James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

Literary Blog: Sonnets Petrarchan and Shakespearean

Literary Blog: Sonnets Petrarchan and Shakespearean

(By Neither Frank nor Bill) Part !

Some favorable responses to my previous literary blogs, especially to the Shakespeare-Marlowe parody Hamlet At Wittenberg, encourage me to continue posting from time to time literary blogs presenting, with commentary, non-scholarly literary writings from my past. This is another of those.

While I was still in Berkeley High School in the early 1940s I had begun composing verses in the set forms--sonnets, ballades, triolets and villanelles--to amuse myself and please my English teachers, two of them. I don’t remember the name of the first; the second, and a powerful influence on me during those creative years, was Constance Topping, a maiden lady of British descent who lived in a big apartment house on Benvenue Avenue just east of Dwight Way in Berkeley, next door to Duffey’s Boarding House where I lived with my father. I still preserve in the originals many papers and assignments I wrote for her, with her notations in margins and her grades and comments at the end. I started out badly, writing a satire of Christian Science (I had lived with a family of whom the mother was a C.S. practitioner), quoting Mark Twain’s observation that it wouldn’t fix the broken leg of a chair; her grade was a B+, her comment included the observation that not everyone would find this belief so funny, and my belated realization was that Constance Topping was herself--yes, you guessed it. Far more successfully, I wrote for her a ballade about the squirrels who played in the trees between our two dwellings, which she observed every day as I did, That Ballade of the Dead Squirrels won a prize at the Berkeley Poets Dinner, held at the Claremont Hotel, a great honor for me. I will print that here some time.

I was especially fond of the sonnet, both the more difficult Petrarchan kind and the easier Shakespearean kind. (The latter are so easy that I have twice in my life composed them one-a-day to please women I was/am fond of--once for a girlfriend named Hazel while I was a soldier in the Japanese Language School at Ann Arbor in 1944, again in August this year when my daughter Sarah said she wanted a sonnet for her birthday, and I responded that that was too easy, I would do one a day for a week. And I almost did that, completing six.)

I am going to copy in this and subsequent blogs, with brief introductory notes, a series of the sonnets I have composed over the years, mostly while much younger. I will not include the ones for Sarah, which contain too many private references that would require long explanations. I begin with three-and-a-half (one unfinished) would-be serious ones, all in the more difficult Petrarchan form, composed while I was a Berkeley High student. Some of my deepest feelings at that time were experienced on clear, cold nights when I found myself outdoors--coming back from ushering in San Francisco (as related in a previous blog) or out late on a date with a girlfriend. These sonnets were attempts to capture and convey those feelings.

Night Sonnets (1942-3. Berkeley High School)

(Unfinished—re-used in one of a series of one-a-day Love

Sonnets for Hazel, to be printed here later, at least in part.)

No, thinking further: the Sonnets for Hazel mostly aren’t worth reprinting, and I will dispose of them by copying a single one here at the end, to offset the seriousness (so intended, at least) of the above. This one was composed one Saturday when I was unable to join her, as anticipated, because I was kept in on KP (kitchen police, the Army’s punishment for minor misdemeanors--I can’t remember what mine was)--and I spent much of the day mopping floors, while composing this to send to her: (Now that I read it again, after many years, I see that it isn’t a sonnet at all. I did write Shakespearean sonnets to Hazel, but this isn’t one of them, it’s just a series of rhymed couplets in iambic pentameter.)

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