HOW SONNETS SAY WHAT MUST BE SAID
“It's now or never,” Elvis Presley is singing in my head, over and over. “Come hold me tight.” Prompted by a suggestion made by the poet Molly Peacock in a workshop on the sonnet she led at the recent West Chester University Poetry Conference, I have listened to the 1960 hit, one of the best-selling records of all time, and the song will not leave me:
Molly Peacock sees links between her sonnets and her life.
Kiss me my darling
Be mine tonight
Tomorrow will be too late
It's now or never
My love won't wait
Based on the Neapolitan melody of "'O Sole mio," the tune’s English lyrics express a familiar lover’s message of carpe diem: Let’s get down to it now, baby, because there may not be a tomorrow. Although Peacock’s responsible for providing me with the earworm, she sees the theme in an entirely different way than the song does. A sonnet’s severely limited form and length force sonneteers into what she calls “now or never moments”—the imperative to say an essential thing before time and space have run out. Whether it’s that one thing you may have failed to tell a lover before you parted or the one truth that might have averted a global disaster, that nugget must surface from the depths of language and be stated before the poem ends.
Now, that may be a quality present in any kind of lyric poem. “How shall we get said what must be said?” the speaker in William Carlos Williams’s “The Desert Music” asks. “Only the poem./Only the counted poem, to an exact measure[.]” Although Williams’s later poetry is often mistaken for free verse, his own “exact measure” (an invention of his own called the “variable foot,” in which each line consists of a unit of human breath) is decidedly not the 14 lines of rhymed iambic pentameter of a typical English sonnet.
In Williams’s view, the poet, like a scientist, uses measured verse as an instrument to seek out truth experimentally. As Peacock points out, however, the sonnet has a unique way of pushing the poet to formulate and utter emotional truths she might not have gotten to had she not been writing a sonnet.
Such candor is a natural outgrowth of the sonnet form. “If you only have fourteen lines, it makes sense to blurt out the truth,” Peacock wrote in a recent, movingly personal essay about writing sonnets and her experience of caring for her dying husband. Further, many sonnets can be seen as either divided into units of eight and six lines (European sonnets) or three stanzas of four lines each plus a final couplet (Shakespearean sonnets). Either form sets up the likelihood of a sharp change in emotion, voice, or idea.
The form of the sonnet—the pressing sense of a fourteen-line limit and the anticipation that a swerve in the action is likely to occur imminently—pushes the poet to speak plainly and cogently. “So let us not talk falsely now,” Bob Dylan writes. “The hour is getting late.” Notes Peacock:
There’s a shift in every sonnet that is called the turn. You never
have to worry about making the turn because it happens on its
own. You realize, after about the tenth line, that you’re going to
have to finish it, and suddenly the drive toward the end intensifies
and turns the thought around.
The poet finds a similar urge to speak candidly in her own life. Each afternoon, she and her husband repaired to “our big square sonnet-shaped bed” to massage each other’s aging bodies and to talk about mundane and ultimate things, she writes. In that defined space and with the awareness that time is fleeting, the poet found herself uttering unwelcome truths.
“‘Sometimes,’ I once said, (I had to work my way up to this, but one day it came out), ‘because of your brain tumor, I feel like we’re living through a tragedy,’” Molly Peacock writes. “‘Well,’ he muttered, ‘just don’t say that too often.’”