Life Lessons From A Sonnet

I love poetry. I’ve even written some non-sucky poetry once or twice. (I am firmly of the belief that there are very, very few people who can consistently write non-suck poetry. I am not one of them, and I have much admiration for those who are.)

Poetry is something I don’t like from an academic approach though. I could not care less about meter and rhythm and verse. Even in school, all of that was so much blah, blah, blah to me. Yes, I studied it, and yes, I did just fine on the goofy tests.

But poetry isn’t about meter, rhythm, and verse any more than an automobile is about oil filters, a horn, and a tie rod.

Yes, those are component parts of a car.

Yes, meter, rhythm, and verse are component parts of a poem.

They are not, however, the poem itself.

A poem, a non-sucky poem, is what comes from all of those component parts arranged in such a ways so as to yield something greater than the sum of those parts.

The car equivalent of that is (for me anyway) this.

Appreciating Poetry

I know, I know . . . most of us were scarred for life against poetry by some teacher in middle school who could never get past the mechanics of poetry to find the life’s blood of it all. Others of us just don’t give a rat’s ass about the stuff and would be quite content if never another poem were produced in this world. Oddly, many of these latter folks love the poetry of various musical forms. So they just love poetry by another name.

One of my favorite poetry forms is the sonnet. Now I’m the first to admit that I couldn’t write a sonnet if you made me. I just don’t get the abab, cdcd, dede, ff thing. I mean, I get it, but I can’t execute it. At least not in such a way that I would ever in my life show it to another human being. Heck, I wouldn’t even be brave enough to show it to our cats!

However . . . there is something really amazing about the structure of the sonnet. And some really incredibly amazing stuff has been communicated in sonnets.

But it’s the structure I keep coming back to.

It’s like this: A sonnet has one of the more rigid forms of poetry structure guiding it. More than the abab thing, there is a meter that must be at the center of it all as well. So you have this tight rhyming scheme, plus a complex rhythm too . . .

It’s not that if you depart from this that you’re not writing poetry; you are . . . you’re just not writing a sonnet.

If you want to write a sonnet, you have to follow these crazy-specific rules. And if you can manage it, you can create something like this:

The earth will never be the same again.

Rock, water, tree, iron, share this grief

As distant stars participate in pain.

A candle snuffed, a falling star or leaf,

A dolphin death, O this particular loss

Is Heaven-mourned; for if no angel cried,

If this small one was tossed away as dross,

The very galaxies then would have lied.

How shall we sing our love’s song now

In this strange land where all are born to die?

Each tree and leaf and star show how

The universe is part of this one cry,

That every life is noted and is cherished,

And nothing loved is ever lost or perished.

That was written by one of my favorite writers – Madeleine L’Engle in her book A Ring of Endless Light. She is one of the most honest writers to have lived in recent times.

Regardless of whether you like that particular poem or not, it is an example of the execution of the sonnet structure.

What Sonnets Have to do with Life

Here’s where this little analogy comes together. There is a structure to our lives. Rules that govern our existence. I don’t necessarily mean the laws that we’ve created to keep society from spiraling into anarchy; I mean things like the fact that we need oxygen to live. Things like the fact that even the people we love most will someday die. The fact that we will someday die and how we have lived is all we can truly leave behind.

So we have a structure to life. But within that structure, we can do anything we choose.

Let me say that again: Within the structure of our lives, we can do anything we choose

How absolutely freaking liberating is that?

The Harder Part

Unfortunately, despite this radical freedom to do anything we choose, too many of us spend most/all of our lives focusing on the structure confining us, rather than looking at it as permission to be free. I know I certainly have. Worse still, many of us spend endless days worrying that the sonnet we will write with our lives (sorry for the cheeziness; please just go with me on this) will suck.

We spend so much time worrying about the end product that we forget to actually write the blasted thing as we go along.

Who cares if what you write is not to someone else’s liking? Seriously. Who Cares?!

If you don’t happen to like Miss Madeleine’s poem I copied above, I’m sure we could find one by someone else that you would.

And that’s the key.

None of us will ever create a sonnet with our lives that will resonate with everyone who reads it. None of us. That’s just the way the universe works. And you know what?

That’s okay.

It really is.

You don’t like the poem I’m constructing with my life? Cool. Go find someone who resonates with you more fully. I need to be okay with that. Even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.

The Point

The point is to not get so caught up in trying to get it “right” that you end up paralyzed like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming car. All you end up with if you live like that is bruised venison steaks. I’m a vegetarian. I don’t want to eat venison steaks.

Write a messy sonnet. Just write it.

Live.

Now.

PS: If you’ve not figured it out, this is part of the messy I referred to last week. You can’t say I didn’t warn you.