Contributor’s Marginalia: Morri Creech responding to Shane McCrae’s “2020”

What seems to be going on here, formally speaking at least, is a conversation about confinement, about the desire to be free from it, and about the paradox that free expression can only be achieved within the bounds of technique. This formal conversation underpins the poem’s subject: the speaker’s psychological experience of the pandemic and the temporary respite from his anxieties found in that stirring gesture of intimacy in the final line, a gesture beyond the reach of language. Images that would otherwise suggest connection and harmony—string, kite, bells—here dissolve into discord: the string is severed, the kite stuck in a tree, the bell’s handle broken off. In expression of this discord, the prescriptive rules of the sonnet, which normally create balance and stability, here bend toward an exquisite imbalance. This is not Wordsworth’s “Nuns Fret Not in Their Convent’s Narrow Room,” in which the speaker blithely embraces the cramped walls of a cell. This is more Donne’s “Batter My Heart, Three Person’d God,” a poem that also explores the tension between liberation and confinement, but one whose syntax, enjambments, and transgressive metaphors push against the boundaries of its form. “I / Except You enthrall me never shall be free,” Donne concludes toward the end of his poem—a statement that applies as much to the structure of the sonnet itself as to the God he addresses—and McCrae’s piece, in its skillful execution, suggests agreement. “2020” is restless in its resistance to formal imperatives, though profoundly musical in its unease, suggesting ultimately that only through constraint can the poet find expression.

The first line announces the dramatic situation in a language that is metrically fluid and syntactically uncomplicated. Sentence and line coincide. The end-stop gives it a deceptively satisfying sense of completion: “we wake from quarantining through the night.” The word “quarantining” disturbs us with its reference to a shared historical moment, evoking those sprawling, identical hours and days spent confined in our homes, staring through the stale light of windows at the abandoned streets. The speaker lies in bed, presumably in the early morning; the poem reveals itself as an unsettling aubade. No sooner is its dramatic situation introduced, however, than the stanza complicates by way of formal tension:

Through bells        a string        between them one in my

Hand one in yours the string        cut from a kite

Stuck in a tree        on the abandoned High

Line when        before it was aban-

Doned was it        ever so empty anyone a child . . . (2-6)

Against the contours of rhyme and meter the sonnet contorts, resisting its boundaries, abandoning its pentameter sporadically, enjambing aggressively (particularly in lines 2, 4, and 5) and employing a number of restless caesurae to counterpoint the syntax and ramify the implications of the phrasing. This formal tension underscores the speaker’s psychological state revealed through the imagery’s uncomfortable progression, from the agitation and tenuousness of bells and cut string to the entrapment of a kite stuck in a tree. The running together of sentences and phrases in the unpunctuated lines creates a turbulent energy that threatens to confuse the syntax without doing so. These strategies set the poem in dialogue with the very notion of containment: while the lines seem anxious to resist or challenge their formal “restrictions,” it is the restriction-resistance dynamic itself that gives the lines their energy. The end of the second line, for instance, terminating on the rhyme-word “my,” annotates the syntax in a startling way, stretching toward the distant noun “Hand” at the beginning of the next line. The phrase is broken while the rhyme remains intact. We are tempted to pause on the word for a moment, even as the syntax hurries us past it. “My” rhymes with the deracinated adjective “High,” which hangs suspended on the end of the line before achieving resolution with its noun in the following one. The language teeters precariously, as on a see-saw, balancing the symmetry of rhyme on the one side and a deftly fractured syntax on the other. The line breaks create a sense of suspense and anticipation—like reaching to pull a string, ring a bell, or touch a lover in the half-dark—and the enjambments continue through the octave, the sentences achieving a breathless motion. Phrases twist and writhe claustrophobically within the lines, never quite resolving on the rhymes.

The avoidance of punctuation and the carefully applied caesurae create still greater tension, as the reader is invited to consider the syntactical ambiguities that vex and complicate the lyric moment. For instance, “Through bells” in the second line can be read as a parallel structure set next to “through the night” in the first, or it can be considered as the beginning of a new phrase, “Through bells        a string,” distinctly separate from the independent clause that opens the sonnet. Though the poem ultimately supports the first interpretation (with the help of the caesura), the phrasing invites us to read and reread, to pause and consider. Beneath the sonnet’s smooth linguistic surface, powerful countercurrents tug at our assumptions. The ambiguities on display here create a sort of duck / rabbit effect: once we have seen the sentence one way, and then seen it another way, both readings persist in our minds and shape our perceptions. We see the line or phrase as inhabiting more than one meaning simultaneously. Implications break and scatter like a game of billiards. Elsewhere, the marked pauses annotate syntax in much the same manner as the line breaks, operating in concert with them (“Line when        before it was aban- / Doned”), complicating, without disrupting, the sense of the sentence. The subtle ways McCrae troubles the form and syntax without undermining it constitute, in no small part, the triumph of the piece.

After the fierce enjambment of line eight (“the bells a bell a teacher would”), the sestet settles into more or less end-stopped lines:

Have used to start class        but the handle broken off

I speak        my voice you say is an alarm

You speak and I am woken by you speaking

The string between us shaking . . . (9-12)

Though the indented pauses appear periodically up to the penultimate line, the enjambments dissolve and the syntactical ripples even out. The poem approaches equilibrium, yet somehow the language continues to increase in anxiety. The Volta occurs in line ten—“I speak        my voice you say is an alarm”—but the relative stabilization of line here pushes back against the disquiet of the statement while the caesura subtly complicates the phrasing. The indented pause, in fact, and the syntactical compression of “my voice you say is an alarm,” manage to increase the tension despite the formal stability of the line. The repetition of “shakes,” “voice,” and “arm” in line thirteen (“Your voice in the string        shakes in my arm        my voice shakes in your arm”) raises the language to a powerful crescendo, and the end-stop contributes to, rather than detracts from, the elevated tension. The distinct countercurrents created by disruptive marked pauses on the one hand (which operate like mid-line enjambments), and rhetorical reiteration combined with balanced lineation on the other, ratchet up our sense of the speaker’s agitation. The language here has the heightened energy of a peroration. Only in the final line does the speaker find comfort in an unambiguous mutual gesture, a gesture transcending speech altogether, though captured persuasively by the voice of the poem itself. The tension of the bells—part music, part jangling dissonance—resolves in the final tetrameter: “we touch each other back to life.” The poem concludes on a note of affirmation in a line both metrically smooth and syntactically self-contained. After a struggle against the bounds of convention, form and content accommodate each other harmoniously in the closing line, and the sonnet ends in a moving accord.

In “2020,” Shane McCrae examines quarantine in an artfully distressed sonnet that paradoxically surrenders to its form by resisting it. The poem touches on those intimacies that acquire heightened meaning as a result of the very conditions that make them necessary. We should continue to return to this sonnet both for its techniques and for the urgency of expression they make possible. It is a remarkable poem.