Sonnet

The Professor

By Joshua Mehigan

I get there early and I find a chair.

I squeeze my plastic cup of wine. I nod.

I maladroitly eat a pretzel rod

and second an opinion I don’t share.

I think: whatever else I am, I’m there.

Afterwards, I escape across the quad

into fresh air, alone again, thank god.

Nobody cares. They’re quite right not to care.

I can’t go home. Even my family

is thoroughly contemptuous of me.

I look bad. I’m exactly how I look.

These days I never read, but no one does,

and, anyhow, I proved how smart I was.

Everything I know is from a book.

I found my poem on the Poetry Foundation site. It is called “The Professor” by Joshua Mehigan. It had an interesting title so I decided to check it out. Turns out it is a classic Petrarchan sonnet. Petrachan poems follow the pattern of eight lines, an octave, plus a six line stanza called a sestet. The poem also has a clear turn at the end of the octave and start of the sestet. The first stanza talks about the routine of the speaker’s life. It is seems very monotonous and unexciting. The second stanza quickly shifts to a serious topic. It starts “I can’t go home,” The second stanza discusses that though people do not read anymore, and the speaker did not read anymore, the speaker had learned everything they knew from a book. I really enjoyed the ending thought because I really value the impact of reading good books. Overall, I enjoyed reading this sonnet and looking into Petrachan style. I had really only noticed Shakespearean sonnet before, as we are not introduced to the many other styles of sonnet, so this was a good poem for me to look at.