According to the tracking info, my new laptop is supposed to be delivered today.  Yesterday, I set aside an hour to transfer documents and photos to a flash drive, so that I could upload them to the new computer.  Of course, it actually took about 15 minutes.  In doing so, though, I noticed that a copy of a short article I'd written was missing.  I'd written it at school, and before I retired, I'd copied the important files from my computer there to the flash drive, but I must have overlooked this one because it's not on the drive or on this laptop.  I clearly remember the occasion of writing it.  I had a couch in my office on the same wall with the door.  I used to take cat naps on the couch: I'd bring a book, settle unseen into the far corner of the couch, pretend to read, and fall asleep, hoping that I'd wake up, book prop in hand, if anyone needed me.  One day I woke thinking that I should really do a brief explication of one of the sonnets in Gwendolyn Brooks's sonnet sequence "The Children of the Poor," which I often taught.  I went to the computer, wrote the article, and sent it off to the Explicator, which prints only short pieces and which accepted it.  The article combines my love of literature with my interest in grammar.  It wouldn't be a huge loss-either to me personally or to the world of literary criticism--if I never found my copy.  But I'm going to try to reconstruct the argument.  Here's the poem, the second in the six-sonnet sequence:

          What shall I give my children? who are poor,
          Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land,
          Who are my sweetest lepers, who demand
          No velvet and no velvety velour;
          But who have begged me for a brisk contour,
          Crying that they are quasi, contraband
          Because unfinished, graven by a hand
          Less than angelic, admirable or sure.
          My hand is stuffed with mode, design, device,
          But I lack access to my proper stone,
          And plenitude of plan shall not suffice,
          Nor grief nor love shall be enough alone
          To ratify my little halves who bear
          Across an autumn freezing everywhere.

The six sonnets begin with people who have no children and trace the progress from a mother's perspective to the children's adulthood.  The form Brooks chooses is a hybrid between Italian and Shakespearean.  Like an Italian sonnet, it's divided into an octave (rhyming abbaabba) and a sestet.  But like the Shakespearean form, the last six lines end with a couplet.  The sonnet form has persisted for centuries in English, but after Shakespeare, most poets have preferred the older Italian structure.  One reason often given is that poets don't want to compete with Shakespeare, that he prefected the form.  I've always thought, however, that poets have seen a danger in the English form: that it's difficult to write a final couplet that doesn't simply make too explicit what the previous twelve lines have implied.  The sonnet may seem almost too neatly complete.  And that's why Brooks's final couplet is so ingenious.

The couplet begins with the legalistic sounding 'to ratify,' which echoes words like 'quasi' and 'contraband' in line six--not exactly what we think of as poetic vocabulary.  But the twist comes with the verb that ends line eleven: 'bear.'  Bear is a transitive verb in English; it needs a direct object: one bears something.  Simply by its sound, 'across' seems to satisfy that need.  Having a cross to bear is a common English phrase.  Even in reading the poem, the reader may hear, solely out of expectation, that meaning.  And yet there are two problems: it's not 'a cross,' but 'across.'  And even if it were the anticipated noun phrase, the sentence would be left with four words that would have no syntactic function.  So we have to revise our expectations.  'Across' is a prepostion, but then what's its object?  Is it across an autumn?  Is that semantically logical?  Would that make 'freezing' a gerund that's the object of 'bear'?  But we don't normally separate verbs from their objects with an adverb (or adverbial phrase like 'across an autumn') in English.  And is "bear a freezing" an English construction.  Or is 'freezing' a participle used adverbially to modify 'bear'?  But that still leaves 'bear' without an object. 

In short, there is no way of finding a satisfactory syntax for the last two lines.  And this incompletion is doubly baffling since readers expect the final couplet of a sonnet to supply a tidy ending.  Yet the ending is exactly right, for what is the poem about but the inability of the mother/poet to supply "a brisk contour," not to leave the children "unfinished."  As the children remain feeling incomplete, so too the reader ends the poem with that same feeling of a sentence "graven by a hand / less than angelic, admirable or sure."  The expectations are rich with connotative resonances, but deficient in completed syntax.