20 pages • 40 minutes read

American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin ["I lock you in..."]

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2017

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form, meter, assonance, and alliteration

The poem is a contemporary sonnet, consisting of 14 unrhymed lines, with most lines containing at least ten syllabic sounds. This is at least partly in keeping with the iambic pentameter of a traditional sonnet, where each line containing five pairs of a “da-dum” beat. While the poem does not follow this strict metrical pattern, it does have a regular beat, which gives it a surprising musicality. At times, the beat is reminiscent of a piece of hip-hop which, like the American sonnet, is another Black American art form.

The poem’s musicality is emphasized by auditory devices such as alliteration. Alliteration occurs in Lines 1-2, with the repeated “p” sounds of the phrases, “part prison” and “part panic closet.” The harsh, explosive “p” sounds draw attention to the words in question – part, prison, and panic, each somehow defining the speaker and the “you.” The poem also uses repetition. The phrase “I lock” is repeated in Lines 1, 3, and 6 producing an incantatory rhythmic effect. Assonance occurs through repeated “o” sounds – the broad “o” recurs through the poem in words like “lock” (1,3,6), “sonnet” (Line 1), “box” (Line 3), and “song” (Line 4), while the longer “o” sound is repeated in words like “bone” (line 4), “hold” (Line 5) and “crow” (Line 7). The poem also uses internal rhyme or half-rhymes to create a musicality reminiscent of hip-hop pieces, such as in the rhyming crow and floor of “… As the gym, the feel of crow-/ Shit dropping to your floors …” (Lines 9-10).

Metaphor and allusions

The poem’s use of metaphors is distinctive, with implicit comparisons often bringing together irreconcilable opposites, as in the case of the meat grinder and the music box. The poet compares the sonnet to both a meat grinder and a wind-up music box, an association which produces a shocking effect. Similarly, the bird or the crow is often the metaphor for the sonnet and the individual’s voice. Yet this bird is placed in unnatural and confined settings, such as a box or a gym. Another notable aspect of Hayes’ poetic technique in “I Lock You…” is the simultaneous use of metaphors and allusions. The poem’s implicit comparisons often reference a historical truth or an image from popular culture and consciousness. The allusions deepen the meaning of the metaphors and add layers of subtext to the poem. For instance, the metaphor of gym and crow are a direct allusion to the Jim Crow laws. Evoking the Jim Crow era and its violence and restrictions adds to the claustrophobic strain of the poem. It also invites jarring images of violence associated with that period, so that the crow flitting about in the gym now recalls a Black American being confined or oppressed. Another example of metaphor and allusion acting together is in the image of the poet locking the “you” into the prison of the sonnet. The sonnet is compared to a prison because it is a form with a strict structure, the metaphor also alludes to the unfair and disproportionate incarceration of Black Americans. However, here it is the speaker locking the “you” into a sonnet; thus, they slyly reverse the roles between jailer and jailed. By creating the sonnet, the Black American speaker – stand-in for the poet – undoes the status quo and challenges traditional power structures. Thus, the entire metaphor-allusion complex of sonnet and prison creates multiple meanings in the poem.

Ambiguity, contradiction, and juxtaposition

Ambiguity in the poem functions in a unique way: its purpose is not just to create multiple meanings but also to engage the reader in a reality in which they otherwise may not want to involve themselves. Like the entire sonnet series, “I Lock You …” makes an important point about the identity of the speaker and the “you,” the latter deliberately left ambiguous. The point is that the “you” or the assassin is not just one person but an entire culture of which the speaker, the reader, and all other selves are a part. By creating this fluidity about the identity of the “you,” the poet ensures that neither the speaker-persona nor the reader elides responsibility about their role in perpetuating an unjust world.

The poet creates this deliberate ambiguity through the use of illogical, odd metaphors and juxtapositions, such as the crow undergoing catharsis in a high school gym, or a bird’s song being separated from its bones. As the poem opens, the poet compares the sonnet to a prison and an escape room, both images at odds with each other. If the sonnet is an escape room and meant to offer some relief, why is it set in a burning house? Locking someone in an escape room in a house on fire is a contradiction, or worse, a cruel trick. Why is the speaker doing this to the “you”? Further, how can the same “you” be both gym and crow, watcher and watched, prison and prisoner? The contradictions pile up, with the poem constantly juxtaposing images of violence and suffocation with images of song and music, such as the “box of darkness with a bird in its heart” (Line 12). The poem ends on a series of contradictory images, with the speaker first describing the sonnet as both the suffocating box with a singing bird at its heart as well as a masterful structure of “voltas of acoustics, instinct & metaphor” (Line 13). In the next sentence, the speaker tells the “you” that it “It is not enough / To love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed” (Lines 13-14). Loving the “you” is insufficient but so is hating them. What lies beyond love and hate? The poem offers no clear answer, but the suggestion that dealing with racial injustice and one’s role in it requires something beyond love and hate, and that may be acknowledgement of reality.