Catholic Sonnets,

Continued...

A. Senior/ Continued from Page 7

"Surely nothing could be worse than this." While ordinary prose is good and useful for saying most things, poetry is a higher language, reserved for saying the most important things, about love and death and war. One of the functions of poetry is to fix things in the memory more firmly, by the use of images, rhyme, and rhythm, and in the case of the sonnet, to sum up more briefly.

This is a truth our enemies know all too well. It is a sad fact to admit that most of us don’t know much poetry by heart, but we can all sing a thousand jingles from the relentless attacks of modern advertising. How much better our lives would be if we could manage to keep a few sonnets like this in our memory.

Great orators have always relied on certain mnemonic devices. One of them is to reduce a long story to a few memorable parts. Good poems frequently do the same. They presume that the reader already knows the whole background, while concentrating on certain key elements. Great musical compositions often do the same thing; there are many wonderful works where one couldn’t possibly remember every note and nuance, but the overture or the aria sums it up.

This sonnet, in just a few formal lines, brings to mind the whole story of the miracle of the plagues of Egypt and the terrifying miracle of the Passover. In prose one might be more loose in the use of words, but here the author, restrained but also creatively freed by the shape of the sonnet, has carefully chosen each word. Note, for instance, the phrase "perptuant night." He could well have said "unending" or the more familiar word "perpetual," but instead he creates a participle, giving a slightly different significance. And the phrase "obsidian bliss" is highly evocative, stimming the imagination and the passions.

So, while I would certainly always encourage people to become familiar with the great classics first and foremost, and in general to mistrust newer things, in this case I would also recommend this collection by William Baer. ■