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Approaching the sonnet sequence/cycle as a narrative: A case-study of Vidyan Ravinthiran (2019) The Million-Petalled Flower Of Being Here Hexham, Bloodaxe Books.

This is a revised version following useful contact on Twitter (see Comments) with Christine Mcgregor, Publicity Officer at Bloodaxe Books. She kindly pointed out that I had mistaken the identification of the poet Faraj cited in Ravithiran’s poem with that title. She furthermore provided me, with Vidyan’s Ravithiran’s help, the text of the translations of Faraj’s poems. This formed the basis of my revisions in the text below. Here follows the revised original text.

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This may get longer than originally intended. My plan is to divide what I want to say under different headings:

• Introducing Renaissance / Elizabethan sonnet sequences. Is a Lyrical Cycle or Sequence the appropriate descriptor of a genre that consists of sets of sonnet by one person in a single publication.
• Brief discussion of why and how narrative form might be used as a descriptor in sets of sonnet by one person in a single publication.
• Why a ‘married love’ narrative theme might make a  difference.  The test-case of George Meredith’s Modern Love.
• How I read The Million-Petalled Flower Of Being Here.

The Italian model of the English Elizabethan sonnet sequences. Lyrical Cycle or Sequence assessed as a descriptor of the genre that consists of sets of sonnet by one person in a single publication.

In the 1970s, when I first went to UCL to read English, we were fed from the start by the Elizabethans with a special emphasis on Edmund Spenser. Each poem of his was studied in terms of its specific genre and the models which influenced that genre. So we took Amoretti and duly read others from Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella to Shakespeare’s most alarming (to me then) queering of the form. We had lectures on the Italian forerunner with much on Petrarch and the Neoplatonics. We read Rosemund Tuve. The emphasis was on allegory, a decidedly narrative device but the poems themselves oft insisted in their singular virtuosity, as in Sonnet 1 of Amoretti:

Leaues, lines, and rymes, seeke her to please alone,
 whom if ye please, I care for other none.

Amoretti. Sonnet 1, ll 1f.

The sonnet is a lyric sung with all the accoutrements of that printed form – the leaves, lines and rhymes included. It pleases itself in pleasing its subject alone and Spenser keeps insisting that his sonnets will but accumulate till his lady yield to him or, as she does, leave him entirely. And this will happen even though there are more serious calls on Spenser’s time in the ever-moving story of the world, such as (in Sonnet XXXIII) the narrative poem to the praise of the Great Queen Elizabeth, ‘The Faerie Queene’.

Let’s face it, Spenser seems to say, these poems are time taken out from the world and dedicated to pleasure alone, though there is a self-consuming battle with time to achieve it. That pleasure merely consumes its wishful protagonist-poets as many more Elizabethan sequences also attest. They are ‘cycles’ when they move from pleading to some sort of temporising satisfaction and thence to loss. They talk about time lost and never regained. In that latter sense they merely are discrete moments of time in sequence. Nothing like story, which demands greater multiplicity of subjects and goals is ever really allowed here and more potential goals and endings.

I will have to leave this assertion rather than sustain the argument further because my interest is in why sonnets might get attracted to more complex narratives, given their origins as a genre. By doing so, we might get a better idea of the kind of achievement Vidyan Ravinthiran’s new poem represents.

In reading later sonnets we will have to avoid the kind of formalism recently reinvented for the genre by Don Paterson via some kind of neuropsychological theory. In one of his long footnotes to The Poem (2018), he says:

…it’s rendered a mere shaped space for thinking in, and for directing emotion. Its shape lays out a rough emotional and argumentative terrain across which a ‘spoken plea’ can be conducted, leaving the brain free to concentrate on original content alone.

Paterson, D. (2018, f.n., p.661) The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre London, Faber & Faber.

What this seems to say is that the sonnet is a temporal space. It concentrates so formally on a distinct and hackneyed plea whose outcome is pleasure, that it allows for a more original mental content (structured thought) to arise, as if liberated from urgent thoughts about ‘in what form can I say what I want to say’. This idea is consistent in Paterson who shows that though Shakespeare’s Sonnets are a sequence, it is a sequence where individual moments – each discrete sonnet – must be read for itself alone and not as a longer ‘fiction or a dramatic monologue’.[1]

Discuss briefly why and how narrative form might be used as a descriptor in sets of sonnet by one person in a single publication.

Now, I believe we will find that Ravinthiran’s sonnets are also explorations of intense thought, just like Paterson’s characterisation of Shakespeare as sonneteer. However, they are also necessarily a narrative ‘fiction or a dramatic monologue’, in which selves take different roles and meet other role-players along the way. In fact I think we must see them as a story to take seriously his explanation of what it means to ‘be here’ as a family, person, couple or as a writer addressing a reader and vice-versa:

The situation described here of a poet reading and waiting for his reader is one reason why this collection contains so many ‘found poems’ that take their place in a story in terms of the effects reading and transcribing them have as the poet takes time out of his story. That it is a narrative first and foremost, it is also why the title of each poem is always situated as either or both a descriptor of the poem’s moment in space and time and as part of the poem’s narrative. Is this first sonnet a poem about what happened ‘Today’. Or does the title merely begin this moment in a situated narrative sequence.

The title often must be treated entirely as a line in the sequence of narrative in the poem and has little function in setting a theme (see the use of ‘Don’t stop’ and ‘I mention it’).[3] At other times the title does set a theme that is important in focusing on the contexts in which Ravinthiran’s relationship to his wife, as a couple of different ethnicity and skin-colour in post-Brexit Northern England (even specifically Leeds, Durham and Birmingham with all their differences of population demographics).

Some poems are ‘found’ and then translated, where the act of translation is itself part of the narrative and the effect of the dynamics of the poem. There is for instance that deeply situated yet resonant sonnet named ‘from the Tamil’ in which translation is a context for misunderstanding but also for the emergence of new thought:

Such acts of differential translation happen even when two people read one and the same poem if the context in which the poem is ‘known’ is different for each reader. This seems the nub of the beautiful poem, Larkin (p.35), which is of course about reading a poem by a known poet. How Larkin’s texts are known thoughout the story told constantly shifts depending on how the poet is found to be ‘relatable’ (the singling out of this ‘student’ neologism is Ravinthiran’s) to different readers and contexts.

So this work is neiher a sequence or cycle but evidently is a story. Like all narratives, it has different characters, each with different ‘points of view’ and even with changes in point of view through the events of the story, and a plot with momentum, pauses and reversals. I think we can see why Ravinthiran might want to write in sonnet sets, with all their associations to the sequencing complex moments of variable thought. But he also wants his reader to follow a story that moves through the whole sequence to a goal or goals.

Why ‘married love’ themes might make a  difference.  The test-case of George Meredith’s Modern Love.

From Sonnet 1 Ravinthiran makes it clear that this set of poems is about his marriage. This is a marriage which requires a number of stories to be told if it is to be understood. These stories are about similarities and differences in culture, context and experience in characters and how both of these interact in the experience of a changing relationship. To do so, it exploits a background of stories of the partners’ own families and earlier lives. The commonalities in these – that they are both creative writers and readers – imply even more differences at multiple points of comparison throughout the duration of the poems. Narrative implies a plot has temporal duration and temporal shifts caused by contingencies whether those be Brexit, a job change, or maybe even how different linguistic backgrounds cause each to read names in a poem differently. How for instance might Faraj sound like Farage!

There is no evidence, as there is for Tennyson and Browning, that Ravinthiran read or was influenced by Meredith’s Modern Love in writing this poem. However, in that poem the sonnet sequence’s function shifted. It is a shift in which sonneteer is no longer merely portraying mood shifts in sequential moments. Instead they have a decidedly narrative function. Of courses any echoes seen between poems are relational, produced by readers as much as writers, so they will not explored here. They can be followed up by those who want so to do by using the link to a full text of the earlier poem immediately above. Let’s just acknowledge that Modern Love is best described critically not as a mere sequences of moments, or cycle of in a merely convention romance, but as a novel that involves depicting:

… insurmountable psychological differences between the agents, mirrored in the shifting narratorial perspective and polyvocality …(in)…. “the manner of Henry James”.

Mitchel, R.N. & Benford, C. [citing Friedman, N. 1957] (2012:xxxix) ‘Introduction’ in George Meredith  (Mitchel, R.N. & Benford, C. (Eds.)): Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads New Haven, Yale University Press.

 So, in discussing Ravinthiran I will assume the total freedom of being able to discuss that sequence as one held together like a narrative with the same access to difference through a range of voices and perspectives, even those of words merely written (by John Addington Symons for instance) and stories told (like Barret/Browning).[6]

How I read The Million-Petalled Flower Of Being Here

In fact such a portentous subtitle promises more than, at the moment, I can give. I’m intending only to illustrate how and why this work must be read as a narrative using the rich devices of narrative in league with those of poetry. These interact – the knowledge of how poetry invites differences in comprehension including legal and other senses of misprision (in Shakespeare’s rich sense of that word in his own Sonnets). We constantly misunderstand each other in narratives in order to drive the narrative forward and complicate it. Sometimes the misunderstanding is about how we say a word in verse changes its potential readings – erroneous or not.

Context is vitally important to understanding here – even that context provide by lifting another poet’s name into a poem and interpreting it metrically as ‘trochee’ (stressed – unstressed) or ‘iamb’ (unstressed – stressed). Contexts and purposes riddle language with potential error, sometimes deliberately. The poem is about poems and poets therefore but also about translators (median characters who transport meaning across a space) and perhaps almost certainly sometimes get it wrong – as in Leila Abouleila’s great novel The Translator. Meaning can be got so wrong in this poem that the name of the Libyan poet, Faraj, can be a homophone in the final poem as that phrase of despair in English we know as, ‘Nigel Farage’.

The poem tells of the poet Faraj’s (full name Faraj Mohamed Ali Aghnayah) difficult passage from his war-torn native Libya to a British Council event at Villa Ma’amoura, in Tunisia in September 2018. This conference as described by Martha Sprackland involved a collective meeting of the twenty poets who would be involved in translating each other’s poems. But the translation process was complex, as Sprackland describes it:

In threes (British poet, Maghreb poet, and translator) we installed ourselves in the many corners of the house – on the hot terraces facing the sea, in the cool, dark rooms, in the hammock in the garden – and began work on the translations of each other’s poems, from and into English, Arabic, Arabic dialect, and Tamazight, that we will finesse over the coming months.

Martha Sprackland in https://literature.britishcouncil.org/blog/2018/majaaz-poetry-translation-workshop-tunisia-sept-2018/

The poems produced appeared in a volume of Modern Poetry in Translation in which the relation between the languages of the Mahgreb poets named by Sprackland above.[6] Ravinthiran describes the mess characterising the tri-partite meetings within which poems got transported between languages: Faraj, a translator and himself in the introduction to the 5 poems of Faraj’s he translates in Modern Poetry in Translation:

..on the sun-languorous balcony (flies, and coffee, kept us buzzing) with our translator, John, helping things along – sheets of translations ruffled by the wind, held down by coffee cups, strewn eventually over the floor – …

Introduction to Faraj’s poems (2019:77) in Pollard, C. (Ed.) Modern Poetry in Translation No. 2 2019: The Illuminated Paths Modern Poetry in Translation Ltd.

Ravinthiran’s prose sentence disrupts the flow of sense within it by highly visible physical signs of the negotiations of meaning between languages, cultures and persons, emphasising the potentially muddling layers of mediation between poem and translated poem, including the interactive agency of the Tunisian wind and sheets of paper. One further source of muddling mediation are tonal differences created by cultural expectations internal to these languages – Faraj’s ‘big flow, and sway of feeling’ confronting the tendency in English of ‘irony and self-deprecation’. However in this piece, Ravinthiran highlights Faraj’s ability to mediate paper muddle and misprision by body signs: gestures of human warmth.

In a particular Faraj poem, ‘(walk away!)‘, Ravinthiran translates these latter warm mediators as moments when text is in process of becoming embodied, employing ‘hand’ to signify both the physical organic object and ‘writing’. In doing so he confound the reader of a poem with the loved one:

………….. You,

looking into my eyes, may understand me.

The palm of my hand is there for you

to read. Study it. …

Faraj, translated Ravinthiran (walk away!) in ibid p. 81

The poem Faraj too is full of misprision deriving from exchanges between languages and cultural expectations that extend beyond issues of the pronunciation of names. The mediating translator who ”sat between’ is more than John in the prose version of this incident above. Faraj’s poems are described as merely, ‘love-struck, unironical passion / in which none of this appeared.’ The ‘this’ which does not appear in these love poems seems to be the whole paraphernalia of mediation of understanding on which irony, that most English of tomes, depends. It is the problem that faces Faraj when he must translate Ravinthiran’s poem about Brexit Britain and the fear and repression represented by Nigel Farage. The ‘coolest’ of men must ‘translate’ his own ‘big’ embodied ‘flow’ into a ‘small poem about small people’.

This debate in this and other poems is essentially trans-cultural love and the effect of differential family, community, national and ideological fractures between lovers – such as occur (silently or ablaze) in any good novel worth the name. Can poems about ‘unironical’ passion find companionship with poems about identity forged in ‘repression / and fear’. They can and must when the practicalities of cultural difference are endemic not only to narratives of love prone to misprision (I take it that this is the point of including the Browning love story as a poem – Barrett/Browning (p.52)).

What I want to suggest is that these poems are no easy read, although they can seem to be so at first. As you get to know them better, their apparently limpid style (in that reminding me of Browning again) that reveals ambiguities and fractures of consciousness – different ears and different voices that translate into each other (polyvocality is that surely).

These fractures are often relived within the story of the poet’s love for his wife. As this story is dismembered and remembered, the discomfort or pain of such fractures and reconstructions are lived in the verse, sometimes for the first time, because overlooked when it occurred:

No-one there, including me, looked like you

so they looked at you, mingling

swift glances and that shameless, long,

unbroken stare. It’s shameful that I didn’t notice

what it was like for you in that place.

Outside the Hanuman temple, p. 31

This works because the meaning of apparently simple words like ‘looking’ and ‘shameful’ divide between consciousnesses and time – even between the time told about and that of the telling. Isn’t one facet of that shame that the poet had failed to see, as if from his wife’s perspective, because he did not look. Yet only through such looking at how we are looked at because of how we look can some effects of racism events be understood. Such effects are those that make Jane Austen still exciting to read, especially in Persuasion. The recognition of the other’s point of view shifts our moral and cultural consciousness. These dynamic effects are rich in Ravithiran.

Truly one could write forever about this and I don’t aim to do that. What we have here is a narrative in which consciousness shifts, sometimes, across time and sometimes across different characters’ consciousnesses of each other’s otherness. The most disturbing effect of that poem is that it queries what ‘being’, whether it be ‘here’ or ‘there’, is like and of course it is only ‘like’ what your consciousness of multiple ways of ‘being here (or there)’ allow, whether these different ways are experienced sequentially or simultaneously (as in some acts of moral victory over solipsistic misprision of others).

I’m drifting I can see. I can’t be assured that this will be so meaningful as I hoped for a reader, or indeed if there will be any reader. So I want to leave it there – a long poem still for me to investigate as I sail my own life-course. And those acts of knowing – in texts or embodied in mouths – are so complex even in the most simple moments of a story. And one of the problems is that, in poetry that still contacts the lyrical moment of subjective utterance it sprang from, makes it difficult to know precisely even the identity of very common pronouns like ‘I’ and ‘you’:

I mention it

because you’re not like that, and now

I’m glad one moment and sad the next,

you see it all. You read me like a book. You text

from work, and it’s like the touch of your mouth

on my cheek. It has the reciprocity of tears – your mirth.

(p.31)

In this moment he is questioning how his wife might have seen his behaviour outside the Hanuman temple. But who reads ‘him’ like a book? Is it the person, the very ‘you’ now reading him AS A BOOK? The metaphor recalls that the poet uses to translate Faraj. ‘You’ is the slipperiest of words in any text. In the beautiful piece last quoted you and ‘text’ can only transcontextly (my neologism here meaning ‘across different contexts in which words have different meanings’) be seen as like ‘a mouth’ and even more so when that text-like mouth is silent because it’s stopped by its contact with my body. After all to ‘read a book’ (as a novel and poem) is a very complex thing indeed.

Over to you.

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[1] Paterson, D. (2010:xiv) Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A New Commentary London, Faber & Faber.

[2] Vidyan Ravinthiran (2019:11) The Million-Petalled Flower Of Being Here Hexham, Bloodaxe Books.

[3] Vidyan Ravinthiran (2019:30,31) The Million-Petalled Flower Of Being Here Hexham, Bloodaxe Books.

[4] Vidyan Ravinthiran (2019:44) The Million-Petalled Flower Of Being Here Hexham, Bloodaxe Books.

[5] Vidyan Ravinthiran (2019:28, 52) The Million-Petalled Flower Of Being Here Hexham, Bloodaxe Books

[6] For brief description of Maghreb region see: https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/m/Maghreb.htm