Ted Berrigan’s ‘A Final Sonnet,’ or ‘Sonnet LXXXVIII,’ is a moving meditation on human mortality. As the conclusion to Berrigan’s The Sonnets, ‘A Final Sonnet’ incorporates motifs from the entire poetic sequence, as well as a quote from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The speaker reflects on how people create meaning in the face of death, which culminates in his acceptance of life’s temporality.
Summary
The poem begins with the speaker’s fragmented thoughts about mortality, some of which are found in Berrigan’s earlier poems.
The speaker’s reverie on the banalities of life, which can include anything from “birthday[s]” to “joke[s],” merges into an excerpt from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In this quote, the character Prospero chooses to give up his magic and enjoy the remainder of his life. The speaker concludes his meditation with a greeting to “Chris,” to whom the poem is dedicated, thereby choosing to focus on the present moment rather than his future death.
Structure and Form
‘A Final Sonnet‘ is written in free verse, but contains an excerpt from The Tempest, which is in iambic pentameter. The form of Berrigan’s sequence takes significant inspiration from T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land,‘ which also employs a disjointed grammatical structure and loosely incorporates quotes from famous works.
For example, Berrigan cuts up a quote from The Tempest with unorthodox line breaks and spacing. Furthermore, instead of beginning the poem with a greeting, “Dear Chris, hello,” he ends with it.
Literary Devices
Berrigan uses the following literary devices:
- Enjambment: Berrigan makes frequent use of enjambment throughout the poem. For example, the first line ends in an enjambment with “a man/Signs a shovel.”
- Antithesis: The line, “work mine end upon their senses,” creates an antithesis between “mine” and “their.”
- Repetition: Berrigan repeats the word, “Someone,” from lines 4-6 for additional emphasis.
Detailed Analysis
Lines 1-3
How strange to be gone in a minute! A man
Signs a shovel and so he digs Everything
Turns into writing a name for a day
In Berrigan’s poem, the speaker reflects on life’s temporality. His exclamation, “How strange to be gone in a minute!” encapsulates the act of dying and how, at any moment, someone can leave this world forever. He observes that an “A man signs a shovel and so he digs,” which suggests the act of grave-digging.
Taken with the following line, one can infer Berrigan’s comment on how people “name” the world around them as a way to cope with mortality. “Nam[ing]” and describing our experiences is also the act of a poet. Berrigan thereby implies a comparison between the art of writing and of grave-digging, as both merely postpone the inevitable.
Lines 4-7
Someone
is having a birthday and someone is getting
(…)
a white tree I dream of the code of the west
The speaker describes how people mark out their lives with marriages, births or even something as small as “telling a joke.” The repetition of “someone” emphasizes the repetitious nature of these events, while the speaker’s ambivalent tone characterizes them as largely meaningless. The next two phrases are also found in Berrigan’s “Sonnet XLI,” which ends with the line, “My dream a white tree.” White connotes purity, while a tree often represents life, but the exact meaning of the white tree’s symbolism is unclear. The “code of the west” refers to an unwritten code that guided cowboys in the lawless Wild West. Zane Grey’s 1934 novel The Code of the West specifically identifies this set of values. The speaker’s fragmented dreams of a pure “white tree” and a noble “code” thus evoke an idealistic vision of American life.
Lines 8-14
But this rough magic I here abjure and
(…)
That this aery charm is for I’ll break
My staff bury it certain fathoms in the earth
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.
Berrigan expands upon the poem’s dream imagery by quoting a speech from the The Tempest. Prospero, a sorcerer exiled to a remote island, chooses to give up his magic staff and book of spells upon leaving the island. Since the speech is about Prospero relinquishing his beloved “art,” some scholars believe it was Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage. Berrigan quotes the text exactly but breaks it up with unusual spacing and line breaks, which grammatically mirrors how Prospero breaks his staff. The act of “burying” one’s staff also recalls the grave-digging imagery in the first lines of the poem. That Berrigan chooses to use older text emphasizes that people have been grappling with the fleeting nature of their existence for hundreds of years.
By including an excerpt from The Tempest, Berrigan further plays into the poem’s themes of mortality and dreaming. The Tempest continually references dreaming, with one of Prospero’s most famous lines being, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life/ Is rounded with a sleep,” which describes how human life begins in the sleep of the womb and ends in the sleep of death. Berrigan makes Shakespeare’s text his own by incorporating it into the speaker’s fragmentary thoughts, suggesting that life is as transitory as a dream.
Line 15-16
It is 5:15 a.m. Dear Chris,
hello.
In the last lines of ‘A Final Sonnet,‘ the speaker breaks from his reverie. He specifies the time, “5:15 a.m.,” which implies that the speaker has been up late at night, ruminating on death. He goes on to greet “Chris,” to whom the poem is dedicated. By beginning the poem with a meditation on his death and ending it with a greeting, Berrigan moves backward, from the future to the present.
Although we do not know who Chris is, we can infer that he or she is someone dear to the speaker. The speaker has chosen to move on from dark thoughts of his own mortality and reach out for the comfort of human connection instead. Whether or not Chris responds is unknown, which leaves the poem feeling unresolved, and Berrigan’s comment on the futility of human existence remains ambiguous.
FAQs
Ted Berrigan’s ‘A Final Sonnet‘ is about the transitory nature of human existence. The piece follows the speaker’s fragmentary thoughts and dreams as he comes to terms with his eventual death.
It is a free-verse poem consisting of 16 lines grouped into one stanza. The poem has no consistent meter, but lines 8-14 quote from The Tempest, which is written in iambic pentameter.
The title labels the poem as the last one in Berrigan’s sequence of Sonnets, but it also refers to the speaker’s meditation on death, which is the “final” stop of a person’s life.
‘A Final Sonnet’ centers on the inevitability of death but also contains themes of dreaming and artistic purpose.
Similar Poetry
- ‘Wrong Train‘ by Ted Berrigan – takes a similar form and topic, with the speaker waiting for the train to the afterlife.
- ‘Because I could not stop for Death‘ by Emily Dickinson – is about the speaker’s journey toward her own death.
- ‘The Waste Land‘ by T.S. Eliot – employs similarly disjunctive phrasing and contains numerous reflections on the meaning of human existence.
