Page 31 of The Two Wills

“It’s a fourteen-line poem structured as three quatrains, ending with a rhymed couplet at the end; they’re all the rage at the moment.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, and my face must’ve shown it.

“Forget all that,” he said with a wave of his hand. “The best part is a sonnet is short. I write one out every now and then to create some space in my busy head. How much can you read of it?”

I pretended to decipher the squiggly lines. “Not much, sir,” I said, handing it back. “Your writing is too curvy.”

The Poet smiled kindly, perhaps only then comprehending the true depths of my illiteracy. He pushed the sonnet back into my hands. “Lesson one: Making mistakes is fine. Just try sounding it out.”

And so I began. “Loooo … k … in … how do you pronounce that?”

“Thy,” he said.

“Thy,” I repeated. “Right, right. I know that.”

“The Y at the end of a word is tricky. It can either sound like ‘Eee’ as in ‘merry’ or ‘very’ or like ‘I’ as here in the word ‘thy.’ Read on.”

“It’s too hard to try,” I groaned.

“Try … see? That word try—T-R-Y—the Y there is the same sound as in T-H-Y.”

“They should just decide on one sound and keep it,” I grumbled before continuing.

The church bells struck ten, then eleven. After two hours, I started making good progress on the first four lines, but with the fifth line I again stumbled.

“For—where—is she so—fair—whose un—what’s that?”

“Uneared. It means unsullied … pure. Like the opposite of err … un-erred.”

“Marry, is it a real word, sir?”

“Yes … no … I mean not really, but it is in my sonnet. Just playing with the language. I can write whatever I want if the reader understands it.”

“Seems a bit cagey to just to make things up. Unfair even. Can’t you just write the words we already got writ?”

“Why should I? All words are made up anyway. Why can’t I be the one who makes them up. Or you? Why don’t you make up your own words?”

I scowled and rolled my eyes at his absurdity. But I also knew the Poet had a point. Words were just sounds that directed our minds to think about something that existed in the world … or in our hearts. We only understood each other because everyone agreed on a meaning. And suddenly it occurred to me just how many other things—things other than words—were merely things we agreed were “true” but at their core were just made up. If that’s so, I pondered with my naïve but burgeoning intellect, then why’s it we all has to follow any of the bloody rules by Queen or Church about who we is or what we do? Why can’t we just be whatever we likes?

“Where did you go there?” the Poet asked, seeing that I was lost in my ideas.

“Sorry,” I said. “This next word …” I pointed to the word womb in the sonnet and worked my lips around it. “Wom … bee. Wom-ba?”

“It’s pronounced like W-O-O-M and rhymes with tomb. The B is silent.”

“Why?”

“Because it is. English makes little sense. But it’s best understood if you make it a habit.”

“What is this sonnet-thing about anyway?”

“You,” he said. “It’s about you. I wrote it this past week.”

“For me, sir?” This fact that he wrote me a sonnet threw me back into my amorous hopefulness. “Can you read the whole thing to me?”

And so he did. As he perfectly pronounced those words I was learning in their proper order—womb, tillage, husbandry. The poem’s true meaning began to form in my mind, and it was not at all what I had hoped.

“I’m confused, sir,” I said. “Is this a sonnet about me marrying and making babies?”