Entr'acte: sonnets

 If those previous posts were the first Act, and if more are to follow, I need a short diversion.

Something short and snappy. My natural verbosity will not deliver, so I'll still go for the diversion.

I'm not going to explain again the sonnet form. Nor attempt a history of it. I'll just pluck a few petals on the way.

First up, although it had been around in early Italian since the thirteenth century, it didn't arrive in England until the sixteenth.

Usually Sir Thomas Wyatt (as left, by Holbein) and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey get that credit. It says much about mid-sixteenth-century courtly life that both those worthies had flirtations with the headsman's axe. Wyatt was in deep doo-doo through an association with Anne Boleyn which put him in the Tower to witness her end. He was saved by his friendship with Thomas Cromwell (they shared, serially, a mistress, Elizabeth Darrell).

Henry Howard, the earl of Surrey, was not so spared. He was a trifle too closely related to the head that wore the crown for comfort; and he had too short a temper for a courtier of Henry Tudor. He became the king's last victim.

I've tried to engage with their sonnets; but never managed to be properly uplifted or enthused.

I'm sure I should rave about Bill Shagspur's efforts. Some we know too well; others have the odour of a sonnet factory (one cannot maintain prime quality over 154 of them). And I've had to teach them too often. Perhaps his best are those almost hidden in Romeo and Juliet (far too good a play to be wasted on the young): the Prologue and the heavily-truncated two tiercets of the Epilogue, but above all the hands motif when the lovers first engage.

My salivation improved with Milton:

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter’d saints, whose bones 

Lie scatter’d on the Alpine mountains cold ...

Spit it out, man!

Slain by the bloody Piemontese that roll’d

Mother with infant down the rocks. 

There! Bet you felt better for that! There's nothing like a piece of invective for clearing the pipes. Some day I must set to discover what incident (apart from a general loathing of Roman Catholicism) prompted Milton's outburst.

Here's another that stuck: Keats gob-smacked On First Looking into Chapman's Homer. The doughty explorers climb a hill, and find themselves facing a vast new Ocean:

... like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes 

He star'd at the Pacific — and all his men 

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise — 

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Pity it wasn't Cortez: but then 'Vasco Núñez de Balboa' is never going to fit iambic pentameter.

Allow me to cut to the chase.

There are a couple of modern sonnets that work for me. Both are very Irish, but speak to a wider audience. Both of whose authors I remember seeing in Dublin. Heaney, still unpublished but one we knew to watch, was athwart the cobbles of TCD's Front Square, in deep conversation with Michael Longley, and (I believe) with Derek Mahon. One at least was smoking a cigarette.

First of them, Famous Seamus:

Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea:

Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux   

Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice,   

Collapse into a sibilant penumbra.

Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra,

Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise   

Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize   

And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.   

L’Etoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle Hélène   

Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay   

That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous   

And actual, I said out loud, ‘A haven,’   

The word deepening, clearing, like the sky  

Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.

Heaney had withdrawn from the Troubles to Glanmore in the County Wicklow, a few kilometres inland from Wicklow town. I imagine him listening to the  post-midnight Shipping Forecast from the BBC. His sonnet twists back to the very beginnings of early English poetry, and their kennings, those metaphors, of Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon verse. Just as the storm drives the French fishing-boats to shelter in the lee of Wicklow, so his home in the Republic is A Haven.

OK: well it works for me.

If that one is good, this is even better: Paddy Kavanagh — who I was taken to observe in McDaid's in Harry Street. The evening was yet young, because Kavanagh was merely hunched and solitary.

Kavanagh exploited the sonnet form, playing fast-and-loose with formal rules — and, as we are about to see, whole rhymes. Many propose Canal Bank Walk as his great achievement. Fair enough, say I, provided you are not being blinded by Hilda Moriarty. 

This one, though, is both simply and grandly, Epic:

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting "Damn your soul!"
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel -
"Here is the march along these iron stones."
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

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