An Open-Hearted Master Class on the Sonnet

“Over the past decade,” writes Jeanne Murray Walker in the preface to her collection Pilgrim, You Find the Path by Walking, “I have felt troubled by the flatness of much contemporary American poetry, my own included.” Personality, voice, tension—she missed them, wanted more. Like many poets of the past twenty years, she rediscovered those perennial fonts of invigoration and refreshment, Renaissance poetry and the sonnet.

In this inviting, passionate, accomplished collection, at least four pilgrimages—the poet’s search for form, the sonnet as pilgrimage, the believer’s journey, and life as a pilgrimage through grief, loss, memory, and silence—fuse into a single metaphor field in which any of these may stand for any other. A much-published, much-awarded poet and playwright, Walker, who lives just outside Philadelphia, taught at the University of Delaware for forty years. A career teacher, she currently serves as a Mentor in the Seattle Pacific University Master of Fine Arts Program. In her poetry a kind and gentle voice coexists with sparkling technical and tonal mastery.

The sonnet inspires poetic explosions at least once a generation. Since 2000 we’ve seen an amazing number of poets—including some once suspicious or contemptuous of the form—write sonnets for this millennium, acknowledging the tradition in a contemporary register. Really, the sonnet poses the two questions of poetic form itself: to use it or not, and if you use it, how? This square, songlike straitjacket comes saturated with rules regarding number of lines (traditionally fourteen), meter (traditionally in English iambic, most commonly iambic pentameter), rhyme scheme (Petrarchan? Shakespearean? Spenserian? couplets? terza rima? blank verse?), and even rhetorical structure (exposition and development in the first eight lines, leading to a reversal—often signaled by the celebrated But beginning line nine—which leads in turn to an ironic resolution). While all these rules are optional, their very existence faces the poet with a lot of decisions to be made or ignored.

The choice of sonnet goes straight to the heart of the matter, the pilgrim’s search. Just as Jeanne Murray Walker the poet, in search of fresh ideas, ways, and means, chooses a form that is always experimental, Jeanne Murray Walker the believer goes in search of belief, and Jeanne Murray Walker the daughter goes in search of comfort when she loses her mother.

Ubiquitous yet elusive, divinity is glimpsed in the act of creation, the mystery of existence, the wonder of other people, the cataclysms of loss, the promise of silence. Yet, as much as the believer keeps discovering divinity, every believer remains a pilgrim, traveling a path s/he makes by going. Every poet is a pilgrim, too, traveling far from home, sometimes arriving somewhere, far more often just traveling, since, as Bashō says in an epigram to this collection, “the journey itself is home.” Thus Walker’s preface is titled “My Pilgrimage with the Sonnet,” and her Introduction is titled, “The Map of the Pilgrimage,” setting out four aspects on which the poems will dwell: creation; our connections between one another and with creation; grief; and silence.

Walker offers fifty-five sonnets in various forms and tones, hewing generally to the traditional, musical heritage but working marvelous variations. Rightly, she senses that from its beginnings the sonnet has always been experimental. Here, we encounter “Rummaging Through Language to Find a Sonnet,” with eight lines of expansive prose, then one explosive line (“when I see this precious, never-to-be-precisely-reiterated brightness”) funneling into five regular pentameter lines. And we also find “Grief,” one of the best of the collection, largely Shakespearean, at least in rhyme scheme:

And then it’s like this: wood smoke blows
across the meadow and a woman is walking
with toast and coffee to a small round window,
where she watches pines raise their blackening
lattice-work against the silver fog.

Pine, she says. Morning.

Anything so she can

find a knob to steer the day. To stop the bog

from closing over that dear face again.

She is on duty, grieving. Waiting till when

she gets some further dispatch — she’ll stay

where shadows swarm the landscape, where the fen

might swallow her alive, as well.

Someday

she may return with news. Till then, for

now, let morning find itself without her.

For all its traditional seemings, “Grief” is just as experimental as “Rummaging.” Voltas and enjambments sprawl across lines and rhymes. Caesuras move fitfully, with many a hard stop, preventing the eye from slipping too easily along. Line and section breaks block the tendency of the grammatical unit to fill out the entire line. Quatrains and couplets exist, but the verse-paragraphs break against them, untidying the traditional well-packaged scheme.

Note, too, how Walker adroitly employs “ghost beats”—not indicated in the word-stresses yet suggested by, say, a dash, a line break. The opening line, “And then it’s like this: wood smoke blows,” seems to lack two syllables, until we realize that the colon is asking us to give it a ghost beat, in this case a trochee—“And then it’s like this [ ′ ᵕ ] wood smoke blows”—a moment of metrical silence, a musical rest that happens in time with the line. Again, in “she gets some further dispatch—she’ll stay,” that em-dash calls for a heavily accented rest in the moving line: “she gets some further dispatch [′] she’ll stay.”

Walker creates effective headless lines, as in the lovely “latticework against the silver fog.” Especially telling in “Grief” is how Walker employs rhymes on and off beat (“blows”/“window”; “walking”/“blackening”; “stay”/“Someday”) and reversed or weakened line-endings, as in both lines of the final couplet. This again breaks against expectations, pressing prosaic tensions into a portrait of suffering and struggle. The effect I get from the couplet is to frame or isolate “her,” the grieving woman alone with her loss and healing. Morning must “find itself without her” and she find herself without the morning.

Perhaps inevitably, the section on grief dominates. Walker’s 2013 memoir, A Geography of Memory: A Pilgrimage Through Alzheimer’s, charts her mother’s entry into dementia, Walker’s efforts to care for her, and how her relations with her mother and sister, and her own understanding of herself, changed. In Pilgrim, the pilgrimage is now through grief. We have seen already in “Grief” the isolation of the griever. Elsewhere we encounter grief’s hallucinations (“Who is she, elbow cocked against the sun/ waving to me this morning on the lawn?”), harsh discoveries (“My mother’s doing what she has never/done before: inventing her departure”), scarring (“Her heart’s a cypress;/she feels it forming a final growth-ring of grief”), and healing, imaged as the birth of a foal:

How lightness

drops from the womb of night like a white foal

this sudden morning, juddering to unbend,

breathing new air. Gathering herself to stand.

The divine is in constant tension with the griever. “Meanwhile, you hide,” the griever says. “No image, sign or word,/however shifting, can fix you — the Light/light changes to.” But the divine has a comeback. “You tell me I am silent,” it says in “The Voice.” But maybe the grieving mind is asking the wrong questions: “Why not believe the beauty you/ see? I pour sun through oaks. What more do I have to do?”

We are not always ready or able to believe in the beauty we see. Overwhelming and eloquent, it should perhaps be enough for us but isn’t. In poems such as the closer, “Farewell,” Walker suggests that it’s hard—and necessary—to live with silence, to accept how full it is of the divine we seek. Thus arises one of the book’s loveliest passages:

Dusk falls. So much goes on

that we can’t grasp. Trees hush, the vast

dimmer switch of sun dials down and noise

relents.

That’s a wonderful place to be left. Pilgrim, You Find the Path by Walking is a collection to read and re-read. It’s a fine introduction to the origins and energy of the sonnet, a master class on writing sonnets, an open-hearted exploration of the life journey of the believer, and an empathetic, faithful rendering of the struggles of those who lose and suffer. It gives us the sense, as in “Everywhere You Look You See Lilacs,” of “[h]ow not traveling,/we’ve still traveled everywhere.” It’s a pilgrimage well worth taking.

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Pilgrim, You Find the Path By Walking

By Jeanne Murray Walker

Paraclete Press

Published April 16, 2019

96 pages