Liberating Constrictions

One of William Wordsworth's best poems, in my opinion, is the sonnet "Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room":


Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their Cells;
And students with their pensive citadels:
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his Loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth, the prison, unto which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, `twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such their needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.


The main argument of the poem seems fairly straightforward. Acknowledging that to paraphrase is heresy (who said that? Cleanth Brooks?), we might roughly paraphrase it this way: "Often tight boundaries or constrictions satisfy, as opposed to stifling." The poem begins by listing examples before it tells us (beginning with "In truth, . . .") what precept the examples support; that strategy supplies tension. (Often Shakespeare's sonnets go the other way--from precept, premise, or question to specifics.) Nuns, hermits, and students seem to like tight quarters. Why? Because they are living lives of the mind or the soul. Women and men who spin or weave may find the work satsifying or even uplifting. That may be a tougher proposition to sell; on the other hand, I think we've all experienced a kind of content from focusing on a specific task or job that might look monotonous to an observer. We get lost in the work, in a good way. We might also get a repetitive-motion ailment, but that's another story.


Once Wordsworth gives us the precept, "In truth, the prison, unto which we doom/Ourselves, no prison is. . . .," he links it to his own love for a constricting form of verse, the sonnet.


That such a poem should come from a British Romantic is, superficially at least, an irony, for the Romantic poets were allegedly all about freedom, organic poetry form, overflowing emotions, intuition, and inspiration. It turns out, of course, that each Romantic--Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Hunt, et alia--forged his own poetics and that none of these poetics was quite as dramatically different from 18th century poetics as one might imagine. . . .


. . ..Are all constrictions liberating? No, but Wordsworth doesn't have the space, in this "scanty plot of ground," to go into that. Because the sonnet to Wordsworth and others seems like a pastime, may we conclude, with Frost, that writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net (assuming that's a bad thing to do)? We may conclude as much, but we don't need to do so. Writing free verse is no picnic, unless you believe that whatever you write is great, but if you believe that, then the problem really has nothing to do with formal verse vs. free verse. Verse/versus.


In any event, the poem points to an issue almost all poets face: what attitude to take toward form. Any poet who has tried to write a sonnet will have found the form to be, in at least one case, too constricting. The form makes you torture your syntax or say (write) something, anything, just to make that next rhyme or to finish the iambic pentamenter. Or the form will make you rush to "get it all said" in 14 lines. Frustated, you want to smash this little 14-line X 10 syllable cage and go off and write like Walt Whitman or D.H. Lawrence, at least with regard to form--long lines of free verse--if not subject-matter.


However, almost all poets have discovered that sometimes the constricting form can liberate. So focused are you on the form that surprising images, words, or phrases sneak in while you're not looking. Richard Hugo makes this argument in his book, The Triggering Town, wherein he describes a hellish form-poem assigned by his teacher at the University of Washington, poet Theodore Roethke. Roethke gave the assignment as a kind of test, and of course students went into it as they would into most tests: with dread. But once inside the seemingly impossible rules--so many many verbs and nouns, so many lines and stanzas, so many beats and repeated sounds, etc.--some students discovered subjects or language they would not have otherwise discovered.


And to write a sonnet, a villanelle, or a sestina that, upon honest inspection, is good enough at least to hold up, to appear in public, is a little piece of heaven. And Roethke's villanelle, "The Waking," is a little piece of heaven for the reader.


The Furness-fells, by the way, comprise a little range of hills--large by British standards, perhaps--in Cumbria. By Sierra Nevada or Rockies standards, maybe not so much. But that's all right. The best part of the bee-reference in the poem concerns the fox-gloves, not the soaring to heights. To watch a bee go deep, deep into the narrow bell of a fox-glove blossom is, in its own way, thrilling. Like Wordsworth, you can get the sense that the bee is on a great adventure, spelunking, in its own way--diving deep into a cavern of nectar. A gardener, I never tire of watching bees go into fox-glove blossoms, and of waiting, waiting, for them to come out. Sometimes I think they never will.


"In truth, the prison, unto which we doom/Ourselves, no prison is. . . ." Actually, I disagree with this thesis, in general, although I agree with it insofar as Wordsworth applies it to the nun's narrow room or the poet's use of the sonnet. I think that, in general, although the prisons to which we doom ourselves may only infrequently be as bad as literal prisons, they can still be awful. I tend to imprison myself in worry, for example, so much so that it's only just a stretch to say I have doomed myself to worry. . . .

. . . .Can one experience too much liberty? Of course. Perhaps the best example is an all-powerful, maniacal dictator, who can and may do whatever he wishes. Hell ensues, for others, for him.

--But so much, so many complications, come out of Wordsworth's seemingly simple sonnet, and thats' one reason I like it so much. It's a very productive poem.