Sonnet Analysis: Longfellow I

As a poet not generally known for his sonnets, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow may seem to be an odd choice to begin the analysis of other poets' work besides my own on this blog. Yet the fact that Longfellow, renowned for poems like "The Song of Hiawatha," written in emphatically different meters and rhyme schemes (to the extent that he even had rhyme schemes), was also a writer of sonnets is, I think, indicative of a very important point about the sonnet: it used to be such a common, almost default, form that every poet tried his or her hand at sonneteering, and published them too. Nowadays, poets may (and most likely do) write sonnets, but the odds of a published poem being fourteen lines with meter and rhyme, whether published as a sonnet or not, are falling fast. Not coincidentally, a certain archaism of the sonnet form is obvious within Longfellow's poem, as well as his general poetic project, as we shall see below. You may notice that the analysis below is broken into different categories than the analysis of my old sonnets; this is because it seems impertinent to attack the poems of those whose minds I cannot read as vigorously as my own. Without further ado, here is Longfellow's sonnet "The Poets:"

O ye dead Poets, who are living still
Immortal in your verse, though life be fled,
And ye, O living Poets, who are dead
Though ye are living, if neglect can kill,
Tell me if in the darkest hours of ill,
With drops of anguish falling fast and red
From the sharp crown of thorns upon your head,
Ye were not glad your errand to fulfill?
Yes; for the gift and ministry of Song
Have something in them so divine and sweet,
It can assuage the bitterness of wrong;
Not in the clamor of the crowded street,
Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng,
But in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.

Triumphs:
This poem is a perfect example of an Italian sonnet in English. The octave is nicely balanced and the rhymes are not forced; the sestet turns to answer the question of the octave and expound on the reasoning; the lines themselves are generally smooth and rhythmic. The counterpoise achieved between the living and dead poets is a treat to read, particularly as it threads itself through the fixed rhyme scheme of the octave. The simple "yes" beginning the sestet, and the immediate launch into the why behind that yes (and also what that yes means; it is actually ambiguous in context whether it is a yes to being glad or to not being glad) is a perfect turn.

Imperfections:
Since this is a nineteenth-century poem, and not a modern one, I will wait until the next section to comment on forms and phrases that feel archaic. Within the poem as it stands, I do feel there are a few minor weak points. The Christ reference in the crown of thorns feels a bit overdone, especially as it contrasts with the "neglect" which threatens the poets in line 4; which are they, neglected or persecuted? Similarly, to a small degree, the poem treads a very fine line between the immortality of verse in line 2 and ignoring the "throng" or the "street" in the final lines; how does the concept of an immortal poet articulate with the idea that a poet ought to be only concerned with what's within himself? But these are nitpicks, and I find very little even to nitpick in this poem.

Archaisms:
When was the last time you heard the vocative of the second person pronoun in English? Yep, there's good old "ye" (and I do mean old) sitting right there in the first line. And the third, fourth, and eighth. It even has its good friend "O" hanging about in the first two instances. You simply can't get away with those in modern English, even in poetry; Longfellow never knew how good he had it. And topping that off with the eighth line as a whole ("Ye were not glad your errand to fulfill?") is just murder to a modern ear. There's a poetic inversion there, swapping the complementary infinitive "to fulfill" and its object "your errand" and creating a mush of standard word order. It's great poetry; it has a long and venerable tradition behind it; and it's not going to work anymore. It sounds too alien to a modern audience; it will only fly if they think the poem older than it is, which is slightly better than "ye" and "O," which have a hard time doing their work even then. On the level of theme and superdictional expression, the Christological reference mentioned above and the general pat message of writing for yourself and not others are also a little off the current fashion. The rub is that they work so well here, especially the message, which is conveyed expertly and beautifully. So I guess the message from this commentary is that we've lost a lot of the tools out of the sonnet toolbox since Longfellow wrote; and also, that a poem can use those tools in beautiful ways even when it sounds a little foreign to our ears. So don't give up on those tools quite yet; but be extremely careful when using them. Not all of us (or perhaps I should say, none of us) are Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.