In a new series, our arts critics choose comforting works for our tough times
Wordsworth’s sonnet Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room is a perfect lockdown poem. It was written to express a sense of comfort and solace within limitation, when compared with “the weight of too much liberty”. It is explicitly about the strict formal requirements of sonnet writing, and how that restriction can lead to its own possibilities. Wordsworth cites specific examples of various people and creatures happy to remain within chosen limits: “hermits are contented with their cells;/ And students with their pensive citadels.”
Well, these days we’re all hermits, and some of us are even students quarantined in pensive citadels (or halls of residence). Reading it in 2020 is an eerie experience.
“Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,/ Sit blithe and happy,” Wordsworth argues. And, he asks, is that any different from bees, who love to “soar for bloom” to hill peaks and the sky, but then also choose to “murmur by the hour in foxglove bells”?
But Wordsworth’s tribute to containment also manages to expand beyond the rules. He gently subverts the strict Petrarchan metre by putting the poem’s turn a line earlier than usual, meaning that the concluding sestet includes an extra line. So the shorter part of the poem is bigger than you expect. Even in strict containment, there is space to be found.
Lockdown might be a restriction imposed on us, but we stay at home by consent. I am not discounting the very real miseries of lockdown, but poetry can help us to look for the positives wherever possible, and provide a tiny moment of comfort and hope.
Wordsworth’s poem reminds us that, however hard it may be to stay at home, there are benefits, too, to making your world a little smaller for a short time. “In truth the prison, into which we doom/ Ourselves, no prison is,” he writes. And when you take a break from making big decisions and running around the world, restriction can be a cause of “brief solace”.
Let’s just hope it really is brief. But 2020 surely will not go on forever, and I like to return to Wordsworth’s poem to remember the peace and comfort to be found in the world immediately around us, and consider that safety and home can be a beautiful and valuable thing. A containment of the body can’t prevent freedom of the mind.