The Turn

Irish proverb: It is a long road that has no turning.

In April 2010, I drove to Iowa with Charlie, a man I barely knew. A man who prepared for our journey by scouring the Internet for interesting jokes. He imagined, I suppose, as we drove straight from Vermont through New York, clipping western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and finally Iowa, we could use a few punch lines. Because it was April and because we took state highways, we proceeded in parallel with impossibly enormous tractors outfitted with gangs of discs. We rode beside the great disturbed sods of prairies, the world turned over.

The word “verse” is Latin and derives from the agricultural act of “turning the plow.” This turn is a doubling back against the way the idea had been traveling, much as the plowman turns at the end of the row and travels back in the opposite direction.

It’s perhaps comparable to the way one strolls to town to pick up the mail and then strolls home with it, or flies round-trip to Rome, or boards a boat to Innisfree and comes back later that afternoon. There is the outbound excursion and the turn to come back, which of course has a different feeling, a different perspective, even though it covers the same terrain. When a farmer plows with an ox, these turns accumulate, as he continually turns his animal at the end of every row to drive back into the sod, to carve the turf again, in the reverse direction.

Ancient texts were written and read this way: left to right, and right back to left, then left to right, etc., traversing across the page as the farmer would plow the soil of his field. The name for this switching back and forth excursion in the field and on the page is boustrophedon.

A third reference to “turning” in literature appears in the poetic form of a sonnet. This 14-line verse is composed of two phases: the first eight lines form the octet of the poem and the last six lines of the poem comprise the sestet. The octet sets out a little problem, situation, predicament, or condition, and the sestet resolves, remedies, or replies. The shift between the octet and the sestet is known as the volta, the Italian word for “a turn.”

If you hover over the page and imagine the vantage of a kestrel, you’d see the sonnet looks like the neat furrows of a field, or the narrow rows of a tended garden. Yeats wrote in his famous poem that he would arise and go to Innisfree and have nine bean rows there. If Yeats’s bean rows were instead lines of a sonnet in progress, his soil a page of composition, then he would have just breached the volta at that ninth bean row before hanging his spade back in the shed.

The sonnet’s volta is a moment in the poem when the meaning pivots or shifts; it is the midlife crisis of the poem, occurring roughly where it occurs in mortality: just past halfway. Another way to think of this archetypal form is in the setting up of a joke (octet), followed by the punch line (sestet). The volta is that pause, that wedge of suspense. As Billy Collins’s smart-aleck sonnet about writing a sonnet explains in its ninth, tenth, and eleventh lines, “But hang on here while we make the turn/into the final six where all will be resolved, /where longing and heartache will find an end....”

As we crossed the Mississippi River and eased into Iowa, Charlie announced, “Two fisherman were out casting their nets when a genie appeared to them and offered to grant them any wish.” We had switched off driving, and he volunteered to take the wheel more often so that I could have my hands free to take notes. “The one fisherman blurted out before the other had a chance to respond, ‘I wish for the whole sea to turn to Guinness’,” Charlie continued. I smiled politely. “The genie granted the fisherman’s wish and with that the...