Atlantis— A Lost Sonnet Lyrics
that a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals—had all
one fine day gone under?
I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city—
white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
what really happened is
this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of
where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.
About
From Boland’s 2007 collection Domestic Violence, this sonnet ponders the nature of Atlantis, the mythical lost city, and comes up with an interesting solution for its ontology.
The poem is less about the lost city of Atlantis and more about loss, grief and memory. The city can be interpreted as a metaphor for things that have been lost and are irretrievable. Atlantis had to be invented by the human imagination as a way of coping or, as Boland puts it in the last line, “they gave their sorrow a name and downed it.
Structure
The poem is loosely a sonnet. Although the traditional sonnet has a formal, rigid template, followed closely by Shakespeare and Petrarch, for example, it can also be flexible and easily manipulated. A good example is Tony Harrison’s Timer which is based on the sixteen line Meredithian sonnet.
Boland’s sonnet departs from the traditional fourteen lines. The formal iambic pentameter metre is discarded for an easy flow with a mix of enjambed line endings, abrupt end-stops and caesurae. There is no formal rhyme scheme.
Structurally, there is one four-lined quatrain, three three-lined tercets and a final stanza that can be thought of as a long final line fourteen or a couplet with two lines of different lengths, creating a fifteenth line.
The result is a concise, framework whereby an idea can be stated in the first quatrain and then explored and given depth. Yet there is a quality of thoughtfulness, where the speaker appears to be talking to herself and reaching an imaginative yet mournful conclusion.
Language and Imagery
The voice is that of a first person speaker, we can assume the poet, using the pronoun “I” and addressing an unseen listener or the reader. The language is accessible and colloquial, as if she is thinking aloud. However, this provides a framework for a complex and inventive idea.
LInes flow easily, without a formal rhyme scheme, and line endings are enjambed. The effect is fluid as the speaker moves from speculation about Atlantis and the mythology to the present day and then back again. This meandering effect is cleverly brought to an abrupt sad ending.
The dominating image is of the lost city of Atlantis as a metaphor for human loss and grief.
Q&A
Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning
