Sonnet - Kate Sommer

 “I will put Chaos into fourteen lines,” Edna St. Vincent Millay (c. 1945)

 

I will put Chaos into fourteen lines

And keep him there; and let him thence escape

If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape

Flood, fire, and demon—his adroit designs

Will strain to nothing in the strict confines

Of this sweet Order, where, in pious rape,

I hold his essence and amorphous shape,

Till he with Order mingles and combines.

Past are the hours, the years, of our duress,

His arrogance, our awful servitude:

I have him. He is nothing more nor less

Than something simple yet not understood;

I shall not even force him to confess;

Or answer. I will only make him good.               

This sonnet is a Petrarchan (Italian) sonnet. The volta occurs at the traditional time, at the sestet. This sonnet is about writing a sonnet. It describes the act of taking an idea or situation that should take more than 14 lines to describe and withering it down to squeeze it into a sonnet format. At the volta she changes from chaos that is hard to control and trying to escape to a thing that has submitted to her will but has not lost his meaning. The sonnet has the same meaning as before when it was chaos but now she has reformatted him down to fit within the restrictions of a sonnet.

I choose this sonnet because I always find it interesting when someone uses a form to describe the same form. Like using dance to represent the art of dance, or using visual art to show how to paint. A sonnet on how to write a sonnet is very interesting to me and even more so because she personifies the chaos that is her thought process when going into the beginning of writing a sonnet.


http://www.cprw.com/Misc/finch2.htm


St. Vincent Millay, Edna. "I Will Put Chaos into Fourteen Lines." <i>Contemporary Poetry Review</i>. Annie Finch, n.d. Web. 9 Dec. 2015.