My Love Sent Me a List

Another meaningful change to the sonnet form in this poem is the feminist context in which Davis places it. While Davis is not the first woman to utilize the form, she does join a tradition of women who have upended what has traditionally been thought of as a masculine style. In popular culture, the sonnet is almost always associated with Shakespeare, or even Petrarch. And in the literary tradition, the sonnet has a long history of being used by men to write about women. The simple act of writing a love sonnet as a woman places a poet in a relatively new tradition of rejecting traditional poetic norms.

While Davis’s use of the sonnet format places her within this new tradition, her undermining of the sonnet format both in form and content suggests a kind of feminist claim over the style. She redefines the style because she doesn’t follow the traditional structure that was created and has been reinforced by a patriarchal structure (Craddock, Jade. “Women Poets, Feminism and the Sonnet in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries: An American Narrative.” 2013. The University of Birmingham, PhD dissertation, p. 244.). It is not just that a woman pens the poem and changes the format of the sonnet structure; it is also that the poem’s subject is a man, and it is the reasonable voice of a woman who strikes down his emotional toxicity. There is a subversion of traditional gender qualities. Traditionally, patriarchal systems define women as hysterical and emotional, while defining men as reasoned and rational. This poem completely flips those constructions around.