Where to Break: Lin-Manuel Miranda & His Sonnet of Thanks

Author Elizabeth Gilbert reminds us in her book, Big Magic, how showing up to engage in creative acts can invite both the mundane and the miraculous to thrive within us. Her thesis is that when creative production discards its vain romance with foolish notions of inspiration and genius, things get better for the artist and the art. Gilbert favors the workaday grace of a craftsperson, who plods patiently onward with or without proof of her work changing the world. I find proof of that type of grace in this sonnet by Lin-Manuel Miranda:

"My wife’s the reason anything gets done
She nudges me towards Promise by degrees
She is a perfect symphony of one
Our son is her most beautiful reprise.

We chase the melodies that seem to find us
Until they’re finished songs and start to play
When senseless acts of tragedy remind us
That nothing here is promised, not one day.

This show is proof that history remembers
We lived through times when hate and fear seemed stronger;
We rise and fall, and light, from dying embers,
remembrances that hope and love last longer.

And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside.
I sing Vanessa’s symphony, Eliza tells her story
Now fill the world with music, love and pride."

Miranda delivered this sonnet as thanksgiving for having received this year's Tony award for Best Score. It honors his wife, their son, and grieves over the death and injury in an Orlando nightclub mass-shooting this weekend.

The sonnet begins simply enough. A humble nod to his family, Miranda's first quatrain enchants us by taking the big honor he's received and placing it in the hands of his son. The second quatrain gives the poem action--"we chase the melodies that seem to find us." At the end of this group of four lines, however, Miranda shows us that the poem's "We" is chasing much more than just melodies; the "We" is also chasing meaning in the present moment. ("nothing here is promised") This sentiment goes beyond the Latin saying Carpe Diem, for it builds a fire in the poem that grows as we travel to the next stanza.

If the second quatrain gave the sonnet action, the third places that action right inside the struggles chronicled in Hamilton: "hate and fear" that "rises and falls," and "remembrances that hope and love last longer." But that's not why I'm writing to you about this poem. I'm writing to you about this poem because of what happens next.

Form in art is like law in society: both allow channels for the violence of one's most private feelings to converse with others. Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust called law "the wise restraints that keep us free," illustrating how our collective tendency towards less regulation too often betrays a danger toward real ontological imprisonment. Form liberates us from that imprisonment, allowing the artist and her audience to share densely packed abstractions of energy and emotive power.

So what happens when that form is stretched, broken, bruised, violated? What happens when the end of this sonnet does not provide a neat little bow for itself, summarizing its aforementioned thanksgiving, love and resilience before going on its humble, merry way? What happens when, instead of a final couplet of around twenty syllables, Miranda gives us this:   

"And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside.
I sing Vanessa’s symphony, Eliza tells her story
Now fill the world with music, love and pride."

Three lines. Close to fifty syllables.

It shakes the foundations upon which this sonnet was built. It calls bullshit on the ability of this formal poem (which moves from the awesome simplicity of a small family to the horrendous violence of mass murder) to do its job without some violence of its own at the end. One can recognize the shape of a "proper" ending in the lines above--perhaps something like:

And love cannot be killed or swept aside
Now fill the world with music, love and pride. 

This would have been lovely. And moving. And inspiring. But for Miranda. . . for Miranda it would not have been enough.  

"And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside."

Two lines collide--crash into--one another, making a long virus of a sentence. Because the form was not enough. It could not hold the grief, the rage, or the sorrow--the gratitude, or the affection. It could not hold all of the worlds of pain--all of the feels. It could not hold all of the strange and sad things in his heart--not in that precious, little, sonnet-package. The form was not enough. The couplet could not rage. The moment demanded more. 

So Miranda broke with convention. He set an expectation, and then stretched it past its limit, bringing the ferociousness of love onto the form of this couplet again and again and. . . isn't that better than bringing ferociousness onto others with an AR-15?  

Form matters to me because law matters to me. Because they are similar. And if I am to bear witness to either being broken, I hope it's in service to the workaday grace of being Alive, not a corrosive romance with greatness that would have someone crown themselves king, and shoot people with an automatic weapon. Miranda brought us the former to counter the latter. 

Author Elizabeth Gilbert reminds us in her book, Big Magic, how showing up to engage in creative acts will invite both the mundane and the miraculous to thrive within us. And while Lin-Manuel Miranda built art with no confidence of finding that grace (that grace of the cabinet maker or patient gardner), grace is exactly what he found. And he found it by knowing, in his deepest place, where to build, and also. . also, where to break. 

---