“Sonnet” by Billy Collins

Billy Collins is a famous American poet, known for his poetry’s comforting themes and ease of comprehension. He originally studied traditional poetry forms, but he changed his objective to experiment with more modern poetry. This poem is a perfect example of this change; the poem is literally a sonnet about the sonnet form’s futility, both mocking and trivializing the traditional rules involved in writing a Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnet. Through his refusal to conform to these long-held poetic norms, Collins leaves the reader with the theme of living and loving in the moment instead of wasting time satisfying rules that limit one’s ability to express love.

“Sonnet” can be split into three main sections: lines 1-4, 5-8, and 9-14. Each section helps to develop a vital part of the theme, and by the end of the poem they work together to create its meaning.

In lines 1-4, Collins acknowledges the basic premises of a traditional sonnet, writing, “All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now, and after this next one just a dozen”. These lines may seem useless – obviously there will only be a certain number of lines left, there is no need to count them down – but Collins does this for a reason. He counts down the lines, starting from 14, to put the idea in the reader’s mind that the sonnet is finite and structured to end on a designated line, without leaving room for variation from this “set in stone” length. By opening like this, Collins speaks to the rigidity of the sonnet form so that he can later juxtapose it with his own “rules”. The next two lines read, “to launch a little ship on love’s storm-tossed seas, then only ten more left like rows of beans.” Collins mentions a little ship on “love’s storm tossed seas”, equating it to the act of trying to write a sonnet. This metaphor implies that just as a ship is miniscule and difficult to maneuver on the vast ocean, a tightly-regulated sonnet about love is so small compared to the vast and emotional topic of love that it is infinitesimal in comparison and ineffective. Collins then compares the lines of a sonnet, 10 left now, to “rows of beans”. If you’ve ever driven past a farm cultivating soybeans, which are actually quite common, you’ll notice that while each individual plant varies a little from another, they are all essentially the same and repeat over and over without any variation. Collins thinks sonnet lines are like bean rows; sure there’s a little variation, but they’re really all the same. The content stays the same each time and is nothing but monotonous. This first section of the poem is about the typical conventions of a Sonnet and how they are monotonous and futile.

In lines 5-8, Collins continues with a second quatrain. He writes, “How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan and insist the iambic bongos must be played,” referencing a traditional Elizabethan (Shakespearean) sonnet’s iambic pentameter, which Collins calls the “iambic bongos”. This implies that Collins believes iambs, like bongos, only serve the purpose of giving a poem rhythm. Collins then writes, “and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines, one for every station of the cross.” Another convention of Shakspearean sonnets is the rhyme scheme; each line has to end in a specific rhyme aligning with the ABAB CDCD EFEF GG rhyme scheme of Shakespearean sonnets. Collins mentions each rhyme matches up to every “station of the cross”. This is likely an allusion to the 14 Stations of the Cross, a collection of depictions of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. Collins uses this since there are 14 lines in a sonnet, just like the 14 Stations, so they match up numerically. Another reason Collins may have used this allusion is that both Shakespeare and Petrarch, the two most famous sonnet-writers and after whom the two main sonnet forms are named, were Christians; Petrarch a devout Catholic and Shakespeare an active Protestant. Just like the “rows of beans” example, the stations of the cross are essentially the same image but just slightly altered each time. Each of them includes different scenes of Jesus’ life, but they are all of Jesus and there is little variation from start to end. Regardless of religion, this allusion also reaffirms the hard number 14 that the sonnet cannot surpass due to the strictness of its form. Overall, this second section of the poem further expresses Collins’ resentment of the Sonnet form and elaborates on the vanity of the sonnet’s tight rules.

The last section of the poem, including the third quatrain and the final couplet, begins with a shift in the poem: “But hang on here while we make the turn into the final six where all will be resolved, where longing and heartache will find an end,”. In Petrarchan sonnets, Petrarch almost always included a shift, or turning point, at line 9 that usually changed/enhanced the poem’s meaning. Collins here intends to do the same, pausing his complaints to find a resolution to his “sonnet”‘s troubled beginning. He writes, “where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen, take off those crazy medieval tights, blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.” For context, Laura was Petrarch’s wife and muse for over 300 of his sonnets. Petrarch certainly lacked no motivation to write his love sonnets, but Collins takes this love further than the page; using Laura as Petrarch’s motivation, Collins writes of a fictional situation in which Laura tells Petrarch to stop writing, take off his crazy (and iconic) tights, and finally go to bed with her. The message behind this closing scene is that sometimes it’s best to “take off those crazy medieval tights” and spend more time with the things you actually love, rather than just writing about them. Collins argues that it is better to show love through deeds than through words.

Petrarch’s medieval tights represent the strictness of the sonnet form; Petrarch taking them off and going to bed with Laura represents freeing oneself from inflexible and monotonous poetic standards to write freely. Collins does this himself throughout the poem, refusing to use iambic pentameter or any form of a rhyme scheme, which are arguably the most annoying and strictest parts of writing a traditional sonnet. In summary, Collins creates the theme of living and loving in the moment rather than wasting time on things that limit one’s ability to express love by introducing the firm, boring, and nonsensical rules of a sonnet, and then juxtaposing it with a situation where those rules are taken away and one can express their love freely. 

“This Practice” by Ada Limón

This Practice

They say the first thing that goes

is short-term memory. We forget

our keys, we forget the address,

we forget the name of the president.

I like to think it’s just a matter of practice – 

we’ve had more time to practice the memory of our brother’s face, 

our favorite light, the creek that runs down the center of town.

I want to practice. Like the Russian soldier

who had to make up a word to say how 

hard he would fight, said he would fight

fiercefully, that’s how I will remember you,

how I will practice – fiercefully

“This Practice” by Ada Limón is a poem about Limón’s sincere desire to keep a loved one in her memory. This poem displays more characteristics of prose than a traditional poem, as it lacks a rhyme scheme and a rhythmic meter. I think Limón breaks the traditional structure of a poem to showcase more of her authenticity. The lack of a strict format or guideline allows Limón to set her writing free and put pen to paper without stressing over the exact form and syntax. This affects the poem by making it sound like someone’s thoughts when read aloud due to Limón’s raw and unrestrained writing style.

Limón is known for incorporating real-life examples into her writing to illustrate the meaning behind her words, which she does in this poem. Limón opens with a statement about what “they” say – we don’t know who “they” are, but we can infer it means the general population – explaining that it is common knowledge that short-term memory “goes” first. From this, we can infer that Limón is referencing the effects of age, as one’s memory generally declines as one gets older. Limón changes the pronoun from “they” to “we” in the next sentence. As in the last sentence, Limón expects us to assume that “we” refers to all people. She lists common things “we” tend to forget with age – keys, addresses, and names. However, Limón breaks the extrapersonal narrative by starting the next sentence with “I”. She takes the opposite side of what “they” say, claiming she believes that memory is a matter of practice. She lists a brother’s face, one’s favorite light, and a creek running down the center of town as examples of things to practice. Perhaps these are the things that she means to “practice” remembering, or they could be significant things to Limón herself. This may be confirmed by the next sentence, which simply reads, “I want to practice.” Alternatively, this could be interpreted as a defense mechanism against the fear Limón feels over forgetting the people and things she loves – hence her desire to “practice” these things. This is also the origin of the poem’s title – This Practice. 

Directly after this statement, Limón includes the real-world example of a Russian soldier who made up a word to describe his bravery, inventing the word “fiercefully”. Limón enhances the poem’s determined tone by including this example. The Russian soldier, who couldn’t speak English well enough to find the word he was looking for, made up his own word rather than give up his search for a word. This perseverance is what Limón hopes to match, as she ends the poem with, “that’s how I will remember you, how I will practice – fiercefully“.

Limón has said in interviews that she identifies with Mexican culture (as her grandfather on her father’s side was Mexican), which emphasizes the importance of remembering one’s ancestors. There is a holiday of Mexican origin dedicated to remembering deceased loved ones, known as the Day of the Dead, in which participants gather a deceased relative’s favorite belongings and pictures and place them at their gravesites. They do this to emphasize the importance of remembering loved ones and never forgetting them, because when a person is forgotten, they no longer exist in the “Land of the Dead” or the afterlife. We can reasonably assume that Limón is aware of this holiday and most likely has been involved in it due to her self-professed identification with Mexican heritage, so it makes sense that she wants to emphasize the importance of remembering the people she loves. She is willing to fight “fiercefully” – a made-up word emphasizing the perseverance of remembrance – to remember her loved ones so they don’t ever get forgotten.

“Flood Coming” by Ada Limón

“Flood Coming” by Ada Limón is a poem about moral survival and navigation in a dirty and destructive world. Limón uses heavy natural imagery to convey this message. She begins the poem with a description of the current state of the world: “the pulled-apart world scatters its bad news like a brush fire…”, characterizing the world as a divided, “pulled-apart” place. For it to have been pulled apart, it must have been together at one point, contrasting with its current separated. Scattering bad news like brush fire describes how there are constantly adverse situations around the world, which we hear about and spread through the news. Limón continues with, “…the ink bleeds out the day’s undoing and here we are again: alive.” The bleeding ink further hints at the spread of bad news, “the day’s undoing” referencing the detrimental events that occur daily. However, Limón chooses to end the stanza with “here we are again: alive.” After painting a gloomy picture of the world, she colors in a glimmer of hope by acknowledging our prolonged existence despite the perilousness of the planet.

In the next stanza, Limón writes, “The tributary of this riverine dark widens into the mind’s brief break…”. Again continuing with the gloomier side of the world, Limón illustrates how the “tributary of this riverine dark”, which likely represents the negative, hopeless thoughts fostered by the dirtiness of the world, seep into the spaces of one’s mind like the offshoot of a river filling in the terrain of its surroundings. “Let the flood come, the rowdy water beasts are knocking now and now.” Despite the violent description of the “water beasts”, the narrator now accepts that the flood is coming hastily, or “now and now”.

The last stanza is the most meaningful. “What’s left of the woods is closing in” – what does Limón mean by “what’s left of the woods”? From what we know of floods, they carry off debris with them. Since the flood Limón describes originates from a river, it is likely near woods too. Thus it makes sense to infer that “what’s left of the woods” (the debris from the destroyed woods) is “closing in” because the flood is carrying the debris with it. The last three lines embody Limón’s attitude towards this dangerous and seemingly imminent situation: “Don’t run. Open your mouth big to the rising and hope to your god your good heart knows how to swim.” Throughout the poem we have seen brief instances of hope, but this is the most powerful. Instead of running in fear from the “flood”, which represents the rising distress and evil in the world, Limón tells us: “don’t run.” Rather than fleeing, she advises, “open your mouth big to the rising and hope to your god your good heart knows how to swim.” This is a powerful refutation of the fear we ought to feel from the flood. Embrace the bad the world throws at you, Limón tells us, and rise above it by being good. We can not run from the flood of earth’s many evils; all we can do is swim by holding ourselves to higher standards than the world.

Limón’s purpose in writing this poem is likely to call us to learn to “swim”. She does not outright state this, but by revealing the pressing necessity of swimming to survive the “flood”, she emphasizes the importance of having higher values and standards than those of the world. Limón’s belief that we can maintain separation from the world’s ideals while still being in the world, “floating in the flood” so to speak, serves both as a warning to those unprepared for the flood and as hope for the prepared who dread the imminent flood. 

Ada Limón

Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her most recent book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. She is the 24th Poet Laureate of The United States, the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, and a TIME magazine woman of the year. As the Poet Laureate, her signature project is called You Are Here and focuses on how poetry can help connect us to the natural world. Her first books for children include In Praise of Mystery and And, Too, The Fox. (https://www.adalimon.net/)