My initial inspiration for writing sonnets - besides the pangs of despised love - were the sonnets of Shakespeare, especially his 151:
Love is too young to know what conscience is;
Yet who knows not conscience is born of love?
Then, gentle cheater, urge not my amiss,
Lest guilty of my faults thy sweet self prove:
For, thou betraying me, I do betray
My nobler part to my gross body's treason;
My soul doth tell my body that he may
Triumph in love; flesh stays no father reason;
But, rising at thy name, doth point out thee
As his triumphant prize. Proud of this pride,
He is contented thy poor drudge to be,
To stand in thy affairs, fall by thy side.
No want of conscience hold it that I call
Her 'love' for whose dear love I rise and fall.
Wikipedia has an interesting entry on 151, although I disagree that when Shakespeare said "nobler part" he meant penis. I maintain he does not start talking about his penis until this point in the sonnet: "flesh stays no father reason.."
(Is "father" a misspelling of "further" but never corrected? All versions I found online use "father" but that doesn't seem right.)
My first sonnet is extremely influenced by 151, but being female, my sexual descriptions are of necessity different from Shakespeare's. Instead of rising and falling I talk about the G-spot, although I don't think anybody ever gets the G-spot allusion - I posted the sonnet on a couple of poetry web sites and I always had to explain what it's about.
If they weren't too lazy to google "
Grafenberg" they would have gotten it. I also called it "the place" rather than spot, because I didn't want to be too on the nose (to mix physiological metaphors) but come on, it's a synonym, you people who supposedly like poetry!
The G spot reference is also a double-entendre - the name of my object of desire begins with "G" - but I didn't expect anybody else to get that, of course. It is my little personal code. I also got the words "bay" and "oyster" into the sonnet for the same reason.
My first sonnet, which is Sonnet #1 of the
Sonnets in G cycle:
My hopes drown on the bottom of the bay.
Brooding, I lie alone on a stark shore.
Beaten down by the predictable fray,
Prostrated I will never see you more.
I blame myself for my poor judgment: how
I dismissed any bad weather report;
The ill-starred forecastle of your port bow;
Your inability to find a port.
But still the white-foam-spraying dreams remain,
Sweating a sad tormented yearning girl.
Admitting that I may be quite insane
Again I search the oyster for the pearl.
No longer Grafenberg the place will be -
The letter will forever stand for thee.So basically, what this sonnet means is that I am devastated by the disaster which cut me off from the one I love, I blame myself for ignoring my intuition about his defects which led to the disaster (which I describe using nautical metaphors) and then I question my sanity because in spite of it all, I still have sexual fantasies about him - so much so that the G in G-spot stands for him, not Grafenberg.
Like Shakespeare, my sexual desire is at war with my intellectual and ethical reservations about the person I desire. Shakespeare wrote several sonnets that talk about his conflicted feelings about his "dark lady." I feel quite close to ole Bill because of this.
Sonnet #1 is one of my favorites because it's the first one I wrote - I worked on it for a couple of days - and because I do think it's rather clever and because it is a tribute to Shakespeare's 151. Plus, nice use of the semi-colon.
Another sonnet I quite like in the first cycle is #8:
If I kissed your sensitive fingertips;
Hugged you from behind, my chest to your back;
If I heard words of sweetness from your lips;
If you made love to me - the Earth would crack.
If I were to caress your face and hair
Or you on impulse kissed my hand, again,
The whole universe had better beware -
Moons would explode, and stars would collide then;
Volcanoes erupt; swarms of bees would sting;
Suns would go supernovea - planets roast;
Saruman would recover the One Ring,
Human civilization would be toast.
We can never together skyclad lie.
Small price to save the world, to make me cry.One reason is personal - I have a kind of fetish for my love-object's fingers. A friend once described him as "a man's man" but his fingers always look so sensitive, especially whenever he touches another actor during a scene. I have photographic evidence of this - although to see his fingers in action is even more wonderful, but I have no videos of his performances. It was one of the things (ten of the things?) that made me fall in love with him. So I was glad to work them into a sonnet.
I also like the non-personal aspects of this one - the bombastic use of words in the cause of sarcasm - if I became physically intimate with my love, it wouldn't mean anything to the world. So why couldn't it happen? So the sonnet turns my inability to make it happen into heroic self-denial. I'm
saving the world! by never touching him. Ah, the consolations of art.
The next sonnet cycle,
Bitterest Bliss and Gregorian Chants was written almost against my will. I really thought the first cycle would be the only one - I meant for the last sonnet in that cycle to be a kiss-off - it ends with the words "Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye." That was May 16. I withstood the urge to write sonnets until the August 27.
The second sonnet in the Bitterest Bliss cycle, named "If you were the angel" is a favorite:
If you were the angel that my crazed mind
Once imagined, you have since been transformed.
No longer innocently sexy, kind,
Sweet and charming, you have counter-reformed.
Bad timing - maybe that's what it was, just.
I needed an idol, and you were there,
Et voila - you were my object of lust,
The virile stallion to my rutting mare.
But saints should not fill us with desire,
Make us want to wallow in naked bliss,
Nor should Gregorian chants inspire
Erotic dreams. I am punished for this.
For my carnal crime against an angel,
You turned demon and I was sent to hell.I like the religious metaphors throughout this one, especially when I describe my love as going in my estimation from good to bad. When people are described as going from bad to good, they are said to be "reformed" as in reform school. So I described going from good to bad as being "counter-reformed" which is nice because it makes a connection to the
Counter-reformation which was the Catholic church's response to the Protestant Reformation. My love, in this sonnet, is a fallen angel. Also, I inserted his name right into the middle of the sonnet, but in a metaphorically consistent way and none but he and me are the wiser.
Two sonnets later, I also succeeded pretty well in a consistent metaphor, this time, snakes:
I am not the least ashamed I loved you,
Proclaiming it off off the Great White Way -
A homeostatic heart will so do
Though there be all colubrine Hell to pay.
The night you called me "goddess" I knew then
She would have her revenge on me in kind
And I could not predict the how or when -
But who can tell the chill serpentine mind?
It is the nature of a snake to strike
At a warm-blooded creature, but I swore
You were a mammal, we two were alike,
Could you distress a doting primate more?
Still I am proud that I loved you so well
Though poisoned by the Serpent-Queen of Hell.The line "Proclaiming it off off the Great White Way" refers to the fact that one of the ways that I demonstrated my love for the dark gentleman of my sonnets was to create an off-off Broadway production out of my growing love for him and for his art. The snake refers to a person whom I blame, in part, for driving a wedge between me and him.
The conceit here is that I claim to be a mammal (as all humans of course really are) while my rival is a reptile - that is, cold-blooded. It may not be literally factual, but evidence has convinced me that it is surely the god's honest truth.
I give myself points for finding "colubrine" in the dictionary as a synonym for snake. And a "homeostatic" heart is one that has internal regulation - a feature of being warm-blooded.
I think "poisoned by the Serpent-Queen of Hell" is an exciting, dramatic phrase. I kept repeating it in my mind for hours after I wrote it.
The next sonnet cycle,
Secret Sonnets - so called because I stopped posting the sonnets on my blog posts and instead put them on separate sub-pages so I could track how many people were specifically interested in reading my sonnets (not many) - hang together very well as a group, and it makes it hard to select one as a favorite.
The recurring use of the word "darling" to address the dark gentleman is one of the reasons why they hang together. The second sonnet in the series says: "...When the train / To Edinburgh passed through the station / At Darlington it made me think of you." which is literally what happened when I was on a train trip from London to Edinburgh.
You are most welcome, my dear lost darling -
You read my sonnets! I am so grateful,
That the pain you inflicted means nothing
To me now. I'll admit I was hateful
And I will not plead for my righteous cause -
I'll confess anything to end this pain.
Darling does my suffering give you pause?
May I please call you darling? When the train
To Edinburgh passed through the station
At Darlington it made me think of you.
Oh wretched wild imagination
A monster that I can never subdue!
It lights me up with eternal fire,
Burns me alive with hopeless desire.
The word "Darlington" made me think of my secret darling, which is really absurd - he and I were nothing more than production partners and my presumptuous heart was taking great liberties there. But that's a heart for you - total disregard for propriety or reason. They are total anarchists that way. And I couldn't stop thinking about him that entire week-long trip. And now when I think back on the trip, it's bizarrely full of all these mental impressions of him.
sigh.
Quite a few sonnets in this cycle are very sexy. #3: "fondle your bottom", "your rising shaft" "guide his lips to my breast"; #4: "every square inch of your dear flesh to kiss." In #5 I apologize for the potential violence of my passion, should my darling get close enough for me to pounce on him. There's a reference to the sexual position known as
cowgirl in that one.
In Sonnet #6 I talk about my wished-for lover's penis in terms I like to think would make Shakespeare proud: "Her stern wooden soldier, master and lord / Of the glistening pink domain - the gates / Open and Private Johnson bobs forward."
I doubt I'm the only person who has ever used "Private Johnson" as a euphemism for penis, but I'd never heard it before, so gave myself points for that.
Sonnet 8 talks about having sex sans clothing, save for my man wearing his boots.
Oh darling, how I long for you sometimes!
Why I am possessed of this unholy
Obsession I cannot say - all these rhymes
Pour out in tribute to you, love, solely,
Whether you deserve such honor or no.
And they are but rhyme, they have no reason
That Logic would claim as her own. But though
Cool sense defies you, my heart cries treason.
Please take me to bed in spite of our rift,
Free of inhibitions and free of clothes -
But you can wear your boots, to you my gift.
You once offered to perform in just those!
Thus prepared, we will get right to our task.
Pretty pretty please, love, that's all I ask. The boots were part of his costume in the off-off Broadway production, and were a point of contention between us - he felt that I should gift them to him in spite of what I thought was his hateful behavior towards me. I told him he could buy them - and when he protested he was broke, I said he could borrow the money from his friend (I was alluding to The Snake there) who had spent the entire production finding fault with me in mostly sneaky subtle ways, as is the wont of a snake. I suggested that if she was so smart she must also be rich and could loan him the money.
He sure loved those boots though - as a friend observed "those boots came into the room before he did." He did look damn good in them - with the rest of the costume, I never saw him in
just the boots - although as the sonnet mentions, he did in fact once offer to appear on stage in just boots. This was during a phone conversation and I collapsed into a chair when he said that. I'm still not sure if he was teasing me because he had a clue how much I wanted him, or he just suddenly felt like saying that, but wow - I think I said something like "this isn't that kind of play." Something lame. But I should be grateful I could speak at all, at that moment, with that glorious image swinging in my head.
So in this sonnet the boots are kind of a bribe for sex. Although of course if I thought I could really get my "darling" in bed for a pair of boots, he'd have a warehouse full of them.
Sonnet 7 is unique in all my sonnets to date for heavily referencing a poet besides Shakespeare. The poem is a tribute to Edgar Allen Poe, due to my sonnet guy's own artistic associations with him.
Upon a mid-day dreary at my trade
I ponder if it's you that I adore
Or some unworldly shadow that I made -
A mere shade. Only this and nothing more.
Despair comes blacker than a raven's wing
And only fantasy can make me well
With bliss the true deluded mind can bring
To save me from a serpent-tortured hell.
Cloud Cuckoo Land where we, impassioned, love
On petals blessed by rosy-fingered Dawn;
No croaking fiend in feathers black above;
In Cuckoo Land my love will turn you on.
Pallas frowns - her wrath falls fierce and mighty
On such sorry fools of Aphrodite. The poem begins with "Upon a mid-day dreary" which recalls the opening of The Raven: "Once upon a midnight dreary" Other references to The Raven include "Only this and nothing more." A mention of a raven's wing, and of Pallas (in The Raven: "on the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door.")
I also like my Olympian allusion: Pallas is of course Pallas Athena, the virgin Greek goddess of wisdom, who stands in opposition to the foolishness of love, represented by Aphrodite the Greek goddess of erotic love: "Pallas frowns - her wrath falls fierce and mighty / On such sorry fools of Aphrodite."
What I was saying there was that I would suffer for my romantic illusions, suffering that ceases - nevermore.
I'm rather fond of the thirteenth Secret Sonnet because I describe the man of the sonnets here more than anywhere else.
Darling, let me rest my rancor for now,
And praise my stone cold inamorato -
It feels so good to wallow and allow
The honey to voluptuously flow:
My dear precious man at once so gentle
And yet so stern, so silent and so hard,
So laissez-faire and temperamental
So lucky in devotion, so ill-starred.
Your thick silky hair, your silly sweet face
Your striking temporal deficiency,
Your criss-crossed forehead, your animal grace,
Your offset eye, your vocal quality.
No one would say you are beautiful yet
I prefer your smile to all the Met. I mention both good ("silky hair" and "sweet face" and "animal grace") and not so good (e.g. "temporal deficiency", "offset eye") and conclude that he is for me a great work of art in spite of all. I'm surprised I didn't mention his sensitive fingers in the list of his attributes.
Mostly though I like it because it fills me with the incredible tenderness towards him that I sometimes feel, even now, over a year after he stopped speaking to me. It really boggles my mind sometimes that I have these feelings for someone who hates me and hates me for unfair reasons.
sighThe
NY Sonnets, written after I moved to Manhattan from New Jersey in November, are mostly pretty bitter. I liked my reference to OTHELLO in #2: "...an excellent wretch way down below / Layers of waste. Or perdition catch my soul / Chaos come again, the world's a black hole." The original is when Othello says to Desdemona: "Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul/ But I do love thee! and when I love thee not,/ Chaos is come again."
I guess my favorite of this group is the sexy - not to say obscene - third sonnet:
You drive me crazy darling beloved
And visions of the wicked dirty sins
I would commit with you dance in my head
Like obscene sugarplums til the floor spins
And I'm nauseous with unspeakable lust,
My heart pounding, my head light and starry
Afraid I'll spontaneously combust,
And then, you bastard, won't you be sorry.
Knowing you read my sonnets makes me write
But the cure's worse than the disease - so weak
To make myself a sorry public sight
For one too sadistic to even speak.
Please consider: me - legs spread, supine bard,
You - trousers down, swinging free, thrusting hard.This was written very close to Christmas, which is why it mentions "obscene sugarplums." In spite of those confections, the poem is as bitter as the others: "And then, you bastard, won't you be sorry."
As usual at the end of a sonnet cycle, I thought I was done with sonnets. But then at a meeting of my playwrights group, someone said the dark gentleman's entire name aloud, and I was thrown into a convulsion of emotions at the sound. Which was the beginning of the
Goddam Sonnet cycle.
Please never again say his name aloud
It is more than I can bear, so intense
My response to six mere syllables. Proud
Was I to at last recover some sense
From insanity and time's long delay
Tricks I have used, and methods have employed
I lately tell myself that he is gay.
Then that noise - and certainty is destroyed.
First in the throat comes a short high-pitched growl
Followed by three sounds of sweet variety
Opening with a melodious vowel
O live right here on my tongue, trinity.
Last name is heaven, hell and all between -
Carnal and Frenchie and rhymes with obscene. The second half of this one is kind of a riddle where I all but write his name into the sonnet. I did sneak his middle name in, in a way which I very much like - actually I almost wrenched my arm out of its socket patting myself on the back for that one.
Goddam Sonnet 7 is quite sexy at the end, with its reference to fellatio.
Five o'clock, time for another sonnet.
You seem to like the sexy ones the best,
And I do like to please you, soubriquet.
Dreaming dreams, my hand is on a man's chest,
His heart is beating and his eyes are blue,
And his costume is Regency splendor.
He is you but at the same time not you -
Therefore may I caress him without more
Complaints from Sense and Sensibility,
But wallow in sensual abandon
Pricked in a thorn field of carnality.
Hopes fulfilled, desire's consummation,
Caressing my darling's thighs and between
Your essence ambrosia for a Queen.And what I like to think is my Shakespearean use of the word "pricked" although I guess I should have written it "prick'd" as Bill would have. I also like my allusion to Jane Eyre in the handy use of "thorn field." That novel is very significant in my relationship to the dark gentleman.
#10 of this group should probably be grouped with the latest cycle because of its begging aspect:
Oh please I'm begging you on bended knee,
You whom I find so easy to love, though
You have made the word wicked mockery
And should blush in shame, I beg you to show
I had reason to esteem you so high.
Reassure me I wrung such agony
From my heart for two endless years, to die
By degrees for someone uncowardly.
Divine my shallow en-graved emotion,
Renew the silver stream, the life-giving
Senamensing of my old devotion,
Only through love are we truly living.
You could be intrepid if you but choose,
There's naught but bone dry bitterness to lose.But it will stay where it is for now. I like my use of the Indian word senamensing, which means "sweet water" and which was the original name of the township of Cinnaminson, NJ which is just north of the town where I spent my teenage years, Pennsauken. Pennsauken was also originally an Indian word, said to have meant "tobacco pouch." Sweet water has much better poetical uses, especially in the contrast between the sweet water of love, and the "bone dry bitterness" of hate.
I'm hoping to somehow turn senamensing into a real word, meaning something like "unconscious or repressed feelings of affection and/or desire." I think there should be a word which means that.
Which brings us to the latest sonnet cycle, the Poetry Month cycle. I think I'll hold off evaluation until that cycle is done.
This year marks the two-hundredth anniversary of Poe’s birth and the publication of two collections of gothic tales produced by the Mystery Writers of America. “On a Raven’s Wing: New Tales in Honor of Edgar Allan Poe” (Harper; $14.99) contains stories by twenty mystery writers, including Mary Higgins Clark. “In the Shadow of the Master: Classic Tales by Edgar Allan Poe” (William Morrow; $25.99) pairs Poe’s best-known stories with modern commentaries; Stephen King muses on “The Genius of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.’ ” There’s also a sensitive and haunting brief biography, Peter Ackroyd’s “Poe: A Life Cut Short” (Doubleday; $21.95), that offers a fitting tribute to Poe’s begin-at-the-end philosophy by opening with his horrible and mysterious death, in October of 1849. Poe, drunk and delirious, seems to have been dragged around Baltimore to cast votes, precinct after precinct, in one of that city’s infamously corrupt congressional elections, until he finally collapsed. From Ryan’s tavern, a polling place in the Fourth Ward, Poe was carried, like a corpse, to a hospital. He died four days later. He was forty years old.
My heart quite fills me with astonishment
