WHENEVER I WOULD ASK MY CLASS WHAT FORM A PARTICULAR poem employed, the answer was always the same: sonnet. Why? Because it is the only lyric form I had any hope that they might know. Or need to. Is the quality of your life harmed by not recognizing on sight something like the rondeau? That’s what I thought. The other reason is that no other poem is so versatile, so ubiquitous, so various, so blessedly short as the sonnet.
So after I told them that first time that it’s a sonnet, and half of them groaned in belated recognition and the others asked how I knew that so fast, I told them that I counted the lines when I noticed the geometry of the poem. What’s that? they would ask. Well, I responded, trying to milk the moment for suspense, it’s square. The miracle of the sonnet, you see, is that it is fourteen lines long and written almost always in iambic pentameter. And ten syllables of English are about as long as fourteen lines are high. See? Square.
My guess is that if you locked ten students in a room with an unfamiliar sonnet and asked them, “What’s the first thing you notice about this poem?” you’d get maybe one of them, after a number of minutes, who would write down, “It’s a sonnet, wise guy. Now let me out.” The others would tell you something substantive about what the poem actually says. Not a bad thing, but it misses a key starting point for reading the poem. On the other hand, if you locked ten professors of literature in a room with that same sonnet, the time frame would be seconds, no more than thirty at that, and they’d all say, “It’s a sonnet.” Or nine of them would, but the postmodernist would be deconstructing the experience. Now this would be hard to prove, since no sane person would want to be locked in a room with ten professors of literature for as long as thirty seconds, even with a sonnet. But I figure that’s what would happen.
Okay, great, so I can identify one type of poem, you say. Who cares? Many of my students actually asked that, while many more were too polite but clearly thought it. And the answer is, the reader of said sonnet should care. I think people who read poems for enjoyment should always read the poem first, without a formal or stylistic care in the world. They should not begin by counting lines, or looking at line endings to find the rhyme scheme, if any. I also think people should read novels without peeking at the ending. Other people, that is. I want them to do that because I want them to really enjoy the poem or novel. I, on the other hand, routinely violate both of those pleasure principles. But after you’ve had your first pleasure, one of the additional pleasures is seeing how the poet worked that magic on you. And at least some part of the answer, if that magic came in a sonnet, is form.
You might suppose that a poem that is only fourteen lines long is only capable of doing one thing. And you’d be right. It can’t have epic scope, it can’t undertake subplots, it can’t carry much narrative water. But you’d also be wrong. It can do two things. And it probably does. The sonnet has been a big part of English poetry since the 1500s, and there are a few major types of sonnet, with myriad variations. But what most of them will do is have two parts, one of eight lines and one of six lines. A Petrarchan sonnet uses a rhyme scheme that ties the first eight lines (the octave) together, followed by a rhyme scheme that unifies the last six (sestet). A Shakespearean sonnet, on the other hand, tends to divide up by four: the first four lines, the next four, the third four, and the last four, which turn out to be only two. But even here, the first two groups of four (which even I know adds up to eight) have some unity of statement, as do the last six, which break down as four and two. Shakespeare himself often works a statement all its own into that last couplet, but it also usually ties in pretty closely with the third quatrain. All these technical terms, and it’s not even physics; still, who can say that a poem isn’t engineered? A sonnet, then, we might think of as having two units of meaning, closely related to be sure, with a shift of some sort taking place between them. Sometimes, and especially in the modern and postmodern period, those units slip and slide a little, and the octave doesn’t quite contain its meaning, which slides onto the ninth line. Still, the basic pattern is 8/6. Let’s look at a poem. Even better, a sonnet.
How about Christina Rossetti’s “An Echo from Willow-Wood”:
Two gazed into a pool, he gazed and she,
Not hand in hand, yet heart in heart, I think,
Pale and reluctant on the water’s brink,
As on the brink of parting which must be,
Each eyed the other’s aspect, she and he,
Each felt one hungering heart leap up and sink,
Each tasted bitterness which both must drink,
There on the brink of life’s dividing sea.
Lilies upon the surface, deep below
Two wistful faces craving each for each,
Resolute and reluctant without speech:—
A sudden ripple made the faces flow,
One moment joined, to vanish out of reach:
So those heart joined, and ah! were parted so.
(ca. 1870)
I picked this poem for three reasons. First, it’s out of copyright (and never underestimate the cheapness of humanities professors). Second, it has neither a “thee” nor a “thou” in sight, not an “e’er” nor an “o’er,” so we eliminate some of that ball of confusion that older poetry slings at hapless modern readers. And third, I like Christina Rossetti, probably because I never had to study her, and I think more people should read and like her.
But on with the poem. I can hear the geometrically inclined out there saying, “Hey, it’s not really square.” True, but it’s approximately square, and that’s how the eye will initially perceive it. So the first question (no peeking): How many sentences? I loved to ask my poetry students that question. They generally were so buffaloed by all those separate lines, they didn’t notice that the words actually make sentences. The answer is two, as you already know, since you peeked. Second question, can you guess where the first period falls?
Right. End of line eight. The guy in the back of the class with his cap on backwards thinks I cheated and picked out a poem that made my point. Would I cheat? Well, yes, I might, but in this case I didn’t. Didn’t have to. I plunked open my trusty Victorian poetry anthology, picked the first Christina Rossetti sonnet without a “thee” in it, and this is the one.
So, the octave is a single unit of meaning. And what is the most basic unit of meaning in a poem? The line? The octave? Nope. If the poem is any good, its basic unit of meaning is the sentence. Just like all other writing. That’s why if you stop at the end of every line, a poem makes no sense. It’s not written in lines, but in sentences. What Rossetti does here is construct her sentences, which have to carry her meaning, so that they work within the form she has chosen, which is the sonnet. Her rhyme scheme proves to be a little idiosyncratic, since she elects to repeat the same rhymes in both quatrains of the octave: ABBAABBA. Then she picks an equally uncommon rhyme scheme for the sestet: CDDCDC. Still, in each case, the particular pattern reinforces a basic concept—these eight lines carry one idea; those six another, related idea.
And this is why form matters, and why professors pay attention to form: it just might mean something. Will every sonnet consist of only two sentences? No, that would be boring. Will they all employ this rhyme scheme? No, and they may not even have rhyme schemes, as we have seen. But when a poet chooses to write a sonnet, rather than, say, Paradise Lost, it’s not because he’s lazy. One of those old French thinkers, Blaise Pascal, I think, apologized for writing such a long letter, saying, “I had not time to write a short one.” Sonnets are like that, short poems that take far more time, because everything has to be perfect, than long ones.
We owe it to poets, I think, to notice that they’ve gone to this trouble, and to ourselves, to understand the nature of the thing we’re reading. When you start to read a poem, then, look at the shape.
ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES TO RHYME
SO IS EVERY sonnet written in one of two basic forms? Must the sonnet world divide into Petrarchan and Shakespearean? We recently saw one by Frost in terza rima, admittedly a rarity, and it introduces some unusual problems. Most poems with this rhyme scheme sit on the page in three-line stanzas, with the middle line of each stanza giving the rhyme for the first and third lines of the next. Big deal, you say, why does that matter here? It’s actually a very good question, and kind of a big deal. The answer is math. You know that bit about octaves and sestets? An eight-line section is not divisible by a three-line pattern, or not in any way that avoids bloodshed. But to end the statement or set of statements on line eight will mean that the idea level of the poem will be at war with the rhyme scheme. Again with the bloodshed! Moreover, the math works against the rhyme scheme running all the way through the poem (three into fourteen equals ugly), so we know that the poem must end with a couplet, and those usually form their own concluding thought. That means that ending the first movement after line nine leaves a three-line group and a couplet. Maybe, but don’t expect readers to thank you.
Okay, wise guy, what do you recommend?
I recommend nothing, except that we look at what Frost and, in another context, Shelley does with the form. What we see in this poem is essentially a single movement of thought, a sort of list of the ways in which the speaker has been acquainted with the night. That movement actually concludes with line thirteen, when the clock “Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.” The fourteenth, then, is merely a restatement of line one.
THIS NOTION OF A SONNET WHOSE ALTERNATE RHYME SCHEME changes the structure of the poem carries over into the realm of those unrhymed sonnets I mentioned a moment ago. Yes, there are such things, and mostly they are modern developments. And some still adhere to the old rules. W. H. Auden is sometimes credited with the first unrhymed, or blank, sonnet in English, “The Secret Agent” (1928), which in every respect other than being blank verse is perfectly regular—iambic pentameter, an eight-and-six-line organization, and so on. On the other hand, W. S. Merwin’s later sonnets generally display a single movement of thought or, if doubled, a movement that does not break after line eight. His “Morning near the End of May” can be read as containing a slight shift in what would otherwise be the sestet, while others such as “The Handwriting of the Old” or “Breakfast Cup” (all 2016) clearly do not, as statements begun in line eight or earlier carry over to line nine. Well, why not? Poetic practice isn’t the Laws of Soccer. In general, we cannot predict what structure blank verse sonnets may take, but they may veer away from the conventional.
So, too, with half-rhyme sonnets. Those would be sonnets with a rhyme scheme but where the “rhymes” may be something short of perfect. They are also known as slant rhymes, and some can get pretty slanted. In his sonnet sequences “Lachrimae” and “An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England” (both 1978), Geoffrey Hill rhymes “pentecosts” with “quests,” “hell” with “avail,” “name” with “condemn,” and “hood” with “servitude.” All imperfect but completely permissible. The resulting sonnets are otherwise quite regular, although he does break the sestets up into two triplets. In his sequence “Clearances,” Seamus Heaney is equally free with his rhyming “line” with “linen” in one case (a near rhyme for the eye rather than the ear) and “Holy Week” with “candlestick” in another, a definite stretch. This cavalier approach carries over, somewhat, into the question of structure as well. While this sonnet (number six of eight) maintains the eight-and-six formula and the first three sonnets actually display the break with extra spacing, the remaining four mark the turn not after line eight but in the middle or at the end of line seven. This one shifts content direction at the midpoint, while it finishes the rhyme of “cross-wind” with the half-rhyme of “hand to hand,” offers the self-rhyme “happened” in lines nine and ten, giving the poem a slightly strange rhyme scheme: ABABCDCDEEFGFG. Okay, then, we can safely say that half-rhymed or unrhymed sonnets do not cause structural change, at least not in the way that use of terza rima seems to, based on an extremely small sample. On the other hand, they may go hand in hand with a sense of experimentation that may lead to rejection of the 8/6 structural pattern. That makes sense, given that the traditional rhyme schemes encourage adherence to the conventional pattern. What we learn here is the thing we’ve known all along, that writers are people, and where people are concerned, there’s no predicting what they may do.
OCCASIONS FOR WHIMSY
MOSTLY, WE’VE BEEN talking about poems that take the form seriously. But the sonnet also invites fun, and even fun at the form’s expense. Here is American poet Billy Collins’s “Sonnet,” which may be the best-known sonnet of our time:
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.
This particular model takes a lot of liberties with the form, including jettisoning rhyme, varying line length and meter, and making the form itself the subject of the poem. That seems pretty disrespectful, doesn’t it? At the same time, it is the best explanation of that form you will ever read. Besides, the disrespect is playful in a way that reminds us that the form itself is a type of play. Playful and instructive—what a concept!
What Collins does here is use the form to discuss and demonstrate how it works, while at the same time embedding a typical subject. The first time or two he counts down the lines left—something most young people assigned to write a sonnet have done, usually the night before it’s due—it merely seems like a stunt. Saying “All we need is fourteen lines, well thirteen now,” that line being finished, may be cute but doesn’t augur well for a poem of substance to ensue. But even as he counts down, he introduces the notion that the first eight lines establish a topic, even as he hints at an eventual theme of love. So when at line nine he says that “we make the turn” toward resolution, he explains how a sonnet is traditionally structured while leading us toward that resolution. Having been so irreverent early in the poem toward the idea of sonnets, he brings us back to its founding father (Petrarch was not the inventor but was certainly the first truly great sonneteer) and his constant subject, his beloved Laura, calling him back to bed. Let’s credit Collins with generosity in giving Petrarch the consummation he never achieved in life; Laura and the poet may or may not ever have conversed, much less cohabited, and the resulting sonnets are entirely taken up with longing and romantic anguish rather than fulfillment. Along the way, Collins has great fun in dismissing rhyme as a quasi-religious exercise (“the stations of the cross”) and rejecting the metrical regularity he describes as “iambic bongos,” something of an improvement on Heaney’s “iambic drums” from a couple of decades earlier. As with much of Collins’s work, his impulse toward parody unmasks sometimes-unconsidered possibilities in the form.
Oh, and one more thing. Having brought us up to the present day, this discussion can’t be complete without a nod toward a Certain Party:
Sonnet 73
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 ruin’d 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 such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
Oh, like you were getting out of here without a sonnet by HIM! This structure is called Shakespearean, for crying out loud. And what makes it so? A very English turn of mind. It’s as if the Elizabethans, or one at least, looked at the Italian model and had two thoughts. The first was, What an elegant form. And the second, How can we simplify it? Essentially, the Petrarchan sonnet involves two clear movements. The octave is composed of two four-line sections, or quatrains, that rhyme either ABABCDCD or ABBACDDC and then a more intricately rhymed sestet, usually DEFDEF. But maybe it could simply be three quatrains and a closing couplet. The idea organization is still the same: one movement in the first eight lines, another in the sestet. So generally the same. But the quatrain-and-couplet arrangement in those final six lines permits a new wrinkle. Lines nine through twelve form their own statement that is self-contained, and then the final two constitute a conclusion. And when we’re talking about loving life all the more because the awareness of death is a full-time reality, there is nothing more conclusive than that.
The imagery in the octave is uniformly autumnal—seasonal, psychological, spiritual, physical. He gives us fallen leaves, ruined churches, harsh winds, twilight and the coming of night. It may not be winter yet, but that’s close upon us. He ends that movement with sleep, which in Elizabethan thinking was merely the poor cousin of death. The third quatrain continues and completes that movement by making it personal: “I am like the fire that has burnt itself nearly out,” he says, invoking “death-bed” in place of hearth, and then providing the brilliant concept of the fire as being consumed by that which once nourished it. The final two lines provide a sort of coda, suggesting how the prospect of leaving this life makes it all the more dear. That sense of longing becoming more acute as the thing longed for—life, in this case—begins to slip away has never been better expressed.
This poem will grow on you. Or maybe you’ll grow into it. I recommend learning to love it while you’re young; that way, it will become more and more yours as you move closer to the age of the speaker. What a concept: a sonnet about not love and romance but aging and death. Maybe Billy Collins didn’t know about this.