Marechera's Love Sonnets. (4).


One of the most loathed texts of Modernism was Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. Wordsworth, represented by “She was a Phantom of Delight” (CLXXIV), was one of its many objectionable texts. Wordsworth’s poem of worship to his wife, Mary, draws upon Gothic imagery: “Phantom” (1), “Apparition” (3), “Spirit” (12). She is an other-wordly being, but of this world, “with something of an angel light” (30). In Sonnet II, “A Phantom of Delight”, Marechera begins an anti-Romantic autopsy of love. It is a brutal sonnet in which he desires to “crush” “love’s false city…And bury it”.

Were these fists boulders
And these shoulders a sudden earthquake
And my disgust lakes of seething lava
I would love’s false City crush
And bury it ever underneath my cooled passion.

Meaning rolls on through the internal rhyme “boulders” “shoulders”, linking the body and seismic activity into a whole, such that anger becomes volcanic, and by implication, a mirror-image of sexual explosion. Metaphorically, volcanic emotion (miming orgasm) buries a place that falsely promised delight. If Wordsworth’s poem upholds the phantasm of love, so Marechera’s poem condemns the phantasmagoria of love: the “hellish vision” that engulfs the lover entirely.

The text, as it appears in Cemetery of Mind, isn’t that clear. It has 15 lines and an awkward line 5 that reads: “I would love’s false City Crush”. This problem illustrates a point that always has to be remembered when reading Marechera’s poetry. Much of what exists was published posthumously, is restored from drafts, and these are sometimes rough in terms of finish. As the other sonnets are allusive sonnets (they refer to the sonnet tradition by virtue of their line count), the text would appear to be faulty. (An identical problem occurs in Sonnet IV). Clearly, “Crush” is incorrect. It isn’t a capitalised noun. It does not create a Marecheran compound “City-Crush”. It has to be the verb that gives meaning to the line: “I would crush love’s false City”.But the verb is displaced for emphasis: “I would love’s false City crush/And bury” (5-6). Little is gained by placing “Earthquake” on its own line (3). It makes more sense to read this as a continuation of line 2: “And these shoulders a sudden earthquake.”

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