Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

John Frederick Nims' "The Masque of Blackness" is an intricate sequence of ten sonnets that explores themes of time, perception, and existential reckoning. The title itself invokes Ben Jonson’s 1605 masque, a courtly entertainment that dramatized transformation and self-discovery, yet Nims’ poetic engagement shifts the focus inward, using the masque as a metaphor for human experience—birth, love, suffering, and loss—staged against the ever-changing backdrop of time. Through dense allusions, structural precision, and shifts between dramatic spectacle and intimate reflection, Nims constructs a layered meditation on the fragility and resilience of human life.

The first sonnet establishes a mood of revelation. The speaker introduces news that transforms perception: New lungs for the world’s air, planets’ new center, / New eyes brimming new colors—a new everything! This hyperbolic freshness suggests an existential rebirth, the reshaping of the self and its understanding. The idea of time shifting—The ticking kaleidoscope rearranged its tenses—implies that personal history is being rewritten, as if the world and its inhabitants are made anew in the wake of a child’s birth. Yet, this excitement is tempered by the observation that reality now feels like someone’s dream / Strange as drowned cities where the cursive eel / Flashes in alleys. Life, newly created, destabilizes the previous order, making even the most familiar spaces surreal.

The second sonnet builds on this theatrical framing, explicitly likening life to a play—one predating even Shakespeare’s era, referencing Palladas, a 4th-century Greek poet known for his cynicism. Here, the lovers move through a murky vast Theater, backstage among discarded props, costumes, and set pieces. The imagery suggests that identities are as interchangeable as roles in a play: banker, burglar, streaming sheik. The poem implies that love and life itself are performances, shaped by fate and expectation rather than autonomy. The final couplet—She feels a dagger and the edge runs red—introduces a more ominous note, suggesting that even love contains an inherent violence or tragedy, an illusion undone by a sudden, sharp reality.

The third sonnet shifts dramatically to an event that shatters the couple’s constructed world: the birth of a child. The telephone dinning at midnight in the west delivers news that upends their sense of time and distance: O thousand miles of wire, you may well be humming. The urgency of new life is juxtaposed against the sterility of empty spaces, deserted halls of the long dorm, and the final image of celestial chaos—Each star is twenty stars! What a wild lens!—suggesting both awe and confusion. This cosmic imagery aligns the child’s birth with a fundamental rupture in the universe’s order.

The fourth sonnet contemplates the vulnerability of infancy, contrasting the newborn’s delicate, anemone fingers with the relentless force of time: Old mustache-tugging, flint, foreclosing Time. This blending of the child’s innocence with the inevitability of age suggests that all potential—Palms must twist up, slow-open tense as traps—carries the shadow of future loss. Yet, there is also a sense of resilience and endurance, as love and knowledge persist despite time’s erasures.

In the fifth sonnet, the child reaches a developmental milestone—discovering his hand. The poem shifts into a meditation on human agency: What will you do with it turned brusque and human? This transition from the instinctive to the deliberate, from half floral and half bird to a force capable of shaping the world, encapsulates the journey from innocence to responsibility. The speaker, perhaps addressing the child or an imagined future self, hopes for wisdom: O use it better than we, your likely future;—a plea to surpass the past’s failures, whether in science (trick the tumblers of combustible nature) or love (Two cups on midnight throw-rugs by the fire).

The sixth sonnet marks a dark shift. The couple encounters sorrow in old tweed, a loss that unfolds not through sudden catastrophe but within the mundane setting of the dullish office you all know. The restrained tone—Doctors are curt, averted; what they mean / Concern shows livelier in the mother’s eyes—amplifies the weight of grief through what is left unsaid. The mother’s small gesture—bringing a toy lamb as evidence of her child’s liveliness—becomes heartbreaking in the face of fate’s indifference.

The seventh sonnet continues the exploration of grief, revealing the couple’s attempt to rationalize their loss: They started to take metaphor like a drug. They turn to poetic consolations—thunder’s blue-steel piston clears the air—but these prove insufficient. When alone, without metaphor’s protective veil, the big skywriting withered, wasn’t there. The only certainty is found in the mundane: some Now remains. Their world is reduced to pebbles, but even these can argue stone, suggesting that, while diminished, meaning persists in small, tangible forms.

The eighth sonnet (Antimasque) introduces a collie pup, a being whose presence is exuberant but meaningless against the shadow of grief. The dog’s boundless, thoughtless energy—Bounding assiduous sniffer hung with hair—contrasts with the weight of human sorrow. The couple recognizes the absurdity: Oh nothing. They knew that. The dog’s only answer to their pain is its own unthinking joy: Dance Dance was all the answer. This moment reflects an existential absurdity, where life’s relentless motion continues, indifferent to personal tragedy.

The ninth sonnet situates the couple at a beach, where the eternal rhythm of waves mirrors their internal struggle. The waves erase themselves in an endless cycle—Wave erasing wave erasing wave shakes no—mirroring their grief’s repetition. Yet, for the speaker, even the natural world becomes an extension of thought, as he reads meaning into the surf’s movements: He saw exclaiming waves turn W / … and combers cave like K. The transformation of nature into language highlights the poet’s impulse to impose order on chaos, but the final image—Dove deepsea-panoplied down phosphorous know—suggests that true understanding remains elusive.

The final sonnet asks what, if anything, can be known in the face of loss. Any true time from clockhands so bent back? The imagery collapses past and present, joy and sorrow, into a single moment. The white dog—once a symbol of meaningless joy—dances by the terrible sea, embodying both defiance and futility. The couple, having moved through the cycles of hope, grief, and adaptation, now stands apart, seeing the works of the bright world apart. Their perspective is altered—perhaps not healed, but aware of the art within the inexorable mechanics of existence.

Throughout "The Masque of Blackness," Nims weaves a complex interplay of time, loss, and renewal. The sequence mirrors the masque’s traditional structure, beginning in darkness, progressing through transformation, and culminating in awareness. By fusing personal grief with theatrical and cosmic imagery, Nims crafts a meditation on love and mortality that is both deeply personal and universally resonant. The ten sonnets, through their rigorous formalism and intricate interplay of metaphor, demonstrate poetry’s power not to resolve grief but to give it shape, to make the unknowable momentarily visible.

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