Black Saturday

Here's a case study in how to be ironic, sad, witty, pious, poignant and heretical simultaneously.

Holy Sonnet 5

Mark Jarman

This is the moment. This all we have.
But how can we say this? What do we mean
By saying this to children, like sad men
With minds gones rotten in a sexual hive,
Who show children the secret thing they have--
The answer to all questions? What do we mean,
Then, by the souls of children, women, men?
The question stung and swollen in the hive.
I think I know sometimes and feel the joy
Of loving only for a lifetime. Death
Will smoke us out like bees, but we'll forget
That we were going to see the end of joy.
Our souls will keep like honey after death.
We'll forget that we were going to forget.




It's a sonnet, alright, but unless you read it several times you probably won't notice. The line breaks fall in interesting places, the rhymes are usually slant rhymes or consonance, he repeats so many of the words that fall at the end of a line.


And the imagery is dense, confusing, wrapping back in on itself and refining the metaphors to ever less conclusive ends. It sure seems like a 21st-century metaphysical poem to me. And if you're going to follow in the footsteps of Donne, Marvell, Herbert and Hopkins this is probably the best way to do it.


You have to be full of failure. You have to be accepting of how worthless it is: poetry, religion, the world, yourself. You have to be resigned. But you have to never let that get in the way.


Even the darkest parts of the poem seem to have some hint of redemption or at the very least brokenness in need of becoming whole. How about the reference to sex offenders "who show children the secret thing they have?" Sure, it's horrific and stark, but there's also something moving about linking the biological facts to a secret thing, the answer to all questions, the hidden mystery you have to be initiated into.


Lest you think me a pedophile booster, let me assure you that nothing could be further from the truth. But there's something more holistic here than "To Catch a Predator." The poem looks at monsters and finds men. It looks at death and finds a forgetting. There's a hard-won optimism here, wisdom that comes from pain.


As Det. Somerset closes David Fincher's Se7en: "Ernest Hemingway once wrote, 'The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.' I agree with the second part."