Sonnet Analysis: My Old Sonnets I

Let us start out the analysis side of this blog with something simple, at least in the simple-minded sense: one of my own older sonnets. First I'll post the sonnet, and then some analysis of what mistakes I made, and, if I'm lucky, anything I think went right (and why). Obviously when analyzing my own sonnets I will be emphasizing the mistakes more heavily than what went right; the opposite will be true when these analyses tackle other poets' work. We will start with a sonnet I have actually revised multiple times, but in its first form: this is War.

The thunder isn't thunder anymore
Now that the eyes have seen the dreadful guns
That threaten even now to end the war
By bringing down the walls. A child runs
Through streets that echo with the bugle's call.
He's screaming something, but nobody cares
For now the men are marching to the wall
In file, rank by rank, the endless pairs
Of booted feet make thunder of their own
To answer those without. The shrilling fife
And pounding drum beat down the panicked moan
Of poor civilians anxious for their life.
Yet naught hears he, the soldier with his pack,
But his own darling's whisper. Please come back.


Mistakes Were Made:
The most excruciating moment here is the end of line 12, where "their life," a forced rhyme with "fife," should really be lives - but fife's plural is fifes, not fives. There are also some extremely forced archaisms in this poem: "naught hears he" (line 13) is the worst, but "those without" (line 10) is hardly modern standard English either. It is generally better to avoid twisting syntax to fit the meter (as in "naught hears he") unless you happen to live in the 16th century, and similarly it is almost always better, unless a deliberate sense of antiquity is intended, to keep the word choice under control and contemporary to your own time. That doesn't mean only using simple words, but it does mean avoiding words (or meanings of words with multiple possible meanings) that have fallen substantially out of favor and have an archaic flavor. There are also a couple of moments - "his own darling's whisper" (line 14) and even "and pounding drum" (line 11) - where the poem seems to reach for extra syllables that end up seeming like wastes; we do not need to know it's his "own" darling, or that there are drums as well as fifes, except for the fact that the meter and form required additional syllables in those positions. Every syllable should help the poem, and it's arguable that these are merely placeholders.

Not Too Shabby:
I enjoy the effect of the enjambment after lines 1 and 4; there is a bit of suspense in each case about what exactly is meant, which is heightened in both cases by the ending of the line before the sense has run out. The substantial regularity of the meter reflects the marching of booted feet and the thunder of the cannon fairly well, and the one irregularity ("but nobody cares") creates a catch in the meter exactly where the sense also has a little hiccup - at the same moment we wonder why no one cares about the screaming child, we hit the irregularity in the verse, and as the explanation comes, so too the regularity reasserts itself in the verse. I'm also a fan of the sentiment of the last couplet, even though (as discussed above), its execution leaves something to be desired.