An annotation: Mark Jarman's Unholy Sonnets
On the importance of managing iambs whilst writing a sonnet.
A while back I asked my Instagram followers if they’d be interested in reading some of the annotations (short essays) I’m assigned to write for my MFA. The larger percentage of those who replied replied in the affirmative, so I am, at long last, sharing one today — I wrote this this morning, and it was fun. Let me know what you think in the comments!
(P.S. Agsain because of Instagram, I know there is interest in some Substack posts about my recent trip to Europe, including a sketched out itinerary from my time. I have a couple ideas for articles in mind, but need to meet a big deadline for school next week before I can turn my attention to them. Until then, I hope you enjoy this annotation! — warmly, a)
Mark Jarman’s Unholy Sonnets is a passionate, well-executed collection of sonnets that meditate on sin, prayer, desire, family dysfunction, God, and more. The sonnets are fluidly written and, for the most part, formally precise — Jarman rarely, if ever, relies on half-rhyme for his couplets, and he keeps to an iambic pentameter scheme with impressive regularity. On my first read, however, these sonnets also had me wondering whether a sonnet is an effective form for the late-20th and early-21st century poet — and if it is, how that poet might make best use of it.
By naming his collection Unholy Sonnets, Jarman invites readers to engage a formal and thematic comparison of his work with John Donne’s 17th-century “La Corona” and “Holy Sonnets.” (There is a craft note to make here about the power of a title. Jarman makes deft, efficient use of the title of this collection to incite dialogue with Donne, and to characterize himself as someone who invested in the same concerns that marked Donne’s writing, but within and for contemporary discourse.) My guess is that Jarman, while imagining and writing this collection, placed more store by the thematic comparison — but, having read Unholy Sonnets just after Donne’s famous sonnet sequence, I could not escape a feeling that the form that gives Donne’s 17th-century diction so much facility and heft does not have the same effect on Jarman’s 20th-century linguistic resources.
Perhaps this is a matter of taste. Regular iambic pentameter (10 syllables in a line, which alternate being stressed and un-stressed; for example, here is a line from Jarman, in which I have bolded the stressed syllables: “She is a cloud in her own sunny day”) can feel “sing-songy” in a manner that often puts 20th- and 21st-century readers in mind of children’s nursery rhymes (Dr. Seuss’s books tend, for example, to be written in iambic pentameter). This does not mean iambic pentameter cannot be a pleasing, useful, or powerful tool for the contemporary poet. On the contrary, it can be one of the most natural and musical ways to imbue poetry, perhaps especially free verse, with subtle music. However, an unthoughtful use of this most familiar meter can create a “sing-song” effect that risks reducing the power of the line for an audience suspicious of writing they might stereotype as sentimental or un-serious.
The secret, I suspect, lies in finding moments and ways to break the metrical rule without losing metrical resonance. When a poet writing sonnets does this well (as Donne, it turns out, often does), it can help the form feel more dynamic and alive. Let us look at two examples.
Here is an example of metrical rule-breaking in Jarman’s collection that, in my readerly opinion, works well: “She is a cloud in her own sunny day, / the damp spot on a rock under the lip” (37). The first line in this unrhymed couplet is a perfect example of regular iambic pentameter. There are ten syllables in the line; every other syllable is evenly stressed; and each foot begins with an unstressed syllable, which makes the feet iambs (not trochees, which begin with stressed syllables). This regularity, paired with imagery that is likely familiar to a reader of poetry, especially children’s poetry (i.e., sunshine, clouds, days, a girl who somehow embodies these things) risks becoming a bit saccharine. It feels predictable, almost pretty, an easy way for a poem to sing about sadness.
The next line, however, breaks the meter by opening with a dactyl (three syllables, in which the first is lightly-stressed and the two syllables that follow are heavy stresses) and an anapest (three syllables, in which the first two syllables are light-stressed and the third is a heavy stress) that describe an unusual, even displeasing, image. Here are the dactyl and the anapest in succession: “the damp spot on a rock.” By the time he reaches “under the lip” Jarman has returned to his regular iambic meter. “The damp spot on a rock” is also, notably, six syllables, three of which are stressed and three unstressed, and the full line does not exceed ten syllables. This means the line still carries the same number of stresses five iambic feet would have carried. It simply rearranges them a bit while still ending on a stressed syllable, and by rearranging the line’s early stresses it creates a moment of subtle surprise for a reader who might have been lulled into a metrical eye roll by the first line. Jarman breaks his iambic metrical scheme, but he does so in a way that feels natural, and the break quickly resolves. By doing this, he disrupts bored expectation, offers a surprise breath of air, and opens the reader’s attention more fully to whatever might come next.
However, in “A voice will speak. A single leaf will drop,” a sonnet on page 41, Jarman breaks the metrical rules of the sonnet repeatedly in a manner that weakens the poem. Here, he broadly follows a regular metrical schema. A majority of the lines are ten syllables long, and most of the feet are iambic. But five of the sonnet’s fourteen lines are one syllable too long, and most of the too-long lines are in the second half of the poem. This couplet marks the moment of transition to his over-reliance on 11-syllable lines: “The poor world must have fallen with the fall / For him to curse a fruit tree, out of season.” The first line in this couplet breaks the iambic pentameter rule in the same, pleasing way “the damp spot on a rock under the lip” breaks the rule. It opens with a dactyl and an anapest, and then returns to regular iambs which — crucially — enable the line to end on a stressed syllable. The second line, though, breaks the metrical rule in a much simpler, and more detrimental, way: Jarman writes in iambs but permits himself one extra syllable at the end of the line, and it is an unstressed syllable. This has the effect of making the reader feel like he or she has tripped over something in the last two syllables. Because of this the line, which should end on a strong, stressed syllable and be end-stopped (signaled by the comma that, in the poem’s original punctuation, ends the line) concludes with a whimper. The unstressed “-son” makes the reader feel like the line does not know where it is going or where it will end, and that it therefore cannot satisfy his or her subconscious need (a need created by Jarman’s relatively regular use of iambic pentameter in the first half of the poem) for the line to conclude on a stressed syllable.
It would be one thing, and perhaps an understandable poetic shortcut in a difficult sonnet project, if Jarman had done this one time in the poem. But he continues to rely on this shortcut for the rest of this sonnet. Only one of the poem’s five concluding lines ends on a stressed syllable, as an iambic pentameter line is meant to do, and it is not the poem’s final line. The last line is, “Perhaps to understand, you had to be there.” Of all the phrases with which Jarman could have ended this poem, “you had to be there” feels like a uniquely inane choice. It almost meets the metrical requirements of an iambic pentameter line, but it does so with language that is boring, and that once again overreaches by one unstressed syllable. This choice causes the whole poem, not just one line, to end on a tripping whimper, and it makes the contemporary language Jarman uses to write the poem feel mealy and weak. As a reader of this poem, I reach these final syllables and feel my trust in Jarman as a leader through his poetic project disturbed, because here, even with the structuring force of the sonnet in his store of resources, he seems to have abandoned one of the most important tasks of the poet: i.e., to restore strangeness and power to a familiar lexicon. If nothing else, reading poems like this one have convinced me of one essential thing: if I am going to write a sonnet, I should do everything in my power to avoid ending a line on a syllable that is not stressed.