Great Information on Sonnets. Why I love them above all other poetry forms.
http://www.cprw.com/Misc/finch2.htm
Chaos in Fourteen Lines
Reformations and Deformations of the Sonnet
"I will put Chaos into fourteen lines
and keep him there..." --Edna St. Vincent Millay
Sociologists have discovered a surprising fact. When a group of people are in an unfenced space, no matter how large, they gravitate towards the outskirts and leave the middle empty. On the other hand, in a fenced space, they will spread out and enjoy the use of the whole area. Maybe this truth helps explain the charm of courtyards, and the fact that the etymology of the word “paradise” is simply “a walled enclosure.” It may also help explain the lasting appeal of the sonnet, the form that Rita Dove has called a “little world.”
Did I say lasting appeal? Doesn’t everyone know that the sonnet should be dead by now? As the poet Tim Yu put it in his blog last year, “the real issue, to my mind, in using a form like the sonnet is belatedness.” Doesn’t it go without saying that the sonnet is a form too late for itself, too old-fashioned to really exist? Somehow, though, the sonnet has not cooperated with the reports of its death. People keep writing them. This essay will explore why, and how, and along the way, investigate a new model of how poetry works through time that might modify somewhat the twentieth-century adhesion to “progress.”
“A sonnet is a moment’s monument, / memorial to one dead deathless hour,” wrote Dante Gabriel Rossetti in one of the most famous sonnets on the sonnet (as you might expect, no other form has inspired nearly as many tributes to itself). Rossetti expresses one of the most useful powers of the sonnet: the ability to keep a moment, to hold a feeling or experience and turn it around in the light of our awareness until many facets are evident. This multifaceted quality gives the sonnet a paradoxical feeling of freedom and expanse within confines:
“Nuns Fret Not,” William Wordsworth (1807)
Nuns fret not at their convents’ narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth the prison, into which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, ‘twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
should find brief solace there, as I have found.
Here Wordsworth uses both the iambic pentameter and the sonnet form to illustrate the paradox of what Emerson called the “restraints that make us free.” I recently saw the deep, embracing blossoms of purple foxgloves for the first time in a friend’s garden; I now understand even better the sensual pleasure, wonder, and calmness that Wordsworth, who wrote 500 sonnets, was describing here. For me also, the feeling of starting a sonnet can carry a sense of mingled freedom, comfort and curious excitement that is different from starting any other kind of poem.
The quality of exploring all facets of a subject does not mean sonnets are always calm; it also means they are able to carry the full force of a lyric outburst with complete conviction. This authority gave Claude McKay’s sonnet “If We Must Die,” written in prison in 1919, an urgency so powerful that eventually it became a talisman in the civil rights struggle:
“If We Must Die,” Claude McKay (1919)
If we must die—let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die—oh, let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;
Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
While the sentiments are powerful, the imagery strong, and the art skillful, I don’t think any of these accounts for the impact that McKay’s sonnet had on so many people. While all these play a part in the poem’s effect, I give the most credit to how well McKay understood and worked with the sonnet form itself. The first two quatrains have a somber tone, a heaviness emphasized by the repeating phrase “if we must die,” with its sonorous spondee. But at the beginning of line 9, with the phrase “Oh, Kinsmen!,” McKay’s sonnet seems to stop, take a deep breath, and regather its energies for a big push to the finish.
The ninth line of either the Italian or the English sonnet form is called the “volta,” the Italian word for “turn.” At this point, the sonnet form is designed to change from one idea, tone, or approach in the octave to a different idea, tone or approach in the sestet. And, just as the secret of success in poetry may be to make full use of what you find most unique and distinctive about poetry, the secret to success with any poetic form may be making full use of whatever is most unique and distinctive about the form. Skillful sonnets usually take good advantage of the volta, the most unique and distinctive aspect of a sonnet.
In McKay’s volta, many factors, including syntax, meter, trope, word-music, and connotation as well as meaning, conspire to make the turn as effective as it is. Take the word “must,” for example. If you read aloud the lines containing this word at the beginnings of the first two quatrains, you will hear something between resigned bitterness and sad determination conveyed by the spondaic stress on the first “must,” and a firmer, mounting determination in the second “must.” But after the volta, the same word has changed its intensity entirely, the spondee conveying an unstoppable force that floods over the expected unstressed syllable in irresistible exhortation.
Word-music plays a part in the change as well. The three “m”s in “men,” “must,” and “meet” gather together to surpass and overwhelm the previous “m”s in “making their mock” and “monsters.” It is also significant that one of these “m” sounds happens in the syllable “men,” contrasting “men” with the simile of “hogs” that opened the poem, and setting the stage for the transformation that will happen by the end of the poem, where the African American prisoners will have become “men” while their oppressors still remain a “pack” of dogs. The phrase “Oh, kinsmen!” right at the volta is the heart of the sonnet not only because it brings in the word “men,” but also because it does so through the word “kinsmen,” emphasizing that it is only in their sense of brotherhood that the prisoners will find the strength they need to prevail.
Reading the poem aloud, you may notice that your energy level and pulse-rate rise after line 9. I think the most significant reason for this change is metrical. With the word “kinsmen,” the poem begins to take on more trochaic feel: “We must meet the common foe” sounds exactly like a footless trochaic line, and phrases such as “far outnumbered” continue the powerful rocking trochaic rhythm, in contrast to the doggedly iambic feeling of the octave, where the only trochaic words (“hunted” and “making”) are dutifully combined to their traditional and most impotent place in the first foot of the line. The trochaic undercurrent of this poem is no surprise in the context of African American poetics; the trochaic meter has been used by African American poets as a powerful alternative to iambic meter in such poems as Countee Cullen’s “Heritage” and Gwendolyn Brooks’ “The Anniad.”
It’s hard to imagine “If We Must Die” in another kind of poetic form—a ballad, or quatrains, or free verse. Who would have thought the sonnet, known so well as the vehicle for plaintive or poignant poems of love, would also prove the perfect vehicle for McKay’s revolutionary call: at once big and loose enough for the pacing and circling of authentic power, and small and structured enough for the channeling and building of directed force? How can a poetic form be so versatile? We might as well ask, though, how can a human voice be so versatile? Something in the shape of the sonnet seems so well suited to convey human feeling that it can feel almost like a throat, a hand, a voice—and yes, also like a stanza or room that is especially well-proportioned to suit the human form.
And, as it turns out, there is truth behind this idea of the connection between the sonnet and the human body. Almost all traditionally-formed sonnets have 14 lines and consist of an octave (8 lines) and a sestet (6 lines) with that significant shift in emphasis, the volta or turn, between them. The critic Paul Oppenheimer has observed that since the last two lines of a sonnet are often separated off from the rest in a couplet or an implied couplet that closes the poem, the proportions of the form are 6:8:12. And this proportion, in fact, represents the special mathematical ratio which the Greeks called the Golden Mean.
A ratio found throughout nature, the Golden Mean is apparent in the proportions by which flower petals grow, twigs sprout from stems, and the shapes of snowflakes crystallize. It is also a ratio evident in the proportions of the human body. Oppenheimer feels that this compelling ratio is one of the reasons for the sonnet’s lasting power, which has brought it into numerous languages and which made it part of the vocabulary of virtually every major poet in Italian, German, French, Spanish, and English over seven centuries.
In fact, the sonnet is the ultimate stanza, an enclosed place of words alive with currents of energy and places to rest. It has provided a place for some of the most intense and memorable lines in English-language poetry to come into being: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways . . . Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers . . . That time of year thou mayst in me behold . . . Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare . . . Oh mother, mother, where is happiness . . . one day I wrote her name upon the strand . . . A sudden blow, the great wings beating still . . . When I have fears that I may cease to be . . . Fool, said my muse to me, look in thy heart and write.”
The Italian or Petrarchan sonnet is the strictest form, with only two rhyming sounds in the octave and three in the sestet. This economy of rhyme sounds can bring great beauty, so the form sounds like the inhale and exhale of a breath. This two-part structure lends power to the volta, which we have seen can structure the thought process in ways from the obvious (“In truth, the prison. . .”) to the more subtle:
“Unholy Sonnet,” Mark Jarman
After the praying, after the hymn-singing,
After the sermon’s trenchant commentary
On the world’s ills, which make ours secondary,
After communion, after the hand wringing,
And after peace descends upon us, bringing
Our eyes up to regard the sanctuary
And how the light swords through it, and how, scary
In their sheer numbers, motes of dust ride, clinging—
There is, as doctors say about some pain,
Discomfort knowing that despite your prayers,
Your listening and rejoicing, your small part
In this communal stab at coming clean,
There is one stubborn remnant of your cares
Intact. There is still murder in your heart.
This poem, where the worshiper tries to integrate repressed feelings into a pious character, serves as a good illustration for Oppenheimer’s idea of the sonnet as the container for the personality’s complexity (see below). The smooth and almost imperceptible transition of the volta perhaps underscores the difficulty the speaker has at first in consciously accepting the hidden thoughts.
This caustic narrative sonnet uses the volta to create a change of scene:
“Sonnet 115,” John Berryman (1947)
All we were going strong last night this time,
the mosts were flying & the frozen daiquiris
were downing, supine on the floor lay Lise
listening to Schubert grievous & sublime,
my head was frantic with a following rime:
it was a good evening, and evening to please,
I kissed her in the kitchen—ecstasies—
among so much good we tamped down the crime.
The weather’s changing. This morning was cold,
as I made for the grove, without expectation,
some hundred Sonnets in my pocket, old,
to read her if she came. Presently the sun
yellowed the pines & my lady came not
in blue jeans & a sweater. I sat down & wrote.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, one of the most noted writers of sonnets in the twentieth century and called by Edmund Wilson the successor to Shakespeare, frequently favored the Italian form. Some say the Italian form is harder to write in English than the English form, since it needs more rhymes for each sound; but in Millay’s hands the rhymes rarely sound forced. Here is her contribution to the genre of the sonnet about writing a sonnet:
“I will put Chaos into fourteen lines,” Edna St. Vincent Millay (c. 1945)
I will put Chaos into fourteen lines
And keep him there; and let him thence escape
If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape
Flood, fire, and demon—his adroit designs
Will strain to nothing in the strict confines
Of this sweet Order, where, in pious rape,
I hold his essence and amorphous shape,
Till he with Order mingles and combines.
Past are the hours, the years, of our duress,
His arrogance, our awful servitude:
I have him. He is nothing more nor less
Than something simple yet not understood;
I shall not even force him to confess;
Or answer. I will only make him good.
The Italian sonnet’s lack of a closing couplet and greater balance between octave and sestet doesn’t mean it can’t be used to great rhetorical force. The combination of energy and containment, development and resting, that structures “If We Must Die” is part of the quality that helped make Emma Lazarus’ sonnet for the Statue of Liberty so durable and beloved:
“The New Colossus,” Emma Lazarus (1883)
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame,
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
While the first line and a half after the volta is somewhat thrown away, Lazarus more than makes up for it in the last four lines of the sestet, which can stand as a quatrain on their own, and which carry in four lines all the accumulated force that McKay disperses throughout his sestet. So, while “The New Colossus” may not fully embody the potential of the sonnet as a sonnet, it is still a reflection of the rhetorical power of the form.
The English or Shakespearean sonnet, adapted from the Petrarchan model by Sir Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt, and perfected by Shakespeare, has a more logically complex shape than the Italian, with a pattern of 4-4-4-2 lines:
“Sonnet II,” William Shakespeare
When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night,
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silvered o’er with white:
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd
And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard:
Then of thy beauty do I question make
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake,
And die as fast as they see others grow,
And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence
Save breed to brave him, when he takes thee hence.
Like Mckay’s English sonnet, this one uses the first quatrain to establish an idea and the second to build on it in a different but related way. Whereas McKay’s volta introduced a new emotional tone, in this sonnet, as in most of Shakespeare’s line 9, the volta brings in a new idea or logical approach: the idea of the lover—and a new attitude of questioning insecurity. The final couplet, like the final couplet of “If We Must Die,” sums up the problem and offers a solution—in this case to produce “breed,” creative or actual progeny.
The English sonnet’s closing couplet, and the great logical potential of its structure, doesn’t mean it can’t be used for a poem with a delicate balance between octave and sestet. This remarkable sonnet about balance has always seemed to me not only like a love poem but also like a tribute to the sonnet form itself:
“The Silken Tent,” Robert Frost
She is as in a field of silken tent
At midday when the sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To every thing on earth the compass round,
And only by one’s going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.
There is a very unusual secret in this sonnet. Read it through carefully and see if you can find what it is (hint: it has something to do with punctuation).
Whether in the Italian or English form, the sonnet allows for dialectical opposition, tension and resolution within one stanza; it can unite opposing attitudes within one identity. Paul Oppenheimer makes a convincing argument that because the sonnet allowed room to struggle with oneself, it marks not only the beginning of modern poetry but the beginning of the modern idea of our “self” as having a complex internal life. If this is so, then the sonnet form is likely to continue to be useful at least as long as we encourage such feelings of interiority; and the current resurgence of sonnets suggests that the form can help express the decentered contemporary “self” as well.
Never static, the form of the sonnet has mutated numerous times since its invention by a lawyer in 12th-century Italy, based on an old folk song stanza. Milton and Spenser each invented new sonnets that are named after them, and Shakespeare and Petrarch built such durable versions of the form in their respective languages that the two major forms of sonnet took their names.
Until the twentieth century, the major variations in the sonnet were “formal” variations that preserved the basic qualities of the form. The Miltonic sonnet is a Petrarchan sonnet without the volta. The Spenserian sonnet has an innovative overlapping rhyme scheme but still keeps the couplet separate: a b a b b c b c c d c d e e. Gerard Manly Hopkins’ “curtal sonnet” uses the same proportions but makes them smaller, so instead of 8 and 6 lines, the two parts are 6 and 4 ½ lines in length:
“Pied Beauty,” Gerard Manly Hopkins (1877)
Glory be to God for dappled things
For skies of couple color as a brindled cow;
For rosemoles all in stipple upon trout that swim
Fresh firecoal chestnut falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced
Fold, fallow and trim.
Glory be to God for dappled things
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim
He fathers forth whose beauty is past change;
Praise him.
Gwendolyn Brooks’ mid-twentieth experiment maintained the sonnet’s formal structure, but changed the feeling of the form:
“The Sonnet-Ballad,” Gwendolyn Brooks (1949)
Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?
They took my lover’s tallness off to war,
Left me lamenting. Now I cannot guess
What I can use an empty heart-cup for.
He won’t be coming back here any more.
Some day the war will end, but, oh, I knew
When he went walking grandly out that door
That my sweet love would have to be untrue.
Would have to be untrue. Would have to court
Coquettish death, whose impudent and strange
Possessive arms and beauty (of a sort)
Can make a hard man hesitate—and change.
And he will be the one to stammer, “Yes.”
Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?
While Brooks maintains the form of an English sonnet, the dialogue, the directly emotional voice of the girl, the simple and universal narrative, and the repetition of the first line, like a refrain, add the immediacy and narrative urgency of a ballad. Hers is such a unique variation that it bears its form as a title, but other variations are more common. Here is a partial list of sonnet variations, a cross-section of a constantly expanding vocabulary of shapes and permutations:
Caudate (tail) sonnet: a sonnet of any type, followed by an extra couplet (or sometimes an extra trimeter, followed by a heroic couplet, followed by a trimeter rhymed with the first, followed by another heroic couplet.)
Chained or linked sonnet: each line starts with last word of previous line
Continuous or reiterating sonnet: uses only one or two rhymes in the entire sonnet
Crown of sonnets: a sequence of sonnets, each of which begins with the last line of the previous sonnet
Interwoven sonnet: includes both medial and end rhyme
Miltonic sonnet: an Italian sonnet with no break in sense at the volta, creating a gradual culmination of the idea
Retrograde sonnet: reads the same backwards as forwards