Contrary to the conventional access strategy whereby the reader would have started off with Sonnet One at page one, the scribe flipped through index pages, 176 to 171, backwards, halting at 172. Was it Kipling’s IF or the inherent hypothetical flexibility that made the grammatical item more pronounced? Prompted through verses listed as such, it was noted that 14 of these had positioned ‘if’ at the initial.
Consciously employed or randomly crafted, the question led to examining the encountered suppositions in Tahir’s Telling Twilight: Seven Score Sonnets, 2024 publication PU. Three grammatical uses of ‘if’ along with the language of programming provided the theoretical framework for the analysis.
Open to further research into its inception and cross-breeding, literary critics so far have credited Romans, Italians, Europeans, British, and now with Athar Tahir, the Anglophones for Sonnet produce. A fourteen-line structure, deca-syllabic with a definite rhyme scheme, the sonnet form manages to create and accommodate a vibrant paradox.
In other words, where content challenges, its form appeases and disciplines. With regard to Telling Twilight, the reader’s interpretative ease owes much to the default pairing of value variables employed as objective correlatives: You/I; speaker/listener; us/them; creator/creation; this/that; and specifically in Tahir’s societal partnership/cosmic alignment as understood. While his recursive call invents an iteration looping, the switch statements clear indecisive moments, creating a console log for both reader and poet. At such conclusive points, innovation intervenes, assigning an indigenous and unexpected value to the sonnet itself.
The three conditions of English syntax—if + present / if + past / if + past perfect—run through Tahir’s fourteen IF sonnets, rooted in the city of Lahore, spanning over six years from 2017–2022. Out of fourteen under discussion, June 2021 Sonnet CXXV if I compare you to… serves as a centerpiece, permitting the reader an agile mobility back and forth. Exploring plausible options to describing ‘You’, definitive choices are made by ‘I’ who fearlessly passes a verdict on the ‘sweaty shrinking’ state of being as seasonally framed. ‘Other conditions’ exude a confidence that soon gets evaded at the occurrence of the ‘or’ conjunct in line 10, safeguarding one’s ‘free fall into utter disarray’. Sanity prevails, signposting March 2022 Sonnet CXXXV that politely shuns away ‘the other’ self. The stay-away syntax establishes a switch statement that allows the Sonnet to control and make a substantive decision. ‘Enough of rhyming schyming’ constructs a data structure to earmark the coded block.
If I could play the sea… 2017 Sonnet traces the origin through sea imagery that nurtures a pain strain. The spirit to challenge provokes turning a ‘blind eye’ to annihilation itself. The usage is effectively engaged through a Prufrockian defense mechanism. Self-preservation is embedded in the proclamation ‘I dare not’. Yet fifteen days later, the Sonnet dated 26.10.2017 encapsulates the tussle between past and present as supposed ‘emptiness’ which infuses a new synergy into the ‘nothingness’ itself. The conditional ‘If’ is pushed to lines 2 and 6, denied its initial position. The mood of 2017 flows into 2018.
If logic were applied… cleverly shifts the onus of summoning options onto the spinner/poet. The surveillance of naming culminates in an ownership that consumes. Absence preempts presence that claims a ‘rhyme without reason’ through Rumi’s call encoded in Sonnet XLII to Elif Shafaq’s implied acknowledgement of 101 ways left uncoded in XLIII with the margin of mere 11 days. The ‘multi-storied darkness’ through ‘bulb’ imagery lends a spine and leaf layout to the Sonnet, ‘splitting silence to speak’ yet more of the ‘modes’ that tentatively inch ‘vast subtractions’.
The awareness of the ‘unnerving’ phase of the ‘hot sand’ encapsulated in April Sonnet 2018 simmers down by November to an autumnal request for a donation: ‘a smile in charity’. Choices are intelligently crafted, deliberated upon as a literary simulacrum to cheat on the reader’s agile comprehension of Sonnets yet to come. Be it the ‘dense moments’ of diligence ‘rolled out as mercury on papaya leaf’ or the art of forgetting and ‘reliving scalloped memory’, the attempts to reduce the drift damage continue.
The range of natural imagery clinches upon elemental composition. Water, earth, and whispering wind subtly anchor the mystical Bishnu, relating the pained ‘I’ to the personal, back to the collective to echo an epiphany. The subtraction of the solid tangible to the ‘hollow’ tactile onto the zero ‘if’ to substantive geological rocks showcases Tahir’s moment of creativity, poetic nirvana.
The awareness of the ‘unnerving’ phase of the ‘hot sand’ encapsulated in April Sonnet 2018 simmers down by November to an autumnal request for a donation: ‘a smile in charity’. Choices are intelligently crafted, deliberated upon as a literary simulacrum to cheat on the reader’s agile comprehension of Sonnets yet to come. Be it the ‘dense moments’ of diligence ‘rolled out as mercury on papaya leaf’ or the art of forgetting and ‘reliving scalloped memory’, the attempts to reduce the drift damage continue.
The range of natural imagery clinches upon elemental composition. Water, earth, and whispering wind subtly anchor the mystical Bishnu, relating the pained ‘I’ to the personal, back to the collective to echo an epiphany. The subtraction of the solid tangible to the ‘hollow’ tactile onto the zero ‘if’ to substantive geological rocks showcases Tahir’s moment of creativity, poetic nirvana.
The awareness of the ‘unnerving’ phase of the ‘hot sand’ encapsulated in April Sonnet 2018 simmers down by November to an autumnal request for a donation: ‘a smile in charity’. Choices are intelligently crafted, deliberated upon as a literary simulacrum to cheat on the reader’s agile comprehension of Sonnets yet to come. Be it the ‘dense moments’ of diligence ‘rolled out as mercury on papaya leaf’ or the art of forgetting and ‘reliving scalloped memory’, the attempts to reduce the drift damage continue.
The range of natural imagery clinches upon elemental composition. Water, earth, and whispering wind subtly anchor the mystical Bishnu, relating the pained ‘I’ to the personal, back to the collective to echo an epiphany. The subtraction of the solid tangible to the ‘hollow’ tactile onto the zero ‘if’ to substantive geological rocks showcases Tahir’s moment of creativity, poetic nirvana.
