Anyone who has stood pressed against a stranger's coat on a rush-hour train will recognise the complaint at the start of Benjamin Campbell's «Sonnet for Second Glances». The speaker listens to a companion go on about "busy trains, / the heat, the harsh florescent light" and answers with mild puzzlement. A poet, the speaker would have thought, ought to love such a place. By the final couplet the argument has turned. Perhaps the trouble isn't the train at all. The poem is about how attention shapes experience, and about the way a person who wants to be elsewhere can only see what is wrong with where they are.
The form carries much of this. The title promises a sonnet, and the poem delivers fourteen lines that fall into three quatrains and a closing couplet. But the lines are short, mostly eight syllables in a steady, tapping iambic rhythm, so the traditional form is squeezed into something close to a carriage: narrow, regular, a little cramped. The tapping can feel like wheels on track, though that is my reading rather than anything the poem states. The rhymes are mostly tidy ("trains" with "brain," "light" with "sight," "look" with "nook," "you" with "new"). The second quatrain loosens, though. "Paradise" and "life" share only a vowel sound, while "histories" and "identities" rhyme more firmly. The looseness suits a stanza about messy human variety. The syntax also spills over the form. The speaker's sentence begins in line 4 ("I would have thought that such a sight") and runs on into the second quatrain, as if the thought won't stay in its compartment.
The two halves of the poem imagine the same carriage very differently. The companion's version is physical and oppressive: heat, glare, and light that does not simply shine but "fall[s] upon the brain," like a weight. The speaker's version is full of reading. Faces become pages on which "the identities / of passenger faces" are "written," and the carriage holds "many varied histories" and "pointless pockets of a life." The phrase "pointless pockets" is clever. A pocket holds odds and ends, and the phrase suggests the small, apparently meaningless scraps of an ordinary day that a poet might still find worth collecting. The word "pointless" sounds like a put-down, but in this context it works almost as a compliment.
The third quatrain is the most intriguing. "Each look / reveals another form of you / returning the gaze." Read one way, the passengers look back at the companion and mirror them, so every face is a version of the person who is complaining. Read another way, looking at strangers is a way of meeting yourself. Either way the crowd is no longer an obstacle. Then comes "each nook / conceals the chance for something new." The verb "conceals" matters. The possibility is hidden, not absent, and finding it takes the second glance of the title, a deliberate look again at what the first glance dismissed.
The turn arrives with the couplet's "But, perhaps." The tone shifts from teasing to quietly diagnostic. The poem ends where it began, with the "busy train," but the plural "trains" of line 1 has become a singular "train," a particular one that now seems more like a state of mind than a place. Two words in the last line do the most work: "perceive" and "want." The companion perceives only what they want to leave, so their dislike has already decided what they see. The rhyme of "perceive" with "leave" ties the two together. Seeing and wishing to escape cannot be separated.
The poem is worth reading because it takes a dull setting and a common grumble and turns them into a small lesson in how to look, without lecturing. The speaker never insists the train is beautiful. The suggestion is gentler: the poem leaves the companion, and the reader, to wonder how much of any misery is in the world and how much is in the way we look at it.