Keown also emphasises her optimism through the juxtaposition of her almost hyperbolic description of her loved one – who “Held something ever living, in Death’s stead” – and the misanthropic approach she takes to the rest of humankind. She could not be more critical of the world which patronises her with their “piteous platitudes of pain”, and this is in stark contrast to the idyllic pastoral world her mind inhabits and tries to keep alive (through such motifs as the lilac in his “little room”).
That she writes a Sonnet is also testament, perhaps, to the love affair which still endures between her and both her loved one and the pastoral ideal he has come to represent. This pastoral ideal is not lost on Brittain in her poem either, but it is something far more nebulous and intangible to her – a vague hope in which she, essentially, has little hope herself.
The structure of ‘Perhaps-’ is particularly interesting, as the pendulum of each stanza swings neatly between the two sides of Brittain’s paradox: life could be beautiful again, and yet how can it be when her loved one is dead? In the first four stanzas, the first three lines inhabit a future tense where hope endures and beauty remains possible (pinned to the repeated adverb, ‘perhaps’); but the last line of each stanza brings this future hope crashing down to a present reality, and the pivot of this metaphorical see-saw is the repeated ‘(al)though’.
However, the deviance from this structure in the final stanza speaks volumes about the poet’s actual frame of mind. The future may hold the vague possibility of closure and happiness (Line 1), but even the future is contaminated (Line 2) by the inextricable fact that the loss of her loved one has broken her heart (Lines 3 and 4). This stanza renders all the optimism elsewhere redundant, as it shows that it is all nothing but vain fantasy. All the staples of pre-1914 pastoral poetry are there – “golden meadows”, “blossoms sweet” etc. – but they clearly belong very much to a pre-1914 world which has now been shattered.
Lastly, it is revealing that Brittain capitalises the second-person pronoun for her loved one, almost deifying him, and therefore putting any world without this “one greatest joy” in the shadow of an almost godless existence. Perhaps this shows that she now dwells in the ecliptic realm so feared by Keown. So desperate is she to remain connected to the natural joys of her pre-lapsarian world before the war that she refuses to accept its demise, whereas Brittain’s eyes are wide open, and she is under no illusions as to how annihilative her bereavement actually is.
by
tayla11194 (student)
