Form and Function as a Narrative Tool

Form and Function as a Narrative Tool by Melanie Hundley

​Melanie is a voracious reader and loves working with students, teachers, and authors.  As a former middle and high school teacher, she knows the value of getting good young adult books in kids' hands. She teaches young adult literature and writing methods classes.  She hopes that the Monday Motivator page will introduce teachers to great books and to possible ways to use those books in classrooms.

I find myself thinking a great deal about the power of the verse novel as the beginning of the school year comes around.  Marilyn Nelson is one of those verse novel authors who provide powerful texts for students and teachers as they think about what poetry can do.  I can appreciate the form of the sonnet but I can’t imagine trying to tell a story with it. When I teach it, my students sometimes struggle with it.  Using one of Marilyn Nelson’s verse novels provides sonnets that use more familiar language but they still pack a powerful narrative and poetic punch.  The poetic form and its rigid structure is very powerful as a tool for writers.  Marilyn Nelson uses the sonnet to provide insight and critique into particular moments in history.

​The rigid poetic forms in these novels provide a framework for the storytelling—a tool to highlight both the structure of the poem itself and the content of the poem.  Many of these poetic forms are the ones studied in school with tightly measured rhyme schemes and syllable counts. These forms may feel distant and unknowable to the adolescent reader who is learning both the form and unfamiliar language at the same time. Sonnets, for example, are more traditionally associated with Shakespeare than with young adult literature.  Marilyn Nelson, author of several YA novels in verse, uses the form of the sonnet to tell the story of Emmett Till. These authors disrupt the traditional expectations of the poetic forms in order to provide social commentary and emotional connection. 

In the introduction of A Wreath for Emmett Till (2005), Marilyn Nelson explains that she chose to use the heroic crown of sonnets after she had done research on the lynching of Emmett Till.  Choosing this form for the novel in verse provided “a kind of insulation, a way of protecting myself from the intense pain of the subject matter, and a way to allow the Muse to determine what the poem would say.  I wrote this poem with my heart in my mouth and tears in my eyes, breathless with anticipation and surprise” (np).  The reader of these poems feels the grief and heartache embedded and contained in the lines.

A sonnet is a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter.  Nelson uses a Petrarchan rhyme scheme in the sonnets in this novel; this rhyme scheme is typically ABBA ABBA for the octet and CDCDCD or CDECDE for the sestet.  The rigid number of lines as well as the relatively rigid rhyme scheme creates a challenge for both the writer and the reader.  Increasing the challenge for this particular novel in verse is the additional structure of the heroic crown.  The heroic crown of sonnets is a sequence of fifteen sonnets.  The last line of one sonnet becomes the first line of the next sonnet. The final sonnet is comprised of the first lines of the previous fourteen sonnets.  

The sonnets are formal in their structure, but the language is less so.  In Sonnet III, the speaker of the poem is the tree who shares how it has lived for hundreds of years and witnessed both life and death as part of the natural cycle of the world.  The tree understood “two hundred years of deaths” but not the unnatural and brutal death of Emmett Till.  The tree, personified here, says his name “still catches in the throat.”  The language is rich in description but not so formal that adolescent readers get lost in the words.  The idea of a “shortened childhood” connects to adolescents and reminds them that Emmett was their age.  The “jackal laughter” highlights the animal-like behavior of the men chasing the young boy. The contrast between “running boy” and “five men” illustrates the violence of Emmett’s death. The formal structure of the sonnet emphasizes the lawlessness of the men’s behavior.  The tree serves as witness to the natural cycle of life and feels it is has been scarred by the unnatural death of the young boy.

III
Pierced by the screams of a shortened childhood,
my heartwood has been scarred for fifty years
by what I heard, with hundreds of green ears.
That jackal laughter. Two hundred years I stood
listening to small struggles to find food,
to the songs of creature life, which disappears
and comes again, to the music of the spheres.
Two hundred years of deaths I understood.
Then slaughter axed one quiet summer night,
shivering the deep silence of the stars.
A running boy, five men in close pursuit.
One dark, five pale faces in the moonlight.
Noise, silence, back-slaps. One match, five cigars.
Emmett Till’s name still catches in the throat (n.p.).
 
IV
Emmett Till’s name still catches in my throat,
like syllables waylaid in a stutterer’s mouth.
A fourteen-year-old stutterer, in the South
to visit relatives and to be taught
the family’s ways. His mother had finally bought
that White Sox cap; she’d made him swear an oath
to be careful around white folks. She’s told him the truth
of many a Mississippi anecdote:
Some white folks have blind souls. In his suitcase
she’d packed dungarees, T-shirts, underwear,
and comic books. She’d given him a note
for the conductor, waved to his chubby face,
wondered if he’d remember to brush his hair.
Her only child. A body left to bloat (n.p.).
 
V
Your only child, a body thrown to bloat,
mother of sorrows, of justice denied.
Surely you must have thought of suicide,
seeing his gray flesh, chains around his throat.
Surely you didn’t know you would devote
the rest of your changed life to dignified
public remembrance of how Emmett died,
innocence slaughtered by the hands of hate.
If sudden loving light proclaimed you blest
would you bow your head in humility,
your healed heart overflow with gratitude?
Would you say yes, like the mother of Christ?
Or would you say no to your destiny,
mother of a boy martyr, if you could (n.p.)?

​The last and first lines serve as both a final thought and an opening of the idea that there is not an end.  The line “Her only child. A body left to bloat” ends Sonnet IV and opens Sonnet V. In Sonnet IV, the mother’s son becomes just a body to those who killed Emmett leaving him as a “body left to bloat.” For the people who killed him, his death is the end of the story. This is not so for his mother, and this develops in Sonnet V. Sonnet V repeats the last line of Sonnet IV and shifts to commiserating with Emmett’s mother as she continues to deal with her grief and loss. She is called the “mother of sorrows, of justice denied.” Emmett’s mother’s pain is compared to that of Mary, the mother of Christ.  The tree sees that both sons were martyred and that this pain is a shared pain. The sonnets here provide both the cycle of life and change and the cycle of grief and sacrifice.

The final sonnet in this heroic crown does more than just repeat the lines from the previous sonnets. It is also an acrostic that spells out “RIP EMMETT TILL” with the first letters of each line. Nelson uses the structure of the sonnets to provide a framework for the critique of what happened to Emmett Till.  The structure, though powerful, fades to the background as the content of the poems surges forward.  She opens and closes the crown cycle with the lines “Rosemary for remembrance” as both a nod to Shakespeare and also as a notice to society—the murder of Emmett Till needs to be remembered, not as a shrine to a racist past but as a current call to action. 

​Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem (2003), like A Wreath for Emmett Till, uses very traditional literary forms as a tool for creating a story and a shared moment of grief.  Fortune, a slave from Connecticut whose bones are stored in a museum in Connecticut, is the focus of this series of poems.  The title of the novel pairs something for which there should be celebration (manumission) and something for which there should be mourning (requiem).  The poems in this text follows many of the elements of a traditional funeral mass including the Introit, the Kyrie, and the Sanctus. These three parts serve as the beginning, the prayer for mercy, and the song of praise for the life of Fortune.

Nelson explains that for her, “the highpoint of the requiem is “Not My Bones.” Which [she] imagined Fortune singing in his own voice” (Nelson, 2003, p. 9).  Just as many YA novels in verse focus on providing a voice for those who are often overlooked, this novel interrupts the traditional funeral mass to provide Fortune an opportunity to speak.  He says, “I was not this body,/I was not these bones” (p. 25) meaning that his body was just a “temporary home” for him.  He speaks out against slavery saying, “You can own a man’s body,/ but you can’t own his mind.”  This interruption of the more formal structure becomes a moment of freedom for Fortune; he is not owned and he can speak out.  His voice, and the power of the interruption, becomes a way of saying there is more to life that the physical body and its existence.  Fortune says his soul is free and his bones, though left to tell his story, are not his home.  The structures of the poems in this text provide both a moment of connection and the recognition of freedom by disrupting a traditional structure. 

Both of these novels in verse challenge readers to see beyond the form to the message of the text. The messages, built in traditional poetic forms, highlight the power of history (structures) and the ways in which that history should be disrupted.  Whether it is using the very formal crown cycle to tell the story of a young man brutally murdered or the formal requiem to tell the story of a man who was a slave during his life, these forms and the way that they are used to connect the past and the present provide adolescent readers insight into historically traumatic moments.