A Brief History of the Sonnet as a Form - Chapter 12 - The First Stirrings of Modernism (Arthur Rimbaud)

Writing poetry is one of the greatest pleasures in the world. So is reading it and learning how to write it, at least for those who are addicted to it. If one is on Facebook these days, for instance, the number of poets writing and the anthologies, poetry magazines, chain poetry attempts and individual or group collections coming out or the poetry pages or groups there are simply mind-boggling. As are the sheer number of poems posted everywhere else.

In this series, I would like to dwell on where it really matters. What people really love about poetry nowadays is imagery. Naturally enough they prefer visual imagery. I teach poetry. Students nowadays are excited by poems being made into videos and images. But those slightly more experienced know that putting an image to a verbal one makes it a one to one correspondence and kills it by killing the imagination’s ability to use the inner eye.

Here is a beautiful sonnet by Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1861)

It is a green hollow where a stream gurgles,
Crazily catching silver rags of itself on the grasses;
Where the sun shines from the proud mountain:
It is a little valley bubbling over with light.
A young soldier, open-mouthed, bare-headed,
With the nape of his neck bathed in cool blue cresses,
Sleeps; he is stretched out on the grass, under the sky,
Pale on his green bed where the light falls like rain.
His feet in the yellow flags, he lies sleeping. Smiling as
A sick child might smile, he is having a nap:
Cradle him warmly, Nature: he is cold.
No odour makes his nostrils quiver;
He sleeps in the sun, his hand on his breast
At peace. There are two red holes in his right side.

Arthur Rimbaud
October 1870

– As translated by Oliver Bernard: Arthur Rimbaud, Collected Poems (1962) (http://www.mag4.net/Rimbaud/poesies/Sleeper.html

This poem that deals with the tragedy of war that sends youth and children out to die is made effective by breaking Romanticism in the way it should be, not in terms of form but in terms of theme, and making it stand on its head in building up first a very calm and beautiful atmosphere or surrounding, so peaceful that one is lulled into a false sense of security, along with the poem's protagonist and not its narrator, and then breaking this spell of beauty like a pot over our heads, in breaking the suspense by introducing first the word "sick." Then comes the realization the poet gives us that the youth is dead and finally that he is the spoil or prey of war as a climax at the very last second. This gives us a severe jolt and shock which the War Poets do not necessarily have in their poems.  But the horror is heightened by the beauty of the surroundings described in classic imagery and it is only later we see that yellow "flags" instead of flowers maybe ironical and not nationalistic.

One needs to observe life carefully, lovingly, intensely, and be in love with life with an eye for its amazing details and wanting to find the language for describing it. Then read such poets to see how they defamiliarize things with words, make it slightly askew. An example is Rimbaud using “crazily catching silver rags” (kinetic imagery) in the second line and “bubbling” in the fourth. And the masterpiece is of course “two red holes.” The second is an example of an auditory image but coupled with “light” it again becomes beautifully askew. And what a line is: "Pale on his green bed where the light falls like rain."   

Yes. Observe carefully using all the five inner and outer senses, read, jot down for use, keeping in mind that unleashing the imagination fully means using the five external and internal senses.

Too simple a formula, you may think, but so effective in the case of Rimbaud.  As for his mastery in the sonnet form, it is in how well he says what he has to say while casting it in the form or mould which is what today's poets are unable to do. The beauty of the rhyme scheme is lost in the translation but not much else is, as the effect is not lost. With Rimbaud and Hopkins in terms of content here and of form in the latter, we enter the beginning of modernism in the world of the sonnet.

(This article appeared here earlier in a slightly different form when I was a columnist for Plum Tree run by Niamh Clune.  https://ontheplumtree.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/wednesday-on-the-plum-tree-in-the-sandbox-with-dr-ampat-koshy/ )