Two Heroic Crowns of Sonnets

I finished reading What We Can Know, Ian McEwan's 2025 novel (his18th), set in a dystopian future where a scholar investigates a lost poem, exploring themes of history, memory, and the consequences of climate change.

It is set in the year 2119, in a United Kingdom partially submerged due to rising sea levels. The story follows Tom Metcalfe, an academic at the fictional University of the South Downs, who is on a quest to uncover a lost poem titled "A Corona for Vivien," which was read aloud at a party in 2014. This quest leads him to explore the complexities of human relationships and the impact of historical events on personal lives.

"A Corona for Vivien" was supposedly written by the renowned (and fictional) poet Francis Blundy as a birthday present for his wife, Vivien, and he read it aloud at a dinner party in 2014. The sole manuscript copy of the poem, written on vellum, vanished after the dinner, leading to its mythical status and becoming the obsession of the future scholar, Metcalfe, in the year 2119.

The poem is a highly elaborate and technically challenging real form known as a Heroic Crown of Sonnets, or simply a Corona. A Corona is a sequence of 15 interlinked sonnets (14 sonnets followed by a final, 15th sonnet, the "Master Sonnet"). The last line of each of the first 14 sonnets becomes the first line of the sonnet immediately following it. This creates a chain-like structure, binding the entire sequence together. The 15th sonnet, which completes the "crown,' is composed of all 14 of the linking lines (the first/last lines of the preceding sonnets) in the order they appeared.

It is one of those difficult, intricate, puzzling, and perhaps awkward forms, like the villanelle and paradelle.

The form and title are inspired by a real-life poem, "A Corona for Prue" by the poet John Fuller.

That poem's first sonnet is:

Come, then, we’ll walk (what else is there to do?)

Down to the goosey river, where the weir

Sprawls like our dreams and seethes throughout the year

Into the secret fields. Just me and you

Tracking the shape and startled peekaboo

Of a lost roe deer (surprised to find us near

But fixed in curiosity, not fear).

These are the meadows, and our rendezvous.

It seems an age since the retreat of March,

Its caution and alarm. Then we were shocked

By graphs in April and the great delay

Through weeks that reached like columns of an arch

That rises into mist, our vision locked

In the uncertainties of dangerous May.

The type of sonnet that makes up Fuller's "A Corona for Prue," is an Italian or Petrarchan Sonnet variant. The structure of the individual sonnets adheres to a highly formal and demanding standard. It follows the classic Petrarchan rhyme scheme of an Octave (First 8 lines): ABBAABBA and a Sestet (Last 6 lines): CDECDE.

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