also has precise and vivid verbs (stiffening, lumped, limped). I wonder if “thin coat” could be replaced with a disyllabic noun to make that line a little less dense with modifiers and monosyllables. I also would suggest hyphenating “beggar lice,” as I initially thought that beggar was an adjective and wondered how the speaker could observe lice on someone’s clothes. Once I looked up “beggar lice” and learned that they are prickly burrs, it all made sense. The poet depicts this man’s appearance and character with remarkable clarity in the space of eight lines.
The variation in enjambed and end-stopped lines throughout seems just right. And the variation in the placement of caesurae is a marvel. Look at the turn to the sestet: “He froze, then; dead slow, he laid supper down.” The three caesurae slow down the line to match the hunter’s movement. The beat on “dead” hints at what the result will be for whatever creature he has heard moving in the brush. “Slow,” though an offbeat, takes heavy speech stress, the tension between meter and rhythm further slowing things down. The colloquial “laid” for “lay” lets us hear the speaker’s voice as well as seeing what he sees. He squats and scans the brush to no avail. And then the .22 rifle rings out. I take it that “one shot” means the rifle can only be fired once before it has to be reloaded, so he has one chance to bag this animal. “Ripped up a leap of guts and furry brown” made my own guts contract. Fetching his kill, the more skilled of the two hunters tips his hat courteously to the speaker—who, carrying a .12 gauge shotgun, appears to have the wrong weapon for small game hunting (thank you Google!)—before retreating to the woods to make supper. The quiet internal rhymes “tipped” and “slipped” contrast effectively with the violent “ripped” of the previous line.
One unusual thing about the rhyme scheme of this poem is that the rhymes on “dew” cross the volta. I’ve always thought it preferable for octave and sestet to have a distinct set of rhymes, to underscore the break between them. But here, in a poem where two characters acknowledge each other across “old walls,” I think it works.
A poem this good deserves a better title. I would have liked either the title or a subtitle to identify when and where the poem takes place.
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