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tags:poetry Poetry
Sonnet
A sonnet (little song) consists of 14 lines, typically written in iambic pentameter (a 10-syllable pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables) that follows a specific rhyme scheme.
The oldest known sonnet form was invented by Italian poet Francesco Petrach in the 14th century. Called the Petrarchan or Italian sonnet, this sonnet structure consists of first an octave (eight lines of verse in iambic pentameter) and then a sestet (six lines).
Sonnet has six forms
- Spenserian
- Miltonic
- Terza Rima
- Curtal
- Shakespearean
- Petrarchan
Petrarchan
Italian, 14 lines, Iambic, an octave and sestet. Volta between 8th and 9th lines
Sonnet 43 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. (a)
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height (b)
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight (b)
For the ends of being and ideal grace. (a)
I love thee to the level of every day’s (a)
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. (b)
I love thee freely, as men strive for right; (b)
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. (a)
I love thee with the passion put to use (c)
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith. (d)
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose (c)
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath, (d)
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, (c)
I shall but love thee better after death. (d)
Notice loose rhyme between grace and ways
Shakespearean
English, 14 lines, Iambic, three quatrains and a rhyming couplet. Volta between the 12 and 13th lines.
Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? (a)
Thou art more lovely and more temperate. (b)
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, (a)
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date. (b)
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, (c)
And often is his gold complexion dimmed; (d)
And every fair from fair sometime declines, (c)
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed; (d)
But thy eternal summer shall not fade, (e)
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st, (f)
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade, (e)
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st. (f)
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, (g)
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. (g)
Volta
A rhetorical shift or dramatic change in thought and emotion. It is a common Italian word more often used of the idea of a time or occasion than a turnabout or swerve.
NOTE
What is the “center” of a text? The body of the poem might be about one thing in most of it, but a swerve towards something, a shift, indicates a greater gravity. Attention
John Ciardi speaks thus of the “fulcrum” in relation to the non-sonnet poem
In The Poet’s Art, M.L. Rosenthal employs two different terms for different kinds of turns: “gentle modulations, or at the furthest extreme, wrenching turns of emphasis or focus or emotional pitch (torques)”
Hank Lazer primarily refers to the turn as a “swerve”, asking, “Is there a describable lyricism of swerving? For those poems for which the swerve, the turn, the sudden change in direction are integral, can we begin to articulate a precise appreciation? Is there a describable and individualistic lyricism of swerving?”
What Leslie Ullman calls the “center” of a poem largely is the poem’s turn.
Surely no sonnet succeeds as a sonnet that does not execute at the turn something analogous to the general kinds of ‘release’ with which the reader’s muscles and nervous system are familiar.
The volta, the ‘turn’ that introduces into the poem a possibility for transformation, like a moment of grace”. Transmutation and Transformation
In haiku - a pivot word which changes the direction, and on which the reader’s thoughts turn and expand is called a kireji.
Annie Finch writes, “Every time you write a poem, and probably before you even begin, you make a myriad of even more fundamental choices about its rhetorical stance and structure. Many of these choices are unconscious, based on ideas of ‘what a poem is’ that you have absorbed long before. To make these choices conscious, at least once in a while, can be refreshing and even eye-opening.”
“And finally, what are the rhetorical turns taken in the poem? How does the poem shape itself so that, when one has finished reading, one feels the poem is over, that something has happened, that something has changed?”