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When is a Sonnet Not a Sonnet?
longevity by C. S. Snow
(C.S. Snow)
He also runs the Yahoo! poetry group Loonatic Fringe
Poetry. His book, Observations, was published in 1997. He
also recently had several poems published in the Kedco anthology;
"Millenium Dawn." He is currently working on, and seeking a publisher for a
second book of poetry. For more information on C.S. Snow, you may also wish to visit his
page at authorsden.
i've woven the sky before you in patterns and billows of pearl-white forever your imagination and blue
i've hung the steep heavens in twinkle and dreams
oceans blue-green and swimming with myth
so, be blind to these things if you willfully must,
© by C.S. Snow, 2002 What? This is no sonnet! Indeed; this is not strictly a sonnet, but a quatrain. Quatrains as lyrical poetry historically preceded sonnets. Since the sonnet form was a natural evolution from the quatrain, I thought it befitting for once to review a quatrain. Why so? Quatrains exhibit several poetic and stylistic elements and conventions in common with sonnets. For instance, both the quatrain and the sonnet:
Not All Quatrains Are Alike
Yet C.S. Snow’s quatrain exhibits several poetic practices,
which are clearly, sometimes even sharply, at variance with the models I
have just outlined. For this reason alone I have chosen to review this
poem, which simultaneously strikes a marked departure from the
traditional framework of quatrain composition, and yet manages to preserve,
intact, the very framework of the genre from which it, at least
superficially, deviates. It would be well nigh impossible philosophically to grasp with empathy this transcendent quatrain C.S. Snow has written in such a remarkably imaged framework, unless you were to take the trouble to read a number of his other poems. So I invite you to read some, if not all, of C.S. Snow’s poems in Volume 1, no. 2 of Poetry in Emotion – la poésie à s’émouvoir (Canada) [2], which features many of the illuminating (or should I say, illuminated?) works of this American author, who clearly owes a great deal of his inspiration, if not consciously, at least by heritage, to the great Transcendentalist poets of the Nineteenth Century, Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882). This is no mere accident. As I have pointed out on more than one occasion in earlier Vallance Reviews, a great many North American poets, both American and Canadian, have historically shared a similar Vision of the natural world, which is informed by a peculiarly heightened awareness of its ruggedness, starkness and even seemingly cold indifference to the presence of man, who is something of a foreign body, much in the same way organ transplants are to the human body. I am referring, of course, to the fated invasion of the Americas by Europeans, first the Portuguese, then the Spanish, Dutch, French and English successively. Theirs was never was, nor is, the world of the native aboriginals, who have always been and are, to the contrary, not outside this natural world; but who live and breathe in it, with it, and are it. If this is not clear enough from even a cursory perusal of the transcendentalist poets, and from reading such literary masterpieces as Thoreau’s Walden, permit me to illustrate the point by citing a few examples, firstly a few extracts from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century American and Canadian transcendentalists themselves, and secondly with reference to C.S. Snow’s poem here reviewed, and to observations drawn from a few of his other poems. For instance, we hear Henry David Thoreau intone, from:
But the spirits of the braves [Italics mine in this citation, and in all subsequent quotations.] More telling even than the covert “message” lurking in the simple, rough hewn language of this remarkably lucent poem is the very title of another of Thoreau’s poems, “With Frontier Strength...” [4] That title says it all. Here the keyword is none other than the Great “Frontier” — at once vast, harsh, foreboding, the realm and natural abode of the “enemy” (the unfortunate aboriginals, whom the advance of civilization had so severely decimated). I could go on, but the picture is clear. For the European invaders, the “Frontier” was the sine qua non, the daunting, the Foe supreme, the “enemy” to be conquered and subdued, indeed, crushed. Sadly, it had always been this very process of breaking through every frontier the American people had to face that had inexorably wrought the destruction of the pristine natural world of the aboriginals, which the noblest of the transcendentalist poets rightly viewed as an “other-world”. Other-worldly, in the Christian sense, scarcely; but a totally unknown, incomprehensible natural world, viewed with suspicion bordering on disguised hostility, yes. That is what the transcendentalists so clearly perceived, when they peered beyond the thick veil or mist which cut right across the enormous divide between “their” world (the abode of Occidental civilization both Thoreau and Emerson reluctantly accepted) and the eerily threatening “other-world” of the aboriginal nations. Ralph Waldo Emerson most sympathetically echoes Thoreau’s sentiments and philosophical cum spiritual misgivings. A few brief citations illustrate this “brotherhood of the spirit”, which these lifelong Friends so intimately shared. From Emerson’s, “Woodnotes. 2” (page 45) [5], we have:
And, yet again (pg. 48) 'T will be time enough to die; Recalling the Vallance Review for February, 2002, “Archibald Lampman. Winter Uplands [Canadian]” [6], we find ourselves face to face with an uncannily similar vision of the foreboding natural world which he was surely bound to experience in the even more rugged climate of Canada! The one marked difference between the Canadian North and her more southerly American neighbour’s natural world is summarized in one word: “wilderness”. For the latter, it was the frontier that had to be vanquished; for the former, it was the immeasurably harsh wilderness that could not ever be overcome. Even to this day, Canada is the most forested country on Earth, with vast tracts of its land surface uninhabited! To speak of a frontier in such a natural context verges on the absurd. The Twentieth Century was replete with authors and poets in the Americas, North and South, who were deeply fascinated by the Aboriginals’ natural world. The list is in fact exhaustive, and this in itself speaks volumes about the vital importance and the historical vitality of the Aboriginals’ pre-Conquest Civilization(s), even in spite of their having been pushed almost to the brink of extinction.
However, in the vast sea of all those pre-eminently sympathetic writers, two names leap spontaneously to my mind, Carlos Casteneda (1931-1998) and Robert Frost (1874-1963). Let us turn first to Casteneda. An aficionado of “psychedelic” and the Transcendent magic mushroom “drug” culture well before the advent of the “Age of Aquarius” ca. 1969-1972, Casteneda wrote volumes about his “other-wordly” mind-expanding experiences, and these works have played a significant and pervasive role in the American counter-culture. Prior to citing just a few of Casteneda’s voluminous works, I stress that most of these focus on the dream activities and Dream Quests of Aboriginal Nations, such as the Toltec and the Yaqui. This is of the utmost importance, because Casteneda’s life has been entirely dedicated, body, mind and soul, to the pursuance of understanding the “other-world” cultures. Here are just a few of his seminal works: 1. Magical Passes : Practical Wisdom of the Shamans of Ancient
Mexico Now, of course, you may well be wondering: why would I quote an author who is not a poet? Technically speaking, Casteneda is a prose writer, and a prolific one at that. But that is splitting hairs. Casteneda’s highly symbolic writings are riddled with imagery and flights of a poetic imagination rarely encountered in the annals of modern literature. Not only is the imagery of Casteneda’s masterpieces supremely poetic, so also is the inner rhythmic structure of his prose. At some point, highly melodic prose transects free verse; the demarcation between them is amorphous, fluid and ill-defined, at best. [8]
One non-American writer, who spontaneously comes to mind, is Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His eerily haunting, opium-driven "Unfinished Symphony", Kubla Khan and the equally mind-boggling, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, convey much of the same “message” and much of the same spirit as do the works of Carlos Casteneda.
A savage place! as holy and enchanted And, lest we forget: Coleridge was a poet of the Imagination in the most exalted sense of that uncanny realm of the human mind. There can be little doubt, at least in this reviewer’s mind, that there existed historically, and there still obtains, a subtle illuminated thread linking the mind-altering imagery of certain Nineteenth Century poets, such as Coleridge in England and, in France, Charles Baudelaire, and the “psychedelic” writers and poets of the Twentieth Century. However, and in spite of this, there is one prime difference between the European “psychedelic” poets of the Nineteenth Century, and their North American counterparts of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: the former were not Transcendentalists, the latter were. Transcendentalism was a new layer on the onion of Nineteenth Century Romantic idealism. It was the product of the culture of the Americas, not of Europe. What is truly remarkable about Robert Frost’s poetry in general, and of his sonnets in particular, is their homespun simplicity, their naturalistic rhythms and their equally naturalistic themes. Frost revels in the landscapes and all that bespeaks Nature in his native America. He loves "plain talk". While his poetry is always structurally sophisticated and profound, his is frequently the deceptively and disarmingly ingenuous language of the American country folk, not of the urban landscape. Let us listen in wonder to a few verses of his subtle sonnet, “The Oven Bird”.
But that he knows in singing not to sing. The question that he frames in all but words Is what to make of a diminished thing. Disarming simplicity of expression? — yes; profundity of thought and symbolism — ditto. Certain words and phrases recur with astounding frequency in his poetry, as indeed in his sonnets, such as (just to cite a few): tree(s), forest(s), rain, showers, dawn, day, night, bird(s), and so forth. This naturalistic pattern is familiar to anyone who is familiar with American or Canadian poetry. You will have doubtless found similar language and phraseology in the poetry of such American poets as Thoreau, Emerson, Frost's contemporary, Robert Hillyer (1895-1961) and, of course, the lyrically lovely Edna Saint-Vincent Millay (1892-1950); and of the Canadian landscape or wilderness poets, such as: Charles Heavysege (1816-1876), George Frederick Cameron (1854-1885), William Wilfred Campbell (1858?-1918) and, of course, the greatest of them all, Archibald Lampman (1861-1899) [2, bis].
This brings us full circle to C.S. Snow’s quatrain longevity:
What really astounds us when we are first confronted with this offbeat quatrain is its remarkable originality! This manifests in many respects: 1. The quatrain is in extremis unlike traditional quatrains in structure as well as expression.2. The poet resorts to an off-beat, if sound, grammatical structure, and omits all capitalization, even of the first person pronoun, “i”. That too is deliberate. Generally speaking, out of "respect" to the Infinite above all others, that “I”, the Alpha and Omega, or Yahweh, Allah, God, Buddha, or what have you, is by default, always capitalized. By using lower case “I”, the poet immediately and forcibly draws our undivided attention to the very core of his quatrain’s theme: The One and Only Universal Presence (pardon the upper case!) 3. This quatrain appears, at least superficially, to be less lyrical and far more abstract than traditional quatrains. The imagery is stripped to the bone, simple, direct and lucid. There is no wastage of words. There is little ornamentation. Does that sound like a traditional quatrain? Not really; but it does sound remarkably like Robert Frost, albeit on an abstract level, rather than the concrete, which the latter generally prefers as his symbolic medium for the message. 4. Its philosophical bent makes it appear impersonal, again breaking with quatrain tradition. 5. Last, but far from least, this is manifestly a transcendental quatrain. So here, once again, it departs from the traditional historical mould. But it does not depart from the traditions so firmly established in the poetry of the Americas since the early Nineteenth Century. In fact, if anything, it reinforces and enhances these same traditions into the landscape of the New Millenium. The first verse makes that abundantly clear:
Now, I suppose that one could claim that the speaker or first-person in this sonnet is God; but that would be tempting fate. As the opus of C.S. Snow’s poetry exemplifies, such a conclusion would be more than likely erroneous, if not actually rash, by its being too specific and too narrowly “defined”. C.S. Snow seeks not to define anything, or should I say, any thing or any “one” or any One. Is this God or “a god” (Zeus, Athena, Apollo?); is this, Shiva or Buddha? Is this Brahma, or Manitou or the the Spirit of the Universe? Call it what you will, “He” (or “She”) simply seeks. And He seeks too who seeks through the voice of the poet. He (or he, the poet) is on a Vision Quest. Does this sound familiar? To anyone, who is versed in the counter-cultural aura of the poetry of the Americas, it must perforce. It is not my intention to dissect this clarion quatrain in this review, for to do so would be akin to literary rape. For it, like so many others like it, roundly resists such nit-picky analysis. It is as it should be; it is as it is. Hearkening back to the American Transcendentalists of the Nineteenth Century [9], we hear Ralph Waldo Emerson declaim (or just who is it who here speaks?), in his own mystifying quatrain:
IF the red slayer think he slays, Odd, isn’t it? — that Emerson should have resorted to the very opposite technique as C.S. Snow, by capitalizing and capitalizing on the first word of his own quatrain, “IF”. Indeed. … which reminds me… we all thought this was supposed to be a sonnet review column. Well, of course, it usually is. And speaking of sonnets, why not also read C.S. Snow’s starkly vivid Desolate Angel in this issue of Poetry Life and Times, while you’re at it? You won’t be disappointed. That sonnet serves to re-enforce and, if anything, to magnify, extol and laud the very World(s) to which he has already given voice in the quatrain here reviewed.
As I fell out of the sky. Hath who forsaken me? This I wonder; Needless to say, C.S. Snow appears to have re-incarnated some of the pattern of Emerson’s stream-of-consciousness in the Far Light it reflects, by resorting to a poetic technique uncannily alike that of his illustrious forbear. And in this light we give pause and say:
So be it. Amen. Ainsi soit-il. Gitche Manitou. The Unknown, the Unknowable, the Transcendent.
[1] Vallance Review, August, 2002. The Sonnet as the Landscape of Mystery: Walter de la Mare’s "Silver" [2] C.S. Snow is featured in: Poetry in Emotion – la poésie à s’émouvoir. Vol. 1, no. 2. Winter/ l’hiver, 2002 [3] David Henry Thoreau. “Where Gleaming Fields of Haze...” [4] Ibid. “ With Frontier Strength...” [5] Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Woodnotes. 2” [6] Vallance Review. February, 2002. Winter Uplands [7] For a complete list of Casteneda’s illuminating works, see Carlos Casteneda Books from Amazon.com [8] What is the substantive difference (if any indeed) between “prose poetry” and “poetic prose?”. For instance, are Arthur Rimbaud’s series of “poems”, Les Illuminations, which are ostensibly written in prose form, poetry at all, or are they prose? What earthly difference can it make? See/ voir Rimbaud, Arthur. Les Illuminations On the other hand, what of Marcel Proust’s anthological novel, À la Recherche du Temps perdu. Is this prose-poetry or poetic prose? For all intents and purposes, it is poetic prose. But that is merely because this voluminous work is a novel (at least, by all appearances). It is also, however, also a poetically charged, supremely imaginative masterpiece of literature![9] Voici le sonnet: American Transcendentalism
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Vous pouvez enfin lire le volume 1, numéro 2, de l'e-zine canadien,
SONNETTO POESIA
- celui de l'été, 2002. Dans ce numéro, l'écrivaine en vedette,
c'est Sara Russell, rédactrice de l'e-zine anglais, Poetry Life and Times
chez le lien suivant :
SONNETTO POESIA
Dans le numéro actuel, on trouve aussi des sonnets par
Brian Whatcott ( des États Unis ), de « la pomme de terre terrible »
( Royaume Uni ) et de Richard Vallance, le rédacteur ( Canada ). Les sonnets
sont classés de façon thématique. On peut lire tranquillement des sonnets
estivaux, des sonnets portant sur le sujet universel de l'Amour, sous la
rubrique, "Love's Labour lost?" ( soit, « À la recherche de l'Amour
perdu? » ), et si vous voulez bien, même des sonnets bizarres de
« Commediadel Arte » ! Alors, c'est bien rigolo, n'est-ce pas? Et bien!
Qu'attendez-vous? - l'apocalypse? Allez-y tout de suite!
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The Summer, 2002 issue (Vol. 1, no. 2) of:
SONNETTO POESIA
- which features the sonneteer, Sara Russell, the Editor
of the UK E-Zine, Poetry Life and Times, is now on the WEB here: SONNETTO POESIA
Our Summer issue also features sonnets by Brian Whatcott (USA),
the Potato Tarquin of Terror (UK) and Richard Vallance, Editor (Canada).
The current issue arranges sonnets thematically. You may read at your
leisure: Summer's sonnets, "Love's Labour Lost?" sonnets and even Commedia
del Arte ones! Sounds like great fun, and it is! OK, so what are you
waiting for? - the end of the world?
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