“Suturing”: Love, Death, and Perfection’s Limits

Abstract

Of all the so-called “received forms” in English, the sonnet is the most familiar (and perhaps the most frequently published in JAMA). In “Suturing,” the predictable sonnet structure, and its harkening across centuries to the likes of Shakespeare and Donne, gratifies readers while simultaneously challenging us to compare love (traditionally its chief subject) with its flip side, mortality. The decidedly gruesome yet paradoxically beautiful descriptors of the practical steps of preserving the body after death are mirrored by the precision and beauty of the form itself. The volta, or change in theme, after the first octet compares this procedural approach to clinical death with the erasure of one’s own creativity via overrevision and a refusal to accept the possibility of imperfection in the concluding sestet. The poem’s title alludes to the physical act of sewing closed a wound medically, yet the speaker reflects on death of the imagination, ironically remarking, “my lips sewed tight…That is not the worst” compared with the feeling “of words held too tightly for them to flow.” Thus the vulgar, physical death of the body is not what the speaker fears, but rather regretting what he might have read, written, or exclaimed before the final stitch of life is sewed. Through its form and imagery, the poem provides a gripping caution to clinicians and poets alike that what we may miss most at life’s closing might not be the control we strive to achieve, but instead its abandonment to transcendent release.