Traverse City Record-Eagle

Fleda Brown: On Poetry

WHEN TO THE SESSIONS OF SWEET SILENT THOUGHT

I summon up remembrance of things past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:

Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,

For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,

And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,

And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:

Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,

And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er

The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,

Which I new pay as if not paid before.

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,

All losses are restored and sorrows end.

-- William Shakespeare

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December 5, 2010

On Poetry: Pleasure of feeling happy and sad

By Fleda Brown, Local columnist ----

The holiday season always pulls me into the past, to joyful and sad past Christmases, to people I've loved who are gone now — my mother, my grandparents. I see my Nana's house, all sparkled with tinsel and fake snow. I see my father trying to get the bubble lights going at our own house, chewing his tongue with frustration. If one went out, they all did. The longer I think, the more intensely the memories flood over me.

It's an intense time for most of us, made more so by the pressures we impose on it, the buying and spending and baking and so on. That's why I picked this quiet sonnet by Shakespeare for this month's column.

I suggest that you read it through the first time without thinking about meaning at all. Don't try to "figure it out," or make it "mean" anything. Isn't it beautiful, just its sounds? Those "s's" sighing at us, those "o's" of "forgone" and "woe" and bemoaned" and "moan" moaning at us.

There's the rhythm of the lines, ta dum, ta dum. Who cares if we remember iambic pentameter from our high school English class? Not me. It's the ease and pleasure of the regularity I feel here. I know what to expect. And the added pleasure of the rhyme in its typical Shakespearean pattern. (Do you suppose Shakespeare knew he was writing a Shakespearean sonnet?) The rhyme braids the whole thing together.

Now we can go back and read it again. There's old Will, quietly summoning up the past, sighing for the things we've all sought and lost, crying over them yet again, adding the past losses to whatever our present woes might be.

All this sadness and loss, though, begins to look here like a kind of pleasure. Pleasure in the sadness. I see myself at, say, 9 years old, all of us opening presents at Nana's house. My sister and I have gotten Toni dolls, the kind you can give home permanents to. I'm excited, with a rush of anticipation — can't wait to put the rollers in my doll's long blond hair. (She'll never be the same again!) It makes me both sad and happy to remember. There we all were, all those dear faces, gone now. But I have that happy memory. The feelings are tangled.

When I get to the end of the sonnet — the rhymed couplet that ties it together like a bow — I feel a bit annoyed, actually. Sorry to let you know that, Will, you being our brilliant cultural icon and all. But I'm disappointed by the way you perfunctorily finish off the poem.

I agree with your sentiment, to a point. If I have someone with me now, a "dear friend," I feel a lot better. If that person is beloved to me, I can live so much better with the pain of my past losses. But all my losses aren't restored, and my sorrows aren't ended.

But Will, I might go on to tell him, I don't for a minute think you meant that either! You just slipped out of the poem as gracefully as you could, all the while leaving 12 of the 14 lines to remind us of the sorrows and losses, but to give us the pleasure of remembering them.

There's your real poem. I think you just made up an ending, like the end of some of the essays we wrote in high school: "OK, the teacher wants a 'conclusion,' so I'll give her some platitude to finish the thing off."

It's OK, Will. You had this form to follow. Thanks anyway, for the pleasure you've given me just in the language alone. It elevates my mind. It makes my heart sing.

Fleda Brown is professor emerita, University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware. For more of Fleda Brown's On Poetry columns, log on to record-eagle.com/onpoetry.

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