The Sonnet as a Silver Marrow Spoon

A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones ...
—William Butler Yeats, “Adam’s Curse”

There is a restaurant in London that advertises “nose-to-tail eating,” and it prides itself that no part of an animal is left unused. I had a friend who when eating there would invariably order the bone marrow on toast. The dish came with a small implement, no bigger than a little finger, which the diner used to extract the marrow, a silver marrow spoon, perfectly engineered to slide inside the baked bone and remove its contents.

Perhaps it was the marrow and its Yeatsian echo that pushed my mind into a literary mode, but this elegant, antiquated tool always struck me as a metaphor for the sonnet: probing, incisive, finding pleasure and insight where it lies hidden, a form that allows poets to make use of what might ordinarily be overlooked or discarded.

As an eighteen-year-old undergraduate, I struggled for a long time to write a sonnet. It seemed like the correct form, the form I should be writing in. But I would become snagged in the intricacies of the meter and struggle for rhymes only to find that they felt forced.

I was at the same time aware of poems on both sides of the Atlantic influenced by the New Formalist school of poets: each iamb weighed, each volta perfectly placed, the rhymes fulsome and plangent but the sum of the whole, on second or third reading, saying very little whatsoever.

So I would strip the sonnet down to its simplest form: an idea or a story that, somewhere around the eighth or ninth line, is nudged or diverted slightly in its path so that it turns and says something else.

The thing I would like to put to a class of seniors is the sonnet in its loosest, least restrictive form. (In fact, some of my favorite sonnets are not sonnets at all. Richard Wilbur’s masterly sequence “This Pleasing Anxious Being” in Mayflies seems to me to do everything a sonnet should but over a more leisurely eighteen to twenty lines per section.)

Seamus Heaney’s sonnets in the sequence “Clearances,” from his collection The Haw Lantern, show how something as simple as a memory of peeling potatoes can be substance enough for a poem:

When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives—
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

Begin by directing students to the narratives, the secrets, the unshared, the family myths or legends. Have them think back to half-remembered episodes, stories or confidences older brothers or sisters or cousins or uncles might have shared with them, casually, unthinkingly, in passing, as such stories are often shared.

Ask them to tell a story as they remember it for the first eight or nine lines and then allow themselves to comment on it from their present vantage point. What do they know now that they did not know then? What light does the present cast back onto that particular story?

The sonnet’s volta is its turn, the point at which it shifts. We see this vividly in Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” with its declaration in the ninth line: “But thy eternal summer shall not fade”—the addressee of the poem has so far been compared to a summer day, but at that line things change. I’ve added a space here to indicate the shift:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
       So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
       So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

The turn in a sonnet allows the poet to interrogate and cast new light on the previous eight lines. In the case of the above exercise, in which the students are relating some sort of narrative, the turn allows reassessment; it’s a chance to comment upon what came before or to include a twist.

Remind students that people carry these narratives around for a long time, and so when we gaze at them through the vehicle of the sonnet, there are things about them we will discover that we did not know we knew: twists, turns, reinterpretations of that intimate cache of stories and tales that accrue over the course of childhood. These seniors on the edge of adulthood might now want to reassess, or comment upon, these stories from childhood.

If students find the story pulling away from the truth, that’s OK. You might remind them that they’re serving the poem, not the story, which is simply the impetus, the fuel for the piece of art they find themselves making. You might remind them here of the old adage: “Trust the poem, not the poet.”

And that’s it, really. Show young writers the sonnet in its simplest, most stripped-back form. Direct them to the stories from their past. Let the sonnet, memory’s own silver marrow spoon, with its turn, its volta, generate within them comments on the stories they are telling. The writing of the sonnet—as with any poem—should be a form of discovery, a digging down into the self, like that dish in the London restaurant that most of us might balk at if it were placed before us: intimate and strange upon the tongue.