Donald Evans's Sonnets from the Patagonian (1918) opens with an unusual advertisement-letter to Cornwall Hollis, where the speaker declares that with the Allied cause crumbling, it is time to think of aesthetics. This framing immediately establishes the collection's tension between high artifice and historical crisis. The sonnets that follow inhabit a voice that is at once world-weary and self-dramatizing, often addressing the poet's own failures and poses. Evans's language is dense with paradox: the poet 'loves his failures as one might love fame' and 'studies heady griefs that wash the cheek.' The Patagonian—never explicitly defined—functions as a mask for a sensibility that is both detached and intensely engaged with the act of making poetry.

The Poet as Performer and Failure

Several sonnets present the poet as a deliberate performer of his own inadequacy. In 'Portraits of the Author: Epicede,' the figure 'lives in pawn, pledging a battered name' and 'loves his failures as one might love fame.' The poem catalogues his gestures: he 'swore he would be glad and only glad, / And turned to Broadway for the peace of God,' only to find it 'at the bottom of the glass.' This self-conscious theatricality recurs in 'The Noon of Night,' where 'the fictive tear he holds in reverence' and 'barren smiles are trained for tragedy.' The poet is not merely suffering but curating his suffering, tying up 'parcels of mock gaiety' and labeling them 'with many worshippings.' Evans's voice here is ironic and precise, never fully committing to sincerity or satire.

Urban Landscapes and the Weight of Artifice

The collection's settings shift between interior and city scenes, often using urban details to anchor abstract emotion. 'Fifth Avenue' recounts a death 'one yellowed day saving a tattered man,' only to undercut heroism: 'It was an accident—and he began / A last profound apology to death.' The city is a stage for accidental nobility. In 'In the Falklands,' the poet 'draws droll figures on the windowpane / To lure his vagrom fellow souls to Rome,' mixing the mundane with the grandiose. Evans's imagery frequently juxtaposes the precious and the degraded: 'Grapes in the grass, and every day a waste / At scattered sources of lost loveliness, / With drunkenness to drain the ruined seats.' The sonnet form itself becomes a container for this tension, its strict fourteen lines holding lines that threaten to spill into cynicism.

Rhyme, Rhythm, and the Shifting Pace of the Sonnet

Evans works within the Petrarchan and Shakespearean traditions but often disrupts expected rhythms. In 'The Noon of Night,' the octave's abba abba pattern gives way to a sestet that moves from catalog to epigram: 'He knows his gems are turned to glassy paste— / But he thanks God aloof from all distress, / For he knows sewers run beneath the city streets.' The final couplet-like closure is abrupt, shifting from metaphysical complaint to blunt urban reality. Elsewhere, enjambment creates a conversational drag: 'He thought back over all the songs he had sung, / And all the hours his heart like waving grain / Had swayed to music.' The pace slows in such lines, then quickens with end-stopped declarations. This variation mirrors the speaker's oscillation between languor and sharp self-awareness.

Readers approaching Sonnets from the Patagonian should attend to the way Evans uses the sonnet's formal constraints to dramatize a divided consciousness. The Patagonian persona is never fully explained, and the poems resist easy biographical reading. Instead, they reward attention to their crafted surfaces—the unexpected rhymes, the shifts between high diction and colloquial bluntness, the recurring motifs of glass, coins, and tombstones. This is a collection that asks to be read slowly, with an ear for its ironies and an eye for its deliberate poses.