Collins suggests that the poet’s writing keeps him from real contact with the beloved. The problem: a sonnet is a piece of paper, an out-of-time meditation that stands in the way of two lovers meeting. “Come at last to bed” is a deceptively simple ending for the poem, one that exposes a problem in most sonnets-as well as an opportunity for humor.
Billy Collins, The Making of a Sonnet, edited by Eavan Boland and Edward Hirsch (New York: Norton Anthology, 2008), 73. Where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,īlow out the lights, and come at last to bed. Where longing and heartache will find an end, Into the final six where all will be resolved, How easily it goes unless you get ElizabethanĪnd insist the iambic bongos must be playedĪnd rhymes positioned at the ends of lines, Then only ten more left like rows of beans. To launch a little ship on love’s storm-tossed seas, His poem “Sonnet” is itself a lesson in sonnet form:Īll we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now, Similarly, Billy Collins’s two sonnet parodies are at the same time love songs to sonnets. His tone is lighthearted, though, as I recall, and even affectionate towards the silliness. A trailblazer in the intentionally humorous, newer art of conceptual and collage poetry, Goldsmith seems to find depth in the light play-and delight in the silliness-of the poetic arts. Goldsmith’s joke was not a put-down I got the impression that deadpan irony simply underlies his poetic philosophy. Many poets poke fun at the technical strictures of the form, which John Keats went so far as to call “chains,” yet they were chains that he, along with William Wordsworth, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Edna Saint Vincent Millay, found paradoxically freeing. His “joke” is based on the mathematical conventions of the sonnet, a poem which frequently contains eight lines that build in a certain direction (the octave) followed by six lines that resolve or release that theme (the sestet).
“That’s my sonnet,” he said (or something like that). When he learned that I was interested in sonnets, he took out a piece of paper and with deadpan irony wrote out the following: About ten years ago, I had a short conversation at a poetry performance with the conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith. The sonnet parody is very simple: it makes fun of the sonnet’s rules and themes. But in reviewing a handful of these mocking sonnets, I wonder if they reveal opportunities for humor in the sonnet form itself and, if we go back to the original poems they mock, perhaps subtler instances of humor in those ostensibly “serious” sonnets. Yet so many poets have had a good time making fun of these very tropes, creating their own sonnet parody genre in the process. Popular views of the sonnet are that this fourteen-line poem deals with unrequited love, lovesickness, heartbreak, relationship problems, or themes of political love-none of which seem like particularly funny topics on the surface. A friend and I have been puzzling about whether sonnets are, by nature of their form and conventions, essentially funny poems.