FormFlash: "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young" by Wilfred Owen (With Remarks on the Contemporary Sonnet, Alice Miller, Interpenetrative Eloquence, and Goddesses in General)

A brutal twisting of tone—achieved by rhyme alone

Folks have been urging me to post more often here—as has that sweet mountain of “almost-finished-posts,” not to mention a more fluid stack,“ideas-flooding-in-to-tell-y’all about.” Ok, ok!

This post is longer now, but it began as a brief FormFlash occasioned by a great comment in response to my post about Alice Miller’s tragic response to the Abraham and Isaac story. In the comment, which you can read below the post, William Marsh brings up this quite remarkable quasi-sonnet by Wilfred Owen.

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

This sonnet is unstructured by rhyme as it tells the miserable, vicious well-worn story underlying the monotheistic, patriarchal Abrahamic religions, the story that gives Alice Miller a profound insight into the heart of human suffering under patriarchy—the story of people hurting each other as they look UP instead of at each other. (BTW the Goddesses, as I understand more deeply every day, do not demand us to look up, nor to look away from each other—and certainly not away from ourselves and the truths of our own hearts—in order to love and honor them!).

Why would Owen— such an unflinching observer of the vicious effects of patriarchy, such a fine wielder of tone and the brutal twist—choose to delay rhyme until after the sonnet is over? I like to tell my students that in a poem that is truly finished,