"Native Guard" is a sequence, or crown, of sonnets. Trethewey employs a time-honored form, but chooses to update it in significant ways. The poem is written in iambic pentameter—ten beats per line with alternating stressed and unstressed syllables—but does not follow a rhyme scheme. The linkage of these sonnets gives Trethewey the freedom to shift between different subjects while still holding on to various common themes including race, writing, war, and history. The sonnet sequence is a form that dates back to the 16th century, famously used by William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser. However, looking at other contemporary practitioners of this form can help us to see why Trethewey chose it for "Native Guard."
In American poet John Berryman's sonnet sequence, Berryman's Sonnets, he writes about a doomed love affair he had with the wife of a colleague. In Sonnet 27 he passionately declares his love:
In a poem made by Cummings, long since, his
Girl was the rain, but darling you are the sunlight
Volleying down blue air, waking a flight
Of sighs to follow like the mourning iris
Your shining-out-of-shadow hair I miss
A fortnight and to-noon. What you excite
You are, you are me: as light's parasite
For vision on... us. O if my synchrisis
Teases you, briefer than Propertius' in
This paraphrase by Pound—to whom I owe
Three letters—why, run through me like a comb:
I lie down flat! under your discipline
I die. No doubt of visored others, though...
The broad sky dumb with stars shadows me home.
Using images borrowed from E.E. Cummings and Ezra Pound, Berryman decorously describes his beloved. He compares her to the "sunlight / volleying down blue air." His use of natural scenery, with a particular focus on light, strongly captures the warmth and joy of this early stage of the relationship. However, in "Sonnet 43," he confesses his love in a tone of desperation, marking a dramatic shift in the sentiment of his speaker:
Listen, for poets are feigned to lie, and I
For you a liar am a thousand times,
Scars of these months blazon like a decree;
I would have you—a liner pulls the sky—
Trust when I mumble me. Than gin-&-limes
You are cooler, darling, O come back to me.
This progression gives him the opportunity to reveal the speaker's changing emotional state, as the love affair decays from heady infatuation into fear and panic. He characterizes this period of time very differently now, saying "Scars of these months blazon like a decree." Now the relationship appears in a less flattering light, categorized as something that has left him with scars. He still writes "O come back to me" at the poem's conclusion, but the reader can tell the relationship is drawing to a close. By choosing to write in the format of a sonnet sequence, Berryman is able to capture the rise and fall of this intensely passionate relationship while adhering to a form that renders the sameness of each day. Because the poems follow the same structure, the change in the speaker is more evident as the sequences move along. Similarly, Trethewey seems to use the format of the sonnet in the service of showing the emotional progression of the Louisiana Native Guard soldier, laying out his movement from early optimism and hope to later disillusionment and despair.
