"Unholy Sonnet 16" by Mark Jarman

Topics mentioned in this episode include:

-My thanks to Mr. John! 

-Matthew from Sleerickets

-Mark Jarman (now I just need a Luke!)

-Anglo-Saxon verse revisited

-Hemistichs, caesuras, accentual alliteration

-Richard Wilbur's "Junk" 

-The metrical decay of mid-century poets

-Formalism as emotional discipline

-Mark Jarman's "Questions For Ecclesiastes" and "Zeno's Eternity"

-Mark's review of Wilbur's Moliere in the Hudson Review

-John Donne's "Holy Sonnets"

-Flannery O'Connor

-Phonetic slant rhyme

-How caesuras can make lines feel funky without being funky

-Donne's Holy Sonnet VII

-The many ends of the world

-The Sermon On the Mount

-The cosmology of Lurianic Kabbalah and Tikkun Olam

-Felix Culpa

-Sexual innuendo

-To live in sin is to see the world through hell-colored glasses

-Tragic enlightenment through sin

-An unsettling double-meaning

-The meaning of an "unholy" sonnet

-Charles Baudelaire

-William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell"

Text of poem:

Unholy Sonnet 16 

We drove to the world’s end and there betrayed 

the ones we promised not to. While we drove 

We talked about the afterlife and love, 

slowing to an impatient crawl, delayed 

by roadwork, in an idling parade 

we couldn’t see the head or tail of. 

We inched past miles of asphalt, reeking stuff, 

stroked by a rake of fire as it was laid. 

And we agreed the analogues for hell 

came to us everywhere we looked in life. 

But not for heaven. For it we couldn’t find 

a metaphor or likeness. Not until 

we had betrayed our loved ones, at the end, 

did we have something to compare it with.  

Transcript

Versecraft Episode 2-9 “Unholy Sonnet 16” by Mark Jarman 

Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in this week. As usual I’ll start with the hopefully not-too-tiresome reminder that if you like the show, please recommend it to someone you think might enjoy it—for podcasts that are as niche as this one, grassroots efforts are really the best way to get the word out. Also, if you haven’t already, do consider leaving me a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or elsewhere, I really do appreciate them. I recently got a really lovely review from a new listener, John, who discovered this show through the Keats episode. Thank you so much John, and I hope you continue to enjoy! 

My friend Matthew from Sleerickets wrote to me this week regarding the Hopkins episode, and while he said he really liked it he gently informed me that my explanation of Anglo-Saxon poetic conventions wasn’t as precise as it could have been. He’s definitely right, and as someone who has written in the accentual-alliterative tradition before, he’s well qualified to notice such things. I’ll therefore offer here a more thorough explanation, in his words:

“The alliterative convention was that at least two and no more than three of the stressed syllables had to alliterate, with at least one coming from each of the two hemistichs and never on the last stressed syllable.” 

As a reminder, a “hemistich” is a half line, and in the context of Anglo-Saxon verse refers to the section of verse on one side or the other of the central caesura. 

Matthew also pointed out that for the Anglo-Saxons, alliteration occurred on the stressed syllable, regardless of whether that syllable was at the beginning of a word or not. So, for instance, you could have the line:

The thumb of Theoden | ran athwart the scroll. 

            In this line, the soft t.h. sound is alliterated on three out of the four accents, and not on the last accent. The t.h. sound is present in both hemistichs, that is to say, on both sides of the central pause; and in one case, the word “athwart,” the alliteration doesn’t occur at the beginning of the word, but because it falls on the accent, it’s still kosher. 

            For Hopkins and other more modern poets inspired by Anglo-Saxon verse, these rules haven’t been followed nearly so rigorously, which is probably why I forgot to mention them. For instance, in Richard Wilbur’s accentual-alliterative poem entitled “Junk,” the first three lines read:

            An axe angles from my neighbor’s ashcan;

            It is hell’s handiwork, the wood not hickory,

the flow of the grain not faithfully followed.

In all three of these lines, alliteration is placed on the last accent, which is technically against the rules. Still, it reads as a delightfully modern spin on Anglo-Saxon verse. 

Now, without further ado, let’s get to our poem for today, written by the sharp and gifted contemporary poet Mark Jarman. Jarman, who was born in 1952, has had an unusual stylistic trajectory. Normally, when a poet’s career includes both metrical and non-metrical poetry, it’s because the poet began their career writing strictly in verse and then loosened up over time. This situation describes the development of countless poets from the mid-twentieth century, including Robert Lowell, Donald Justice, Stanley Kunitz, Thom Gunn, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others. By contrast, Jarman began his career writing non-metrical poetry, and then abruptly adopted meter in the mid-1990’s: In 1996, he co-edited the landmark anthology of New Formalist verse entitled Rebel Angels, and in 1997 released his critically acclaimed collection, Questions For Ecclesiastes, which featured many accomplished poems in verse, most notably his series of “Unholy Sonnets,” one of which I’ll be reading today. Jarman describes his conversion to writing in meter as a choice he made in tandem with his own religious re-awakening. In a letter to me, he wrote: 

“I made a deliberate decision when I began the poems in Questions for Ecclesiastes, especially the sonnets, to adhere closely to metrical forms and patterns because I was engaging with issues of faith more directly than I had in the past. I thought writing in form would keep me from sentimentality.”

As Jarman rightly identified, formal rigor can often be an effective means of encouraging emotional rigor. Since that time, Jarman has remained active in the world of formal poetry, and in his own work has alternated between strictly metrical, loosely metrical, and non-metrical writing as it suits him. His latest collection published just last month, entitled Zeno’s Eternity, promises to be another interesting mixture of poetic strategies, and I look forward to reading it. Speaking of recommending things of his I haven’t yet read, and also speaking of Richard Wilbur, I noticed in my latest copy of The Hudson Review that Mark has an article about Wilbur’s translations of Moliere, which should also be a good read. For those of you who’ve never read Moliere and don’t have French, I highly recommend Richard Wilbur’s translations— they’re far and away the best out there. 

Now, if you’re familiar with the history of English poetry, you might be familiar with the 17th century Metaphysical poet John Donne’s famous series of so-called “Holy Sonnets.” Against the Renaissance convention of sonnets being addressed to an unattainable lover, these sonnets address matters of faith, and are perhaps most notable for the deeply passionate admixture of religious zeal, doubt, and anxiety that Donne displays in them. The most famous of these sonnets are the 10th, which begins “Death Be Not Proud,” and the 14th, which begins “Batter my heart, three-personed God.” 

By calling his own series of sonnets “Unholy Sonnets,” Jarman is calling back to Donne’s sonnets, and seems to imply that his are more unorthodox than Donne’s. In a certain sense they are, but the title is a bit misleading—these sonnets are not “unholy” in the sense that they’re Satanic, blasphemous, or anti-religious. On the contrary, much like Donne’s, they are beset with anxiety and doubt, but contain at their core a deep love of God. If they’re unholy at all, it’s in what you might call their thematic strategy— like Flannery O’Connor, in these sonnets Jarman often uses the brutal aspects of God or the dark impulses of humanity to reach a deeper truth about the nature of divinity. Unholy Sonnet 16 is a perfect example of this, and while it’s not as overtly dark as some others in the collection, it is in my opinion the most haunting. It goes like this: 

Unholy Sonnet 16

We drove to the world’s end and there betrayed

the ones we promised not to. While we drove

We talked about the afterlife and love,

slowing to an impatient crawl, delayed

by roadwork, in an idling parade

we couldn’t see the head or tail of.

We inched past miles of asphalt, reeking stuff,

stroked by a rake of fire as it was laid.

And we agreed the analogues for hell

came to us everywhere we looked in life.

But not for heaven. For it we couldn’t find

a metaphor or likeness. Not until

we had betrayed our loved ones, at the end,

did we have something to compare it with. 

            Though many of the rhymes here are consonantal slant rhymes, we can still easily identify the scheme: ABBAABBA, CDECED. We begin with two enclosed quatrains which share a rhyme scheme, forming an octet—we conclude with two tercets which are unrhymed in themselves but rhyme with one another, forming a sestet. Though the sestet has a different scheme from what we’ve seen before, we can still readily identify this poem as an Italian sonnet. As with last week, because I’ve already spoken at length about Italian sonnets on the show before, I’ll refrain from doing so now. I’ll merely point out that because Jarman is using slant rhyme rather than true rhyme here, the form of the sonnet becomes easier to achieve in English than it would be otherwise. 

            Speaking of slant rhymes, one of these pairs stands out more than the rest. In the sestet, “hell” is made to rhyme with “until,” and “find” is made to rhyme with “end.” So far so good. But what pairing does that leave us with? “Life” and “with.” This is neither a true rhyme nor a slant rhyme as we have previously understood it—both the consonant and the vowel have shifted. It would be premature however to say that this pair is totally unrhymed. To identify the way these two words rhyme, we have to get down to the level of oral articulation: both the “f” sound of “life” and the “t.h.” sound of “with” are voiceless fricatives. The sounds are produced in a similar manner, just in different parts of the mouth. As such, we might call this a “phonetic” slant rhyme. 

            Another rhyme which stands out here is the B rhyme, which over the course of four words sneakily transitions from a consonantal slant rhyme to a phonetic slant rhyme: “drove,” “love,” “of,” and “stuff.” From “drove” to “love” is a consonantal slant rhyme; from “love,” to “of” is a true rhyme; and from “of” to “stuff” is an assonantal slant rhyme. Because the sound has transitioned so much, the only similarity to tie together “drove” and “stuff” is the fact that the “f” sound and the “v” sound are both labiodental fricatives, the former unvoiced and the latter voiced. The formal possibilities inherent in subtle rhyming like this have been one of the main areas of interest for contemporary formal poets. 

            Metrically, the poem is pretty straightforward iambic pentameter, with trochaic substitutions in lines 4, 8, and 10, and amphibrachic substitutions in lines 6, 8, and 11. In my opinion, the most rhythmically interesting lines are 2, 4, and 6. Line two is interesting because it can be read, and probably should be read, as pure iambic pentameter, but that’s not necessarily how our ears hear it. Because of the strong caesura after “not to,” marked by a period, we hear the rhythm as being broken up. Though we can read it as iambic pentameter, we actually hear it more like iamb, iamb, amphibrach, cretic: ba-BUM ba-BUM ba-BUM-bum | BUM-ba-BUM. “the ones we promised not to. While we drove.” This is a great example of how the use of caesuras can rhythmically spice up a line without making any actual metrical substitutions. 

            In line four, we have a good example of how sound can reflect sense. Jarman describes the car “slowing to an impatient crawl.” To mimic the slowing of the car, he puts the driving iambic rhythm into reverse: Back to back trochaic substitutions in the first and second foot destroy the iambic momentum, and when it’s picked up again in the third foot, it has to slowly build up speed once more. 

Line six is notable simply because it’s short. Three iambs and an amphibrach, it’s a line of tetrameter rather than pentameter. It would be easy to dismiss this as a careless inconsistency, but if we double check to see if there could be a reason behind the shortness of the line, we find that there just might be a metrical pun here. The line, referring to traffic, reads “we couldn’t see the head or tail of.” Just as the extremities of the traffic are out of sight, so too, we are here missing a foot. Perhaps this is a cheesy defense, but I’d like to think it’s what Jarman had in mind. 

            Now let’s begin the poem again, starting with the octet: 

We drove to the world’s end and there betrayed

the ones we promised not to. While we drove

We talked about the afterlife and love,

slowing to an impatient crawl, delayed

by roadwork, in an idling parade

we couldn’t see the head or tail of.

We inched past miles of asphalt, reeking stuff,

stroked by a rake of fire as it was laid.

            The first two lines are rich with implication: “We drove to the world’s end and there betrayed the ones we promised not to.” What does he mean by “the world’s end”? He’s certainly no flat-earther, nor does he appear to be describing the literal apocalypse, so we have to take this phrase figuratively. John Donne was no flat-earther either, and this opening line recalls the opening line of Holy Sonnet 7, which begins, “At the round earth’s imagined corners, blow” In that poem, Donne begins by evoking the spatial ends of the world and goes on to describe the temporal end of the world, the last judgement. He pleads with God to withhold the last judgement until God has taught him how to repent for his sins. As we will see, Jarman suggests in this poem that repentance is sometimes only possible once it is already too late—after an irremediable sin, one that causes one’s world as one knew it to end. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself here. 

            For now, I invite the reader to pause and look up Donne’s poem, Holy Sonnet 7, and hold it in the back of their mind as they read this one. I also invite you to consider how, even if it’s not meant literally, the phrase “world’s end” conjures up associations both with a sea full of unknown monsters on the one hand, the place where the map of the world ends, and also the end of the world, the apocalypse. It is uncannily ominous in the context of a mere traffic jam. 

            The speaker is driving to this mysterious “world’s end” with a passenger. Both he and this passenger betray “the ones they promised not to.” What act between two people causes mutual betrayal? Whom do we promise not to betray, if not our spouse? Subtly and elliptically, Jarman has set the scene for a tale of two married people committing adultery with one another. With all the eerie and apocalyptic weight of the phrase “world’s end” we learn that what we are talking about is the end of loyalty and the beginning of a life in sin. Once the act is committed, the world of both this couple and their spouses will never be the same, and they will be in uncharted, treacherous waters. Knowing that such an act must be hid from the world, the cheating lovers flee to where they won’t be discovered—they might as well be at the end of the world. We’re only two lines in you guys, this is crazy.

            Despite the couple’s desire to get away to their tryst, they can’t be accused of not at least considering the implications of what they’re doing, even if they don’t fully understand them: they speak of love and the afterlife to pass the time in the car, presumably because these are issues one considers, especially a religious person, when deciding to betray one’s spouse. The consummation of the couple’s unfaithful bliss is then delayed by an inconvenient traffic jam, which has occurred due to roadwork. They find themselves “slowing to an impatient crawl—” the word “crawl” highlights their degradation—in an “idling parade we couldn’t see the head or tail of.” 

            Let’s stop here to consider why Jarman might have situated these lovers in a traffic jam. Near the end of the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 7:13, Jesus says: “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat.” What Jesus is saying is that the path of sin is a wide and easy way to travel through life, and most people follow it. Our couple here are literally on the path to sin and find themselves surrounded by a crowd of people going in the same direction. These sinners, driven by hedonistic impulses, are like a parade, celebrating the path to their own destruction. Just as sin is driven by ignorance of life’s origin and life’s purpose, so too this couple cannot see “head or tail” of the road they’re on. We might also note that both “head’ and “tail” can have sexual connotations, an effect I’ll revisit shortly. Finally, the phrase “head or tail” reminds us of a coin toss and is a reminder that these people are playing with their lives with no knowledge of what the outcome will be. 

            What is the meaning of the fact that the road is under construction? We could take this to mean that the road to sin is so well travelled that it must constantly be repaired, made to look fresh and new for its potential victims, and this would accord with the hellish imagery we meet with later in the poem. Alternatively, we could take a more mystical approach, one which I suspect had nothing to do with Jarman’s intentions but is interesting to consider regardless. 

            In the cosmology of Lurianic Kabbalah, the dominant branch of Jewish mysticism, the creation of the world is almost immediately followed by a cosmic catastrophe. To create the finite material world, God, who is conceived of as infinite light, had to contract itself, creating a void where creation could take place. Within this void, a small stream of God’s light poured through, and this light created a series of descending vessels within which the light itself could be contained and filtered down into a potential material world. However, these vessels were deliberately formed in an un-unified way and were unable to properly contain the light which flowed into them. 

As such, in a cataclysmic domino effect, one by one they began to shatter like lightbulbs, sending shards hurtling down, forming what would become the material world. These shards of the vessels themselves contained divine sparks, but because these sparks are hidden within the confines of the shards, they are not always evident. The darkness and evil of our world can be attributed therefore to the fact that the sparks of divine light which are everywhere throughout our world, and which are the origins of our souls, are encased within imperfect shells of materiality. Our goal as human beings is to extricate and reveal the sparks of light from creation, which we do through good deeds, and thereby contribute to the repairing of the world, what is called Tikkun-Olam.  

What’s crucial to understand here is that the shattering of the vessels is part of God’s deliberate plan—the idea is that giving people the opportunity to be righteous in the face of evil, to make order out of chaos, to repair the world, is a greater good than God simply existing in immaculate perfection. We see this idea play out in Christianity too in the idea of the Felix Culpa, the “happy fault” or fortunate fall, which views the fall of Adam and Eve as ultimately a good thing, because it provided the impetus for Christ to come into the world. 

To get back to Jarman, we might view this road under repair not simply as the road to sin, but the entire world, which suffers from sin and must constantly be repaired. In the grand scheme of things, it may even be that the shattering of the relationships which the adultery will cause will provide a means for the individuals to become, in their regret and repentance, more righteous people. The unholy provides an opportunity for the holy to enter in. This reading reveals yet another interpretation of the phrase “world’s end”—the purpose of the world is for people to work out their salvation through their mistakes. 

In lines 7 and 8, we get the hellish imagery I mentioned before: “we inched past miles of asphalt, reeking stuff, stroked by a rake of fire as it was laid.” This description can’t help but call to mind the fire and brimstone imagery we typically associate with Hell. Furthermore, this Hellish imagery is made to be intimately associated with lust: the asphalt—which can be broken down into the words “ass” and “fault”— is stroked by a rake—“rake” being a term which can refer to a womanizer— as it was laid. I need hardly spell it out any further. 

Now let’s begin again, and this time, read all the way through:

We drove to the world’s end and there betrayed

the ones we promised not to. While we drove

We talked about the afterlife and love,

slowing to an impatient crawl, delayed

by roadwork, in an idling parade

we couldn’t see the head or tail of.

We inched past miles of asphalt, reeking stuff,

stroked by a rake of fire as it was laid.

And we agreed the analogues for hell

came to us everywhere we looked in life.

But not for heaven. For it we couldn’t find

a metaphor or likeness. Not until

we had betrayed our loved ones, at the end,

did we have something to compare it with. 

The couple recognize their surroundings as hellish and observe that in general life is full of sights that remind one of hell, whereas nothing on earth appears to resemble our ideas of heaven. Such an observation of course says much more about these individuals than it says about the world. It’s of course true that the world is full of suffering and ugliness, but it’s also full of astounding beauty that often seems to intimate a higher order of existence. The fact that this couple can only see the hellishness in things is evidence of how their minds have become distorted by sin and guilt, even before they actually perform the sinful deed. 

The last sentence is what makes this poem devastating: “Not until we had betrayed our loved ones, at the end, did we have something to compare it with.” The coldly neutral phrase from line two, “the ones we promised not to,” has been exchanged for “our loved ones,” showing the psychological evolution of the speaker—while driving out to consummate the affair, he had distanced himself and his mistress from their spouses as much as possible, in order to avoid feelings of guilt. After consummating the affair however, the couple realize that they actually do love their spouses. Part of this realization is that they did actually have something on earth to compare to heaven—namely the peace and bliss of a happy marital life. Only now that that life is gone can they see it for how heavenly it was. 

There is however a chilling ambiguity here. The speaker says that “at the end” they had something to compare heaven with.  It’s unlikely, but possible, that it’s actually the consummation of their infidelity which they see as heavenly, the literal and figurative climax of their erotic desires. Though I don’t think that this is reading we should prefer, the fact that this last line can mean both one thing and its opposite, both the realization of lost goodness and the reveling in present vice, makes this poem especially disturbing. 

            We can now see why Jarman chose to call this an “unholy sonnet.” By giving us a study of sin, this poem illustrates the reality of a moral world. Those who attempt to defend the decadent poet Charles Baudelaire often argue that his poems engage in a similar strategy. The poet whom I think of most however is one of Jarman’s own favorites, William Blake. Just as Jarman wrote unholy sonnets to contrast with Donne’s holy sonnets, Blake wrote a series of what he called “proverbs from hell” to contrast and complement the biblical book of Proverbs. Several of Blake’s proverbs could serve to sum up the tragic, moral development of Jarman’s poem: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” “If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.” “You never know what is enough, unless you know what is more than enough.” 

            With all that we’ve learned and explored, let’s read through this poem one last time, as an old friend: 

Unholy Sonnet 16

We drove to the world’s end and there betrayed

the ones we promised not to. While we drove

We talked about the afterlife and love,

slowing to an impatient crawl, delayed

by roadwork, in an idling parade

we couldn’t see the head or tail of.

We inched past miles of asphalt, reeking stuff,

stroked by a rake of fire as it was laid.

And we agreed the analogues for hell

came to us everywhere we looked in life.

But not for heaven. For it we couldn’t find

a metaphor or likeness. Not until

we had betrayed our loved ones, at the end,

did we have something to compare it with.