A Day Is a Sonnet

radishes from my garden

“Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.” ~ Oscar Wilde

I have to admit, I thought I had come upon a new idea, but as I searched the stores of thoughts on sonnets, I found the above lines from Oscar Wilde. It should not surprise me that a man who said so many witty things would have said this, and so well. The phrase “Life has been your art,” echoes the words of Naomi Shihab Nye who says, “Your life is the poem.”

The longer I live the more I am concerned with days. With how to enjoy the day. And though my enjoyments might be odd, sometimes, and sometimes ordinary, they are specific. I have started to figure out that hitting certain touchpoints gives me a sense that I have made the most of a day. I like the way a day is a square on the calendar. I like the way a sonnet makes the same shape. Both are contained and have a turn toward the end. A sonnet, the volta, a day the setting sun.

A sonnet is often a struggle the poet is having with themselves. Perhaps trying to manage the fallout of a great love. Or trying to reconcile the human influence on once unspoiled nature. But whatever they address, they do so within the confines of form.

“Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. - Mrs. Whatsit” ~ Madeleine L’Engle

So it turns out everyone is thinking about life as a sonnet! Or at least a significant handful of writers who see the play of limits in both sonnet and the everyday. It’s true: we have 24 hours but must write the content of those hours ourselves. The meal, to me, is an important marker. A way of slowing and sitting down and writing a line of pleasure as a plate of homegrown greens, a ripe avocado, a cool iced tea. And then a walk along a most-loved path in our new county, one with endless novel sights and hidden trails, walks with overhanging oak tree boughs and a variety of blue jays, finches, black-plumed quail.

“Even if you walk exactly the same route each time - as with a sonnet - the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet’s health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same.” ~ A. R. Ammonsbut laying out a garden.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are caught in repetition from the moment we wake up. Make coffee or tea, eat breakfast, make the bed. Get some form of exercise. Water the garden, walk the dog. Whatever it entails, ordinary life calls us to task from the very onset. Some wake early to have time to themselves before the merry-go-round begins, but even that habit is another way of adhering to form. I think we crave such form as much as we push against it. Days of endless idyll are fun for a while, then lead to restlessness, or even depression.

But when we get the balance nearly right (and we never have true balance for long) there is a thrill that comes from meeting obligations and also doing the most to partake of the world, making sure to make music of our days, however that might come. Love is a kind of music. Being is a kind of music. Even a repetitive task done with gratitude. How satisfying and impossible to live in so strict a container as time. May we revel in its limits, count the lines as they pass, see if we can find––even an off-center–––rhyme.

Is there a way you find music in your days—-even in the midst of all the necessary tasks? I’d love to hear how your life is a poem, and what helps make it one.

Danusha