Who among us assumes at least the following about the
“sonnet”?
- 14 lines
- Iambic pentameter, though tetrameter is acceptable
- A rhyme scheme, most likely abab cdcd efef gg
In other words, we assume the
sonnet is a form set by more or less rigidly subscribed-to technical rules governing number of lines, line length & rhythm, and rhyme. The purists among us might go so far as to
insist that a sonnet line is restricted to ten syllables.
Some of us may go a little
farther and assume the following as “natural” to the sonnet:
- Topics: life, love, death, human frailty, impermanence, the inexorable march of time
- Sweep of thought: from ignorance or confusion to understanding, from question to insight, from proposition to conclusion
- Tone: ironic (especially the self-deprecating kind of irony)
It might help to understand that
the word “sonnet,” which the Italians used as early as the 12th
Century, means literally “little song” & comes from the Latin root sonus,
meaning sound. I would have liked those old poets! Poetry
begins in and as sound! As Curt and Margaret rightly observed, both Dante
and Petrarch practiced sonnets, though in Dante’s case we should probably
handcuff the word in this way: “sonnet.” I am not familiar with his Canzoniere
(songs) but in La Vita Nuova (LVN), as Curt noted, he writes “sonnets”
to Beatrice. But he treats his poems first as “songs” rather than
“sonnets” as we understand them traditionally. Sometimes he calls them
“sonnets,” but sometimes “ballads” and even “roundelays.” What’s more, in
LVN there are “double sonnets,” which
are “sonnets” with shorter lines interwoven, often as internal commentary
(Dante is famous for this) and resulting in poems with as many as 20
lines. Which is to say, “sonnet” for Dante meant “song” or, literally,
“little song,” but not necessarily 14 lines of iambic pentameter rhyming
abba/abba-cde/cde. For him “sonnet” was a rhetorical form in which
you could posit a theme or an argument or opinion etc. and then at the “turn”
(called a “volta”) deliver a
solution/conclusion/resolution. Rhyme was of course part of the
formula. It was Petrarch who popularized or codified the form that we
know today as “sonnet.”
From Petrarch forward until at
least the moderns, maybe later, the “sonnet” grew increasingly calcified in
terms of its formal elements: 14 lines of iambic pentameter rendered in exactly
10 syllables; an abba/abba-cde/cde rhyme scheme (with some room for wiggle into
an English form: abab-cdcd-efef-gg) and covering themes more or less “suitable”
to the form (love, death, etc.). Needless to say, sonnets written to this
formula in 1940 looked an awful lot like sonnets written in 1540, and sounded
about as fresh as a 400 year old poem, too. You can still encounter them
today among writers of sonnets who a) subscribe to the formula out of some
traditionalist fellow-feeling, b) keep copies of Swinburne and Longfellow on
the shelf and nothing more current, and/or c) submit poems to journals like The American Aesthetic, which regularly runs sonnet contests (and insists on 14
lines, iambic pentameter, 10 syllables per line, and at least abab-cdcd-efef-gg
rhyme; and the rhymes must be exact {also called perfect}, not near, slant,
off, or even “visual” {rough/cough}).
For the most part, though, today the
rules are much more relaxed. Sonnets usually retain the 14-line
requirement, and sometimes the 5-foot or 5-beat metrical line, though strict
iambic meter is no longer de rigeur. In the modern “tradition,” it has
been for many years enough just to gesture toward the sonnet form, in the way a
modernist painting “echoes” earlier periods (and architecture, too). The
Denise Levertov poem below is an example. So are several other
poems that follow, including those that don’t actually contain 14 lines,
but “move” like a sonnet (e.g., statement of problem in first paragraph,
resolution in second).
Here are some poems that approach
or diverge from, more or less, the classical form we have come to know in
English lit as “sonnet”:
Sunday Afternoon
—Denise Levertov (1961)
After
the First Communion
and
the banquet of mangoes and
bridal
cake, the young daughters
of
the coffee merchant lay down
for
a long siesta, and their white dresses
lay
beside them in quietness
and
the white veils floated
In
their dreams as the flies buzzed.
But
as the afternoon
burned
to a close they rose
and
ran about the neighbourhood
among
the halfbuilt villas
alive,
alive, kicking a basketball, wearing
other
new dresses, of bloodred velvet.
Sonnet[1]
—Billy Collins (2001)
All
we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,
and
after this one just a dozen
to
launch a little ship on love’s storm-tossed seas,
then
only ten more left like rows of beans.
How
easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan
and
insist the iambic bongos must be played
and
rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,
one
for every station of the cross.
But
hang on here while we make the turn
into
the final six where all will be resolved,
where
longing and heartache will find an end,
where
Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,
take
off those crazy medieval tights,
blow
out the lights, and come at last to bed.
Sonnet #73
—William Shakespeare (15__?)
That
time of year thou may’st in me behold
When
yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon
those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare
ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In
me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As
after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which
by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s
second self, that seals up all in rest.
In
me thou see’st the glowing of a fire
That
on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As
the deathbed whereon it doth expire,
Consum’d
with that which it was nourish’d by.
This
thou perceive’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To
love that well which thou must leave ’ere long.
On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday
—Frank O’Hara (1964)
Quick!
a last poem before I go
off
my rocker. Oh Rachmaninoff!
Onset,
Massachusets. Is it the fig-newton
playing
the horn? Thundering windows
of
hell, will your tubes ever break
into
powder? Oh my palace of oranges,
junk
shop, staples, umber, basalt;
I’m
a child again when I was really
miserable,
a grope pizzicato. My pocket
of
rhinestone, yoyo, carpenter’s pencil,
amethyst,
hypo, campaign button,
is
the room full of smoke? Shit
on
the soup, let it burn. So it’s back.
You’ll
never be mentally sober.
Surviving
—Ruth Stone (2002)
I
speak to you who are still loath to answer,
out
of the flagella of my cells. I hear distant flutterings,
bird
whistles and the sky’s wet slough
dissolving
into fragments, shadows that were.
You
who are always sinking into must,
stripping
back, the gaud of skeletons,
cum
of molecules, kiss of gas;
the
exact never to be repeated form gone slack.
Now
it is spring. Again it is that time you hung yourself.
Which
self among you silenced all the rest?
Your
psyche splintered selves, one for each year;
myself,
who was, went with you into dust.
Now
I am the simple who rose up and lived;
each
day a blank, each night a catacomb.
The Spelling
—Simon
Armitage (2006)
I
left a spelling at my father’s house
written
in small coins on his front step.
It
said which star I was heading for next,
which
channel to watch, which button to press.
I
should have waited, given that spelling
a
voice, but I was handsome and late.
While
I was gone he replied with pebbles
and
leaves at my gate. But a storm got up
from
the west, sluicing all meaning and shape.
I
keep his broken spelling in a tin,
tip
it out onto the cellar floor, hoping
a
letter or even a word might form.
And
I am all grief, staring through black space
to
meet his eyes, trying to read his face.
Notes from a Lover Who Hanged
—James Gainesborough of the City (n.d.)
It
was Judgement Day, and naked I stood
God:
Here you are, hero, so wicked smart
And
here are your works, salacious and tart
You
are judged, you know, by your bad and good
And
what you couldn’t help and what you could
And
who you hurt with head and heart
Now
look for your head cause these poems are a part
Why
I might knock you down with the Holy Rood.
Me:
You spit on clouds and lightning hits the land
Father,
I’ve never been any but Your own son
But
if my songs more clunked than clanged
And
I’m knocked to the Pit by Your Holy Hand
Call
my life just Notes from a Lover Who Hanged.
Henry Moore in Arcadia
—Y.T. (1997)
“Weeks in the workroom watching the
blackbirds eat,
Days in the haymaker’s field as the sun flies
out of the sky.”
Yes, some things must be eaten, the rest you
paint over.
Everything as if balances out in formulations of as if
just to convince our bellies not to
acknowledge the difference.
Orange teeth are painted from the inside out
and so
the prospect of the field of limes and of the
national bank.
The blackbirds show how every conquest is
Norman,
even the painterly, completed by stroke or
fell-swoop.
Eats the mildest air of summer, the seeds of
the mulberry,
rinses with a ’73, but walks resolutely into the
vineyard
grumbling because not one soul has visited in
three months
of written documentation. Grumbles and does
not work or works
only of shade and light. Nothing with any stamina, anyway.
[1]
This one is rightly called a meta-sonnet.
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