I gotta get a piece of this.
Know that I am someone who believes that in 400 years, the most canonical lyric poetry of our period will be rap lyrics. Rappers at least know, what free verse poets have forgotten, that the roots of lyric poetry are music. (It might matter to you, as well, to know that I can compose both raps and formal sonnets).
But for all that, Shakespeare’s sonnet destroys Lupe’s verse.
Both poems are about a serious matter: Lupe’s about the social injustice of endemic poverty; Shakespeare’s about the eventual death of those we love.
The Lupe verse is structured around a conceit that the speaker is walking through an impoverished neighborhood inside a giant robot. Imaginative but a little silly or cartoonish as well. The conceit allows him to characterize the neighborhood in a sort of reverse blazon, working up from toes to face. The conceit is, however, worked out a little mechanically: one element of the hood associated with each body part on the way up. The elements of the neighborhood are conventional to the point of being utter clichés: hoes, crackheads, crooked police, drive-bys.
The poem is, as all rap, in accentual verse. The primary literary device is intense internal and end rhyme, with assonance being an acceptable alternative for full rhyme (spy, -hind, gi-). While it represents a feat to arrange for the same vowel sound to fall on most beats, accentual verse in general is much more forgiving than accentual-syllabic. Lupe can have as many as three syllables or as few as one between each stressed syllable. And this rhythmic arrangement often requires the unnatural demotion of syllables that would be stessed in ordinary speech (e.g. the "drive" in "drive-bys") Does one really want the heaviest stresses in the fourth from last line to fall on the function words "there's" and "on"?
Moreover, Lupe avails himself of several further licenses in achieving his rhythm, including a loose, paratactic syntax, allowing for the omission of particular sentence elements (e.g. “I am” omitted from the third line, “There is” from the fifth). And, the opposite of this, mere filler words like “like.”
Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter is decidedly more demanding, only one unstressed syllable between each stressed syllable (though, admittedly, with certain variations conventionally permitted). And for all that, he manages his statement with a greater naturalness of sentence construction.
For a very pointed comparison that tells in Shakespeare’s favor consider the stretch of his poem that, on the surface, may seem to resemble Lupe’s toe-to-face list: lines 3-6. This is a series of assertions about summer, one per line, that make Shakespeare’s beloved, implicitly, superior to that season: it has rough winds, doesn’t last long, and can be too sunny or cloudy. They are, for one, not a mechanical aggregation: the short length isn’t a simple addition to the rough winds in the way that crackheads are just the next-in-the-sequence after hoes, and the too hot/dimmed is a contrast of opposite extremes rather than a simple appending of drive-bys to crooked police.
Line eight is nothing short of miraculous. Look how it works: It makes the assertion that every fair thing eventually loses its fairness. But it says that by using the word fair in two senses, with different second elements implied in each case: And every fair (thing) from fair(ness) sometime declines. The construction of the line perfectly reinforces what is said in it: the substantial fair thing evaporates into the more abstract fair-ness under the cover of a word that looks like the same word. It’s an achingly beautiful evocation of the decaying passage of time conveyed through wordplay that the Lupe has no equivalent for, subtlety that the Lupe can’t dream of, even a cleverness that is stratospherically above giant robots.
Shakespeare’s soundplay is subtler, but more intricate (can you believe that?), than Lupe’s thudding assonance and rhyme. Consider the ch and n sounds in Chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed. Were you careful to hear a ch in nature as well as in chance and changing? Did you catch the n in untrimmed as well as in chance, nature and change? How about the hint of a ch in the –g- of “changing”?
Shakespeare’s sonnet is arranged in its entirety to make a single complete but organically developing thought. The comparison between the beloved and a summer’s day initially seems to have to do with beauty, but mutiblity enters in with summer’s short lease, and the poet gradually confronts the eventual dying of his beloved, but arriving a consolation about living on in the eternity of verse. Lupe’s peters out in some incomprehensible statement about the White House.
We won’t mention other poetic devices: the compressed implicit metaphors in “eye” “complexion.” Le mot juste in “darling.” The anaphora in “So long.”
Lupe has a (jejune) extended metaphor and assonance arranged to fall on the beats and that’s it. You might even say that the silly tone of its core conceit is at cross purposes with the serious subject matter it means to treat.
