The Deserted City opens with a sonnet sequence that immediately establishes a voice of profound loss. The first poem, 'The House of Night,' imagines a world stripped of light, where the speaker feels 'more blind / Than the dead, blundering planets raining past.' The language is stark and cosmic, yet the poem pivots on a promise: the beloved will come 'with unfaltering faith' to lead beyond death. This tension between desolation and a fragile hope recurs throughout the collection.

The poems are structured as a series of 'houses'—Night, Doubt, Mercy, Earth, Faith—each representing a psychological or spiritual state. The sonnet form is used with consistent rhyme schemes, but the voice shifts from the first poem's cosmic despair to a more intimate, questioning tone in later pieces. The excerpts suggest a narrative arc from isolation toward a tentative reconciliation with mortality.

The Architecture of Despair

The sequence's organizing metaphor—the house—gives each sonnet a distinct emotional architecture. 'The House of Night' builds a world of total darkness, using conditional clauses ('Though all the light were lifted') to create a hypothetical desolation. The speaker's blindness is linked to 'dead, blundering planets,' a striking image that suggests cosmic indifference. In contrast, 'The House of Doubt' opens with a rhetorical question—'Why should we fear?'—and counters bodily doubt with a soul that chants 'as one that hath no fears.' The shift from conditional to imperative mood marks a change in rhetorical strategy.

'The House of Mercy' introduces a direct address to a 'Beloved,' shifting the tone from abstract meditation to personal plea. The speaker admits past sins but questions whether mercy might have altered the present. The final tercet imagines the beloved speaking to 'little grasses,' a sudden turn to natural imagery that softens the poem's earlier severity. This movement from cosmic to intimate, from conditional to direct address, gives the sequence its emotional momentum.

Voice and the Shifting Addressee

The poems vary their addressee, creating a layered sense of dialogue. In 'The House of Night,' the speaker addresses an unnamed 'you' who will come to lead them. 'The House of Doubt' speaks to a collective 'we,' perhaps the speaker and a companion, or the reader. 'The House of Mercy' directly addresses a 'Beloved,' while 'The House of Earth' turns to 'O ye disconsolate and heavy-souled,' a broader audience of the suffering. 'The House of Faith' returns to a 'dear' and imagines a future summons: 'when thou comest (for I at last will call).'

This shifting addressee creates a sense of searching—the speaker reaches out to different listeners, from a divine presence to a human beloved to a community of mourners. The voice itself changes register: from the declarative certainty of 'I know I should not fancy Time unkind' to the pleading 'I question not, Beloved, nor deny,' and finally to the almost tender instruction in 'The House of Faith' to 'Bid strangers to the feasts that once we planned.' The progression suggests a gradual acceptance of loss, though the excerpts do not reveal a final resolution.

Pace and the Sonnet's Turn

Each sonnet follows the Petrarchan or Shakespearean structure, but the pace varies through enjambment and caesura. In 'The House of Night,' the opening octet runs with few pauses, building a relentless list of hypothetical horrors. The volta at line 9—'Though all my world was thus'—slows the rhythm, introducing a longer pause before the turn. 'The House of Doubt' uses shorter lines and more frequent stops, creating a breathless, questioning quality. 'The House of Mercy' employs a more measured pace, with the final tercet breaking into a scene of stillness: 'the young June grasses seem / Quite still that keep the edge of the still stream.'

The most dramatic shift in pace occurs in 'The House of Earth,' where the speaker describes yearning 'to touch that Earth which ye afar behold.' The line 'But I between dead suns must peer, and grope' uses heavy stresses and a caesura after 'peer,' mimicking the act of groping. This variation in tempo—from the rapid accumulation of conditions to the slow, weighted lines of longing—gives the sequence a musical and emotional arc that rewards careful reading.

Readers attentive to the sonnet's formal constraints will notice how Sherman uses the volta to pivot from despair to a glimmer of hope, often in the final couplet. The sequence rewards rereading: the 'houses' can be seen as stages of grief or as stations in a spiritual journey. The poems are best approached as a single, unfolding meditation rather than isolated lyrics. Pay particular attention to the recurring images of light, darkness, and the natural world—they shift in meaning as the sequence progresses.