Enter the Jack Rabbit
A FRIEND of the Atlantic and of literature has been good enough to give us the following glimpse of poetry in the making, before it has hardened into the finished commercial product. He says : — “A sheep herder in Wyoming, after a terrific storm, in which his sheep were almost lost, writes to a friend in the East as follows : ' Inspired by the fine day after the storm, I started a sonnet yesterday, but got through only with eight lines, when I stopped to shoot a jack rabbit. By the time I had cleaned and cooked it the inspiration had gone. Here are the lines : you finish it.’
“ These are the eight lines : —
Fled ever onward ’fore the angry blast
From out the icy north; no shadow east
By sun or moon in all that time. But lo!
A new day dawns. The distant mountains show
Their broad, majestic brows ; the storm has passed:
The sun in glory shines, and now at last,
Its fury o’er, the wind breathes soft and low.’ ”
The sheep herder’s friend, in the kindness of his heart, has composed the necessary sestet which rounds a sonnet into its perfect measure of fourteen lines. We shall not rouse the envy of Atlantic poets by printing the sestet, although we are willing to own that it begins with
The “So man ” opening for the sestet of a sonnet will at once be recognized by experts as one of the classic devices for firmly tying the imagery of the first lines to the thought or image contained in the final six. “ So man ” is a sort of King’s Gambit, a pretty safe move to make upon the sonnet chessboard. “ The child of trouble ” may contain a veiled allusion to the untimely death of the jack rabbit. But this is by no means clear, nor is it essential to the structural unity of the sonnet.
In a country where nearly a thousand poets promptly rushed into rhyme to confute the reasoning of The Man with the Hoe, there should be no lack of sonneteers willing to take the octave printed above and to complete it, as the Wyoming poet himself would no doubt have done triumphantly, had he not paused to shoot, clean, and cook that unfortunate jack rabbit. The Atlantic is of opinion that the most effective sestet (which it hereby pledges itself to print) will be the one which not only completes and enforces the sentiment of the octave, but in so doing manages to indicate the subtle and elusive personality of the jack rabbit as it darts across the poet’s vision. Enter the jack rabbit! Whether he should be actually described we are reluctant to pronounce, but surely his presence should be “ felt,” as William Wordsworth would say. And by the way, would Wordsworth have hesitated a single instant to complete that sonnet ? We think not. The “ So man ” would have sprang to his ready pen as promptly as the Wyoming shepherd seized his murderous gun. And so far from the inspiration disappearing with the entrance of the jack rabbit, we could name a good many Wordsworthian sonnets that would have been far better if some one had started a jack rabbit at the end of the eighth line.