Thread: notable sonnets
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Unread 01-30-2001, 12:41 PM
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Kate Benedict Kate Benedict is offline
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Wyatt couldn't catch the dear or anything the dear represents -- but he catches something, doesn't he? His sonnet grabs you by the throat across a span of centuries.

And there is some wisdom here, for poets new and seasoned, isn't there? What's our job? The essayist reasons things out, builds a case, takes a stand. The poet knows the real stuff of life is uncapturable. We stand before it like weary hunters, pursuing an ultimately untouchable mystery. We write drinking songs, too.

Regarding the Frost sonnet, Richard, I also "buy" the anthropomorphism in this poem -- I who am usually such a stickler on these things. Perhaps the plain-style diction is one reason why the imagery works, the simple one-syllable words. And, y'know, the waves may be doing some seemingly odd things -- looking, thinking -- but they are doing them to another piece of the natural world, the shore, not the speaker. And Frost doesn't lay the anthropomorphism on with a trowel. And there is that "child's eye view" element you mention, which also informs the end of the poem with statements that sound as if made by a disciplinary grownup. "Put out the light," sounds like a parent enforcing bedtime; "Someone had better be prepared..." sounds like a strict papa or schoolmaster. It's an altogether extraordary sonnet, isn't it? Top Ten material.

Grrrls! (And guys after a brandy or two...) Come hither and listen to our lovelorn sister, Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,--so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, "There is no memory of him here!"
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.