ROVA MAYE A.

TRANI WF: 1-2:30PM WFW

October 15, 2015 Prof. Isa Lorenzo

A Title and A Blank Page

The Emperor’s New Sonnet, is a poem written (or was it really written at all?) by Jose

Garcia Villa. My one question when I saw this poem was: is it really poem? Or do we say that it

is a poem simply because Villa dictates it so? Does it really fit in the rules and boundaries for us

to call it a poem? I even thought that this would be a literary piece that fits The Blank Page;

however this poem owns a title.

The first thing I’m going to do is evaluate this “poem” according to Villa’s First, A Poem

Must Be Magical. We can say that The Emperor’s New Sonnet is magical in a sense that there is

wonder in its blankness. A lot of questions are raised and a lot of possible answers that can be

possible made, I call this magical. It is also musical in a way that silence is pleasing to the ear. It

also certainly catches one’s attention all throughout even sticks to a person’s mind after seeing it

for a long, long time. I wonder though if the words in this poem were chosen so carefully that in

the end, no words was good enough. The poem’s presence of burning spirit is also questionable

for me. Until now, only the author knows the objective of this poem. Also, can one say that this

poem is beautiful and humble at the same time? There is also no descriptive language here so we

cannot judge whether the words would be considered as “shy and tame”. One value remains so

positive, and that is the implicitness of this The Emperor’s Sonnet.

 Despite of the blankness of this poem, we have a hint and that is the title. When one

thinks about it for so long, you can see the connection it has to the short story: The Emperor’s

New Clothes. The poem is blank as it relates to the new “clothes” of the silly emperor and his

silly followers. However, I cannot know whether the moral of this short story is also connected

to the moral of the poem itself.