[Continued from: “American Sonnets (Part XVII: An American Sonnet By Any Other Name)”]
I stepped out of America for a moment in mentioning Rimbaud – as David Lehman did – in the context of subversive sonnets in my last post. There are poems subversive in form and poems subversive in content – and those two categories of subversion often overlap and blur completely, especially when considering a form like the sonnet, in which the form and content are so inextricably associated. Despite this inextricable nature, two of Rimbaud’s sonnets are particularly apt examples of the two potential directions one can take in subverting the form. I’ll focus on the one that best illustrates subversion of form here in this post.
In writing on Rimbaud’s 1874 “Sonnet” in 1980, Roger Little begins:
Among Rimbaud’s verse poems one finds a high proportion of sonnets . . . Only one of his texts, however, bears the title ‘Sonnet,’ and that, paradoxically . . . is presented as a paragraph of prose. It is the second section of ‘Jeunesse’ and, while commentators have worried about its meaning, few have considered its form in relation to its title.
He goes on to argue:
[The] formal organization of the text argues a measure of calculation on Rimbaud’s part at variance with its apparent incoherence . . . and that the incongruity and obscurity are, in short, to a large extent intentional. [Marcel] Schaettel likewise acknowledges the incongruity of such a title for such a text, seeing the relationship as a forerunner of a Surrealist tactic . . . [but] this is belied if one can show any kind of formal order in the prose ‘sonnet.’
Little focuses on the “Mais” (“But”) of the final sentence as “the pivotal word . . . a not unfamiliar articulation of the sonnet form” – he finds the sonnet’s turn embedded in the prose block. He also focuses on the rhymes, noting how rhymes embedded within the prose block can actually be recreated (as some are in the autograph copy) as end rhymes “in several cases in a way which seems not to be mere chance.” He also points to the preponderance of repeating sounds: “The sheer intensity of such repetitions suggests again a poetic attention entirely appropriate to a sonnet.” He agrees with Schaettel’s assessment that “the text has to be considered as if ‘deuxs grilles différentes’ [two different grids] are superimposed, one as the text published, the other the ghost sonnet whose lines have now emerged from the shadows.” But returning to Schaettel’s assessment of the titling technique as Surrealist precursor (I noted this connection between subversion of the sonnet and conceptual moves made by Duchamp and Magritte in an earlier post too), Little objects,”I see a danger here in too close an assimilation here with Surrealist usage; Magritte’s ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ beside a naturalistic representation of a pipe suggests a very different relationship from a text entitled ‘Sonnet’ that both is and is not a sonnet.” He turns to the way that David Scott holds Rimbaud’s ‘Sonnet’ up as a prefiguration of “the loss of prestige that the sonnet will suffer . . . no longer accepted by the avant-garde poets . . . as a consecrated form.” Little resists this interpretation, concluding:
Rimbaud undoubtedly overthrew the traces in several ways, but the schoolboy’s experience of carefully-constructed metrical exercises in Latin as well as in French, and several years of practice within traditional verse forms (even if strict adherence to the traditional sonnet rhyme-scheme is never envisaged) no less assuredly leave their traces. Patient work on the prose poems is gradually revealing a body of evidence which bespeaks the poet’s technical mastery of traditional rhetoric put to innovative ends of the highest sophistication. Experimentation with form, evident in the Vers nouveaux, is far more likely to have continued than to have stopped short or foundered in what Scott calls ‘disorganization and disarray’ . . . The form must therefore be taken into account in our assessment of the effect of the text. There is a discreet and purposefully evasive organization of the ‘sonnet’ aimed at disturbing self-satisfied response patterns, and it makes phonic coherence a foil for semantic and syntactic oddity. The poetics of incongruity includes such contrasts between traditional and revolutionary features the better to take the reader by surprise and have him return again and again to the text.
This take renders Rimbaud’s piece not simply a sonnet-in-quotes, but a prose-poem-in-quotes as well. It also renders him a precursor not only to the Surrealists, but to writers of “disguised” form, as described recently by Stephen Kampa in “Another Way of Breaking the Pentameter.” Kampa begins with “disguised” sonnets by Joshua Mehigan, then turns to Auden as precursor in these hidden forms. Rimbaud makes for a provocative addition to such a lineage.
La force et le droit réfléchissent la danse et la voix à présent seulement appréciées.
[The strength and the right reflect the dance and the voice only now appreciated.]
– Rimbaud, “Sonnet”
[Continued in: “American Sonnets (Part XIX: The Pure Products of America)”)