Monday, June 13, 2016

Lin-Manuel Miranda's Sonnet at the Tony Awards

The sonnet just got a boost in the news in the reporting of this year's Tony Awards, as Lin-Manuel Miranda, the brilliant author of Hamilton: An American Musical, recited one in accepting his Tony for composing the musical. This poem has been published with a couple of different line divisions, none of which (that I've yet seen) make it a sonnet--but I think there is a set of line divisions that would make it one.

CNN has Miranda's 'sonnet' without line divisions at all

"We chase the melodies that seem to find us until they're finished songs and start to play when senseless acts of tragedy remind us that nothing here is promised, not one day. This show is proof that history remembers. We live through times when hate and fear seem stronger. We rise and fall, and light from dying embers, remembrances that hope and love last longer and love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside. As sacred as a symphony Eliza tells her story. Now fill the world with music, love and pride. And thank you so much for this." 




This is probably appropriate for Miranda's well-known spoken-word, hip-hop origins, but it's not a sonnet. Sonnets have lines, meter, and rhyme. And of course they include the "thank you so much for this," which refers to the Tony award but probably isn't intended as part of the poem.

Vanity Fair has it as, basically, a ballad (four quatrains), although they don't emphasize the quatrain divisions.

My wife’s the reason anything gets done

She nudges me towards promise by degrees
She is a perfect symphony of one,
Our son is her most beautiful reprise
We chase the melodies that seem to find us
Until they’re finished songs and start to play
When senseless acts of tragedy remind us
That nothing here is promised, not one day
This show is proof that history remembers
We live through times when hate and fear seem stronger
We rise and fall and light from dying embers
Remembrances that hope and love lasts long
And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love
Cannot be killed or swept aside,
I sing Vanessa’s symphony, Eliza tells her story
Now fill the world with music love and pride





This isn't a sonnet because a) sonnets have 14 lines, b) sonnets are consistently rhymed, and c) it's a ballad. Ballads aren't sonnets; different lyric forms exist for different reasons and uses, and it's not helpful to conflate them. There's nothing wrong with Miranda's poem as a ballad (except that he called it a sonnet). This was how I first encountered the poem set, and it has a strong appeal--partly because the lines end up the same length or roughly so throughout. But it's not a sonnet, which is a problem given that Miranda told us it's a sonnet.

The NY Times has it as follows:

My wife’s the reason anything gets done

She nudges me towards promise by degrees
She is a perfect symphony of one
Our son is her most beautiful reprise.
We chase the melodies that seem to find us
Until they’re finished songs and start to play
When senseless acts of tragedy remind us
That nothing here is promised, not one day.
This show is proof that history remembers
We lived through times when hate and fear seemed stronger;
We rise and fall and light from dying embers, remembrances that hope and love last longer
And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside.
I sing Vanessa’s symphony, Eliza tells her story
Now fill the world with music, love and pride.


(From http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/13/theater/lin-manuel-mirandas-sonnet-from-the-tony-awards.html)

This is not a sonnet; they've made it 14 lines, but they wrecked the rhyme scheme and the line lengths end up really weird and inconsistent. Nice try, but it's not quite there.


EW reports the line divisions very oddly, dividing some lines with a virgule (/) and some with actual line breaks:

My wife’s the reason anything gets done/ She nudges me towards promise by degrees / She is a perfect symphony of one/ Our son is her most beautiful reprise.

We chase the melodies that seem to find us until they’re finished songs and start to play/ When senseless acts of tragedy remind us that nothing here is promised, not one day.

This show is proof that history remembers/ We live through times when hate and fear seem stronger/ We rise and fall and light from dying embers remembrance that hope and love last forever. 

Love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside/ I sing Vanessa’s symphony. Eliza tells her story. [we] fill the world with music, love, and pride.


This is almost there, but like the NY Times version, it too ends up mucking up the rhyme scheme (and actually ending up as a thirteen-line poem) because of what looks like a missed line division in the third from last line.

So what do I think Miranda's sonnet should look like? This:

My wife’s the reason anything gets done

She nudges me towards promise by degrees
She is a perfect symphony of one
Our son is her most beautiful reprise.
We chase the melodies that seem to find us
Until they’re finished songs and start to play
When senseless acts of tragedy remind us
That nothing here is promised, not one day.
This show is proof that history remembers
We lived through times when hate and fear seemed stronger;
We rise and fall and light from dying embers, 
Remembrances that hope and love last longer
And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside.
I sing Vanessa’s symphony, Eliza tells her story. Now fill the world with music, love and pride.

 Now this is a sonnet! 14 lines, rhyme scheme, and meter. The meter changes in the last two lines of the sonnet, but this is not unprecedented: Sir Philip Sidney's great sixteenth-century sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella, frequently moves from iambic pentameter in the first twelve lines to hexameter in the final couplet. Miranda's move is more dramatic, into duodecameter (twenty-four syllables a line, twice as many as Sidney's twelve-syllable hexameter), but it fits his aggressively innovative and over-crammed poetic style. The strictest form of the definitions I've introduced in my Introduction to the Sonnet (beginning here) would exclude it for the meter change, but as I've noted before in different contexts, as long as the poem builds up an expectation of consistent meter, the rhetorical effect of a sudden change towards the end can be very effective while remaining within the tradition of the sonnet.

Why does this matter? I'm sure, to many people, it simply doesn't. Lin-Manuel Miranda called it a sonnet, so it's a sonnet. But I believe that there is a reason we don't just call all poems, or even all short lyric poems, sonnets. There is a value to having standards and constraints within--and against--which to work. Writing a sonnet is different than writing a ballad, than writing an ode, than writing anything other than a sonnet, because of its particular constraints, its particular history, and its particular rules. In Lin-Manuel Miranda's sonnet (once properly set as a sonnet) we can see the particular ways in which he plays with those rules: by keeping fairly strictly to the iambic pentameter mode in the first twelve lines, the powerful expansion of the meter in the final couplet (and especially the moving "Love is love..." half-line, which begins the metrical change, going far beyond the pentameter restriction all on its own) is substantially heightened. Compare the Vanity Fair setting of the poem as a near-ballad with the sonnet setting above, and you will see that the final two lines of the sonnet are remarkable for their vitality and power in a substantially different way than the final quatrain of the ballad. This power comes not just from the words of Miranda's poem, but also from its context. Alexander Hamilton, the subject of Hamilton, was particularly known for writing "Non-Stop" (in the title of the first-act finale) and so the overstuffed last two lines are not just moving in their content, but in their Hamiltonian nature. The strong caesuras in these lines (after the last "love" and after the penultimate period, respectively) are what clearly suggested to the Vanity Fair editors that these should be line breaks, but both come more than halfway through their respective lines, which is a signal to us that they are in fact caesuras--and that this is in fact a sonnet.