Curator · Funmi Omo Moji
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It was a chilly February afternoon; I was walking back home from campus. It was drizzling but a very strange thing happened by which I — never having seen snow in my life before coming to Alabama — was pleasantly surprised: the rain drops were turning into snow just before reaching my open palm. This image stayed with me, and that night when I sat down to conceptualise the sonnet I was assigned to write, it serendipitously fit the sonnet's metaphorical structure. As an exercise in understanding grief, the poem becomes enriched by the metaphorical significance of rain (as tears) transforming into snow (as wisdom that comes from a higher understanding of death). This, therefore, is my attempt at transforming my own grief into poetry.
The easiest part was choosing the central theme: grief — literally at the centre of the sonnet, in the middle of the eighth line. Having lost my father and both my grandparents in the same year, grief became a part of my emotional existence. I eventually found my own way of coping: shifting from a human perspective to a cosmic one, watching videos about the vastness of space that put my infinitesimal existence into perspective. I render this in the sonnet's three shifting perspectives — the human, the moon's, and finally that of Time.
I wrote the sonnet as a short story about a conversation between a person and the moon, opening in a third-person narrator's voice (“The sky is alight tonight”) that shifts into the first person (“As I dream…”). To the person, grief is the fear of losing loved ones: the conceit of the “tree” — “a hollow, cold, lonesome cradle” — hints at losing one's parents, and one grieves twice: once fearing a death, and once when that fear comes true. The “tree” of “a thousand boughs” becomes the family tree, though read as the “tree of life” it offers a deeper, more consoling understanding of life and death.
To show three perspectives, I included two voltas. Following the Petrarchan structure, the first turn falls in lines 7–8, where the moon — personified, and lonely as the only moon — views all humans as a community it longs to join: “Yearning, despite death, to be one of you.” The image of “blue sky sprites” captures this cosmic view: from above, humans are tiny and transitory, and so are their griefs.
For the second volta I followed the Shakespearean couplet. Influenced by Walt Whitman's idea of life as a transformative cycle rather than a linear process, I offer a resolution by erasing death altogether: “But like rain turns into snow, life knows no death / While the cycle of time carries on in stealth.” From Time's perspective there is no death — one energy is simply transformed into another, exactly like rain becoming snow rather than vanishing. Where “snow” often symbolises death, here it becomes the next state of existence; I gave each couplet line eleven syllables (against the sonnet's usual ten) to mark this higher truth.
The tricky part was merging form with function. I did this mainly through internal rhymes and enjambments. Following a straightforward Shakespearean scheme (abab cdcd efef gg), I let the first movement — human grief — be the busiest in internal rhyme and punctuational pause, echoing the bouts of sobbing one feels while grieving; as the perspective shifts, that frequency steadily decreases. Inspired by Miltonic verse, I built the early lines with jerky, enjambed syntax that smooths as the poem approaches its tranquil destination.
Writing this sonnet made me far more appreciative of the craft — of the poet's intelligence in integrating form with function. Now that I have built a sonnet syllable by syllable and rhyme by rhyme, my first instinct when reading one will be to trace its syllabic and rhyming patterns and ask whether they answer its themes.
Amrita Bakshi · 7 July 2023
