worryingly jolly batman

101 sonnets

101 Sonnets from Shakespeare to Heaney,
a Faber Penguin audio tape

"A sonnet is a box of dreams" ~ Don Patterson

A hundred winding dusty miles, and all the while
these sonnets, each burnished where an elbow meets
the desk; each fourteen lines a box of dreams
within whose walls lies pressed, like yellowed lace,
the hand-worked filigree of words. You can't beat
an old song for tough roots, for plunging into wells
of sorrow, for countermelodies of regret,
for adding salt or sugar to the pulse
and to the tongue. Each sonnet, when its lid is sprung,
releases dreams into the air — shakes off sleep
and waking, flings away the sheets. these words on wings,
a hundred winding miles they sing, and leap
and spangle through the car like motes. Each fourteen lines
from dust to dust unravels, strings the world in rhyme.

-- Sue Wootton

This poem is from Sue Wootton's Magnetic South, which I haven't read much but we have it in the classroom here and I was browsing around. (It looks good, by the way. Steele Roberts, 2008). I admit, I first hit on the poem because 101 Sonnets from Shakespeare to Heaney is also in our classroom, and we've been asked to select a poem from it (or from elsewhere) to speak aloud, from memory, to the class. We talked briefly about how meter and scansion affect readbility and memorisation, how the sonnet is supposedly the perfect size to express a thought, etc. I like this one very much, having read it. I like the internal rhyme (always a favourite of mine) and I like how it doesn't succumb to sonnet rhyming until the couplet. I think it expresses quite nicely the pleasure of returning to a familiar poem, the extra depth and meaning I bring to a poem when I return to it after some time, not to mention the resonance of a poem that has stayed with us for some time.

Tuesday is poem day: