The Logic of Jarman’s Sonnets

The one structural standard that holds constant throughout Mark Jarman’s Unholy Sonnets is that the poems are composed in fourteen lines. The traditional sonnet meter is relaxed when the dictates of the language or meaning predominate, and the rhymes of traditional forms are mixed, slanted, or ignored when a poem seems to call for necessary freedom. The jarring of form is consistent with the jarring of meaning or the traditional orthodoxy that is challenged by the poems. In terms of meaning, the sonnets are constant in the way that each explores a concept of religious orthodoxy through a process that builds to subversion. The sonnets concern themselves with language and the ways that man imagines God and tries to communicate with him in human terms. The turns the sonnets take attempt revision based often on man reaching for the unknowable.

Most of the sonnets are meditations that gently nudge the meaning of religious orthodoxy, but three are addressed directly to God. These three carry the voice of the supplicant and come at the beginning of the volume, at number 3 and at number 33 as though their placement carried the significance of spiritual numbering.

The introductory sonnet petitions God as driver of the other car on the highway. Each of the quatrains in the Petrarchan octave begin with “Please” and follow with a request for erratic driving—bear down, swerve, slow, cut off, and blast the horn in the first octave, tailgating and jockeying for position on a mountain road in the second. The turn reflects the exhaustion of “sanity/ and fuel,” and with the signature “please” asks the other driver to stop, get out, and walk back in rage to show his face. The tone evokes the Old Testament God, who frequently appeared out of a whirlwind or within violent experience, to appear in incredibly modern terms. The request central to the poem is for God to appear in the most unlikely circumstance and to reveal himself “face to face.” While the poem is organized around a slant rhyme scheme of abbaabbacdecde, there is the sense of a quatrain and couplet embedded in the sestet. The first four lines, even in their turn, increase the momentum of the action with the repetition of “please,” while the final two lines figure the response of the supplicant and rise to a crescendo with “My Lord!”. The two final words are both oath and penitential response. The sonnet establishes the “unholy” parameters of the sonnets to follow.

In sonnet 3, the “imagined God” is addressed with a request that the “blow” be softened. The speaker admits that his concept of God is “derivative,” but he believes that partly he is “bent” to make God appear to be accidental. Again, using the Petrarchan form, the octave questions the pressure that is brought to bear on the speaker while the sestet acquiesces. If he is to be bent “like the pole/ A horseshoe clangs against,” then he asks God to bend him “like the grinning iron monger” twisting a bar.

In sonnet 33, God is addressed in a conventional form at the beginning of the octave—“Lord, spare me”—and at the beginning of the sestet—“Lord, stop my hand,” but the subject matter is less conventional and what begins with a semblance of rhyme loses any sense of rhyme after the first quatrain. Basically, the poem is the writer’s request that God keep him working and deliver him from the boredom of routine activities that prevent the holiness of his task from being realized. While there is very little progression in the development of the idea of the sonnet, there is a turn in mood in the ending couplet. Following the recital of those things that intervene in a writer’s life, there is a request that the writer be “equal to the task,” and the task be the “preoccupation of the lifework.”

There are four sonnet sequences within the volume. Two of these use the interlocking first and last lines characteristic of Donne, but two short sequences choose not to use this form and are simply tied by turning a common theme to several angles.

The first of these is written in response to a quotation by the theologian Karl Barth that suggests that God’s action or creation is the “answer” to a voiced prayer. The short sequence begins with a testing of the Barthian axiom and follows with a sonnet that explores the same concept in the temporal rather than the spiritual world. The next modulates back to a devotional approach, and the final sonnet in the sequence ends with a prayer of its own.

The octave of the first sonnet enumerates natural phenomena such as lightning, meteors, and viruses, and uses the Barthian notion as the turn in the sonnet: “Into this random rightness comes the prayer.” Jarman seems to challenge the notion by suggesting that the prayer is only interested in its answer and “twists time in a knot until it gets it.”

The utter disregard for the larger picture that seems to be figured in this preoccupation with answer is portrayed in the poem that follows. There’s a knock at the door but the man of the house is in the bath. The knock continues and accelerates causing the man to go see “what’s the matter.” The metaphorical suggestion is that if a demand is expressed loudly and insistently enough, it will get an answer.

The third poem in the sequence spins off the traditional supplication for life and daily bread. The speaker suggests that whatever comes is assumed by the supplicant to be the answer. The turn of the poem questions what the proper request could possibly be. If it is for God’s return, then the request is really invoking the end of time. In the last poem of the sequence, the supplicant acknowledges that prayer is basically man trying to make up or imagine God. As a kind of example, the narrator suggests that he is going to make up a God “immanent as snow.” In the turn of the sonnet, this snow God is addressed directly with a request that he reveal himself “as dangerous as it is beautiful.”

The sequence does what a single poem could not do. It explores the logic of the proposition of prayer and the imaginative dimension that it expects, and while it does not reject prayer per se, it does debunk the easy notions of the reality of man influencing God and argues for understanding that at best it can be merely a channel for understanding what is rather than arguing a whimsical what might be.

Sonnet 9 continues this debate on the problem of man communicating with God in its insistence that “someone is always praying as the plane/ breaks up.” The octave delineates the possible prayers before the crash, and the sestet answers with the crash and the ominous reality that “prayer/ struck . . . the rockhard, rippled face of facelessness.” The audacity of man communicating with God as though he were man seems to be an underlying problem. If the sonnets do anything, they argue for man to come to terms with the “facelessness” of God.

Sonnet 11 pictures a boy being influenced by a gang member to rob a convenience store in the octave. The sestet answers by forcing the gaze back on the gang member and suggests that the reader look inside the nylon stocking pulled over the head for the “sacred face inside that face.” The search for the sacred, the understanding of the sacred as sacred rather than a man’s version of sacred, is central to these sonnets.