A sonnet crown is a 7-sonnet sequence in which the last line of each sonnet is repeated in the first line of the next. The first and last lines of the sequence are also strict repetends; this gives the sequence its crown-like circularity.
The first one I encountered, back in college, was John Donne’s “La Corona,” a meditation on the life of Christ and a “crown of prayer and praise” extended in offertory. I think I have read that poem a hundred times! It remains my favorite among sonnet crowns, a perfect match of form and subject, and a work of private devotion with universal allure. The circular structure of the poem makes an ample space. It “rolls the universe into a ball,” an ardent idea of Donne’s which seems most relevant to us now in the quantum age. I always wanted to write a sonnet crown but didn’t want to do it just for the sake of doing it. I knew I would need a subject that cried out for circularity and a feeling of enclosure. In 1991, at a time when I was digesting a terrifying course of psychoanalysis that occurred years prior, I found my subject. For me, analysis was like being caught in a maze, a frantic experience of entrapment. There was a quasi-religious quality as well: transference was much like idolatry. I remembered how perfectly Donne’s crown worked with religious subject matter, and I thought the form would work well for the outcry of a lost soul too. This poem is “raw” in subject matter but “cooked” in terms of its craft. I realize it won’t appeal to everyone. Strict formalists will object to the deliberate metrical liberties taken and receive the work as too confessional. Postmodernists will dismiss it for its form alone. Call me crazy!—as crazy as the speaker of these sonnets—but I believe there are readers out there who will appreciate both the poem’s technique and its tone of extremity. “O the mind, the mind has mountains, cliffs of fall frightful…” wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins. And the mind has its eternally looping mazes. |
A Strange Mazy Life. . . mornings a puzzlement of tunnels and hollows,nights a blur of stores underground. In zigzag corridors I lose myself. Foot follows foot in numb obedience. A person gets around. A mazy life for the mind also: it moves apace, a grey sinewy shape nosing its own reaches, lugging its wet bulk down this complicated space, this eternity of halls, walls. The analyst teaches: Free association! Liberate the repressed! Loosen your tongue, let the process do the rest but I’m not free, babbling on your narrow couch, leeching the hour, greedy infant at your breast, or blind mite of a marsupial clutching a dark pouch, intent on getting mine like any pest. Intent on getting mine like any pest I, pest-like, nestle to your singularity and we are plural now, a woman possessed of a woman, merged in a rite of parity. Consecration, sanctity! No less a thing than love is this. I spill, I flute— my words are fluent in this strange largesse. Yet the bond is bluff, the love moot. That is a thought I shovel under. I will not quit this fascinating passion play— the plot of it has taken hold of me. I will not doubt, or compromise what I have gotten here, though I may merit hell itself for what I've sold of me. Though I may merit hell itself for what I've sold of me, my loss is my offertory. All that I am or own is on your plate. I’m told the damned enjoy inverted glory. Love, it's glory day when you hold forth! Your Delphic riddles awe me, each a parable seeding my barrenness. Once I was cold ground, saith the Lady; now I am arable. Somewhere, a woman artist has created a female Christ upon the cross, voluptuous in her agony. There are those who would erase her, tear her down, but I have waited all my life for such an image! Impetuous, I kneel before that icon, superimpose your face. I kneel before that icon, superimpose your face though your face is hardly known to me. You veil yourself behind Victorian lace, relic of the founding grandfather's formality. And so I lie here, studying your chaste decor, your lithographs, your reading. The furnishings suggest patrician taste, the books and art a more bohemian breeding. All day at work I ponder the enigma: you! All night I map out different histories. What a gripping journey you have booked me on! To all my friends I witness your kerygma. I'm catechetical, mouth to holy mysteries. What a rare elixir you have hooked me on! What a rare elixir you have hooked me on! I'm a junkie, you're my lovely fix. Each day I skitter the mazes, wild to be on your couch, feral! See: needle pricks track my heart. See: infections bloom in me, and fever. I'm gorgeous with the burn— and one day will be blemished with the doom. I'll thrash, and learn what the doomed learn. But now I'm well cocooned, mommy's in my bed. No doom can light, no man can interfere. I'm snug with you in cozy dereliction. You are warming me so! You lullaby the dread right out of me! How well you know me, dear, to enshrine my past in ritual repetition. To enshrine my past in ritual repetition I am once again a child, your child, with a child's ideas, a child's affliction— easily seduced, milady, easily beguiled. I color books for you, finger paint my dreams, come skipping to the analytic hour. This innocence is false, you teach; it’s taint I was born to. Every giggle masks a glower. The masquerade is getting out of hand. I'm tiny now, preverbal, infant, crier, yowling for your milky consolation, yearning for your lap though your lap is banned— you've abandoned me! You're just a pacifier, an empty pap, a witch, an aberration. An empty pap, a witch, an aberration! Impostor-doctor, money-grubbing tart! To charge for love is an abomination. Each month you send a bill to break my heart. We've reached an impasse. My failure calls your competence to question: I am too "regressed." You shunt me now to other halls and walls— the office of a Doctor K. It's best. I cave and I comply. My white eyes lead me to that other part of town. The crowds point the way and the foot follows. Corridors still lead me to the love that lies, down subways, mallways, brown mornings a puzzlement of tunnels and hollows . . . |