levelheaded: Ode to my sneeze

 

There is a disconnect between the title and body of this poem. The title makes it sounds like the poem will be a humorous ode to an achoo. The body of the poem gives us a complex, consequential approach to freedom that includes suppressing (or avoiding suppressing) freedom for its own sake. One of the rewards of the poem is in looking for where these two impulses intersect.

 

Let’s start at the strange syntax of the first line. On one hand, it implies the speaker is unwilling to give her own sermon because she may be forced to relinquish, to “risk,” her freedom. Even if we doubt she’ll be imprisoned literally, it seems she’ll be stuck inside herself, imprisoned by her own aversion to faux pas. On the other hand, she may not be talking about her own sermon. She may be unable to compromise her freedom someone else’s sermon, for the “welcoming speech from the queen.” It’s no coincidence that a queen is someone who could literally imprison someone.

 

There’s an enigmatic quality to the poem’s language. It is a bit evasive and almost seems like a riddle. And it uses sound deliberately. The natural accents of “must echo liberty” have a forceful rhythmic quality that works in opposition to the soft “s” and “k” sounds that recur in the first two lines (i.e. risk, sake, sermon, speech, queen). The force of the rhythm is paired up with the emphatic “I must.” In the end, we’re left with the speaker’s mandate to “echo liberty.”

 

So where does the sneeze come in? Well, the sneeze is the poem’s central metaphor. After a couple reads, it’s clear the speaker is talking about an actual sneeze. The speaker is considering what it means to let out a great big sneeze in the middle of church or during an important person’s speech. Of course, things are never so simple. A sneeze is characterized by its spontaneous, involuntary nature. The poem’s final “must” implies a similar involuntary quality to the speaker’s “echo.” We can hear the echo of a sneeze in a quiet reception hall. We understand the faces that turn back from the front pews of a church. To suppress the sneeze would be to violate the human mandate to sneeze. It would violate our mandate to use language and to otherwise be as human as humanly possible.

 

 

– The Editors