Seamus Heany was MOST recent among us. He was born 1939 and died August 30th at 75, this year. He was an Irish poet, playwright, translator and lecturer, and the recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Below you will see the first of the CONNECTED sonnets in his book of sonnets.
Glanmore Sonnets
By Seamus Heany {syllable count}
1. Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground. 10
2. The mildest February for twenty years 10
3. Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound 11
4. Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors. 10
5. Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe. 12
6. Now the good life could be to cross a field 10
7. And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe 12
8. Of ploughs. My lea is deeply tilled. 8
9. Old ploughsocks gorge the subsoil of each sense 10
10. And I am quickened with a redolence 10
11. Of farmland as a dark unblown rose. 9
12. Wait then...Breasting the mist, in sowers’ aprons, 11
13. My ghosts come striding into their spring stations. 11
14.The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows. 10
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178023
READ more of the poem there there's at least 8 more connected sonnets!
*Note he does not divide the lines into quatrains
He does not use the constant traditional 10 syllables per line.
His end rhyme pattern is [a,b,a,b - c,d,c,d - e,e,e,e - e,e]
He uses assonance and half rhyme to end rhyme in lines 2,4,6,8, 9,10,11,12,13,14.He goes completely out of any standard pattern for a sonnet in his last 6 lines.
Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases
or sentences, Assonance is a rhyme, the identity of which depends merely on the vowel sounds. Thus, an assonance is merely a syllabic resemblance. For example, in William Butler Yeat's poem, 'The Wild Swans At Coole', Yeats rhymes the word "swan" with the word "stone". Assonance is found more often in verse than in prose. It is used in (mainly modern) English-language poetry, and is particularly important in Old French, Spanish and the Celtic languages. * Wikipedia
Now let's look where he makes his TURN his VOLTA [very similar in concept to the kireji, or cutting word in haiku] This is where the poets mind leaps, turn, FREE ASSOCIATES relating for him the similarities or difference as they see it between the 2 parts of the sonnet [before and after the VOLTA] TRADITIONALLY it is in line 9, and yes there is a mild shift there but I believe it is truly meant to be and felt in line 11, yes WOW, how modern is that!
The biggest thing to KNOW and to understand is, he KNEW how to write a metered traditional sonnet, and he CHOSE not to, he purposefully did what he did THERE IS NO CONSISTANT METER [the musical rise and fall in a pattern of your voice when you read it aloud] It is STACCATO "detached, disconnected", past participle of staccare "to detach, separate", aphetic variant of distaccare "to separate, detach" OR is a musical term for notes that are played quickly and sharply.
This was done FOR A REASON the topic called for it he speaks of his life and his writing connecting and disconnecting him from the land. So, his verse connects and disconnects YOU to IT, to him, and to the land.
Now, that was MY opinion jump in and argue if you like
ABOUT THE VOLTA about something in the structure of the poem QUESTION and together we will find answers FOR OURSELVES
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF0U0pVK0bk
Please enjoy the link to Seamus' verse
AND THANK Brian for making us aware of it!