A Crown for Lockdown: Part One

Introduction

A crown of sonnets is a sequence of 14 sonnets, all based around a single unifying theme and also all connected, through the repetition of the last line of a sonnet as the first line of the subsequent sonnet. So, line 14 of sonnet one becomes the first line of sonnet two, and line 14 of sonnet two becomes the first line of sonnet three, and so on. The final line of the final sonnet must also be the first line of the first sonnet, completing the ring, or crown.

I first came across the form through Marilyn Nelson’s collection, A Wreath for Emmett Till, which even more impressively is actually a heroic crown. This involves fifteen sonnets, with the final sonnet being known as the Mastersonnet and being made up of the opening lines from the previous fourteen poems.

This was beyond me.

Nevertheless, when Covid-19 reached Britain in 2020, I found myself turning repeatedly towards the sonnet form, and I quite liked the idea of that more basic crown.

The disease spready rapidly, as elsewhere, and by mid-March had caused the first of three national lockdowns (to date): schools switched to remote teaching; all but “essential shops” had to close, along with libraries, theatres, cinemas, public houses (bars), galleries and museums; people were instructed to work from home wherever possible; social contact and movement between households was made illegal. One shopping trip and one excursion for local exercise per day were the mandated allowances.

We might like to imagine that Britons would respond to such a crisis with calm stoicism and the sort of stiff upper lip that is our stereotype. Instead, people began panic-buying toilet roll and pasta, shops had to introduce impromptu and informal rationing systems, and people quickly began viewing the film Contagion as some form of prediction at best, or as a survivalist manifesto at worst.

Anyway, all of a sudden I had some time on my hands…

A Crown for Lockdown is the consequence. It records genuine family events and one family’s response to them, between March and May of 2020. I’m well aware we got off lightly. I hope there’s no need for a sequel.

A Crown for Lockdown

1.

When panic-buying pasta hit the news

And toilet rolls went flying off the shelves,

When circumstances took our right to choose

To socialise or just keep to ourselves;

When skies were suddenly devoid of planes,

When hairdressers could no longer cut hair,

When children’s swings were left to rust in chains

And all the fun was sucked out of the fair;

When pubs and beauty parlours had to close,

And dentists couldn’t even look at teeth,

When florists didn’t dare to sell a rose,

And mourners couldn’t meet to share their grief;

While politicians pondered the new norm,

I thought, “I know: I’ll try the sonnet form.”

2.

I thought, I know, I’ll try the sonnet form,

To sort my thoughts out, just as I once did

When adolescent feelings raised a storm

And I wrote science fiction, as a kid.

My notebooks glowed with rocket ships from Mars

And groaned with talking squids in outer space,

Despotic monsters from beyond the stars,

Intent on wiping out the human race.

Though someone, somehow, always saved the day,

My stories shook with hyperbolic fears

Which made my mother shake her head and say,

“I don’t know where you get such strange ideas!”

I don’t know where those stories came from, Mum,

But they were not the shape of things to come.

3.

No, they were not the shape of things to come.

Invasions can be subtler, it seems.

A reach that’s more insidious than some

Corrupt intergalactical regime’s.

No meteor strike found us unprepared,

No Martians came to take us by surprise,

No “Take me to your leader” was declared,

No flying saucers blotted out the skies.

Instead, we face a virus, a disease,

A hidden villain, with a silent tread.

It travels on a cough, a sneeze, the breeze…

We lack the wherewithal to stop its spread:

A world at war with microscopic foes;

The epidemic spreads and swells and grows.