Dreams

Helen Hunt Jackson appreciated and admired the conventions of poetry. Growing up in a comfortable, upper-middle-class home with a massive library under the guidance of the college professor father she loved, Jackson studied the intricate constructs of poetry, particularly from the Renaissance.

Unlike her close friend Emily Dickinson, who evolved her poetry into eccentric and radical forms that experimented with rhythm and rhyme, Jackson found her voice in exploring rather than deconstructing the defining poetic forms of Western culture. In “Dreams,” for instance, she follows the Petrarchan sonnet form that dates to 14th-century Renaissance Italy. With its elegant diction, sculptured metrics, and elaborate rhyming scheme, the Petrarchan sonnet uses the first eight lines to pose a problem and the closing six lines to offer a solution. This contrapuntal structure provides Jackson’s poem with a stable architecture.

That is not to say, however, that Jackson does not experiment in her sonnet or upend expectations to create a jolting impact. At first, “Dreams” appears conventional in its careful rhythm and rhymes, moving from problem to solution exactly where it should, at the end of Line 8.