William Beckford (1760-1844)

Elegiac Sonnet to a Mopstick

Picked up from http://sonnets.org/beckford.htm, with grateful acknowledgement.

Remarks:

This outrageous homoerotic ditty by the author of Vathek is another tour de force of the sonnet form. Very much a poem of its day (the early nineteenth century or even late eighteenth), this sonnet displays its consciousness of itself in every whimsical rhyme. Lines 6, 7, 9 and 12 fit the strict, though varied iambic patter only by virtue of elisions on “even”, “ever”, “many a” and “thou art”, pronounced “e'en”, “e'er”, “mennya” (this one is perhaps arguable) and “th'art” respectively — a metrician's inside joke. The mop handle, a “birchen bough”, once in a blissfully Narcissistic state of Nature, gazing on its own reflection in a pool, but now stripped and forlorn, is compared to what the speaker's breast or heart will be when Philisto is gone — not to the more obvious anatomical alternative. And yet the final trope (we recall that the moves between octave and sestet, and between final quatrain and couplet, are called “turns”, and here we have a turning or troping of metaphor along with the rhyme) is suddenly and unexpectedly poignant, as the helpless mop is compared to the speaker's whirling thoughts, of all things: and so the sonnet, strictly within form yet flashy in its variations (consider the alliterations on “t” in the couplet, or how the final line is varied by a choriamb in the first two feet, “Turns on the twisting”), by “turning” makes a joke about itself.