I'd like to know more about this poem

[Andrea345]

Leda and the Swan
W.B. Yeats

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak would let her drop?



Does this poem qualify as a sonnet?

I think it does but here’s some questions I’ve got about why it might not be.

There's two quatrains instead of an octet and Yeats broke the third line of the sestet into two lines. While I can't represent the way the line break shows up in print using the UBB code, I see it printed everywhere else as indented so far as to line up after the word "dead." Why does he break the line? That break doesn’t screw up the pentameter of what would have been counted as line 11 but it definitely creates a line 12 according to the print. This brings the poem to 15 lines instead of the traditional 14 for a sonnet.

This break up of line 11 also creates another question for me. There’s no rhyme for “dead,” the rhyme is definitely on “up.” So, would I represent the rhyme scheme as abab cdcd efgefg or something else?

The sestet reminds me of the way the Italian Sonnet ends. I’d say that the volta is Leda’s precognition of the harm Agamenon and Troy would do to her daughters, Helen & Clymenestra. This changes the idea from rape to rapture and moves from the physical to the metaphysical. This change occurs at l9 and Yeats works the sestet with the same sort of freedom as one of the Italian sonnets. Yet the last two lines, while not forming a couplet, are an even harder twist to what I’m calling the volta (http://shoga.wwa.com/~rgs/gl-uv.html). Is there a technical term for that final question or did I miss my call on when the volta occurred and I’ve screwed up the idea of volta?

The first two quatrains are worked like the Shakespearian sonnet. Then the two quatrains are, to me, two separate perspectives. While I’d argue that there’s some word choice weirdness in the first strophe, I take it as being from the swan’s point of view. I see it as limited 3rd person but the word choice on “caressed” makes me think of something Leda ought to be aware of more than the swan & “By the dark webs” seems too objective. The 2nd strophe is from Leda’s perspective. That these are two quatrains with different perspectives makes me wonder if this isn’t another violation of what makes for a sonnet. Does the octet in the sonnet have to be a consistent perspective? In the English form, each quatrain “develops a specific idea” (quoting Howard Miller) but the English form is three quatrains, not two.

If a sonnet is defined by having the volta more than if it follows either the accepted Italian, Spenserian or English forms, then this is a sonnet. But that line break thing happening is making me nuts.

This piece is written in iambic pentameter & Yeats uses his substitutions to move heavier beats closer together. His use of additional feet adds a breathlessness, like a stagger to my mind. I fell in love with this poem. I think it’s one of the best examples I’ve read of an erotic poem.

Thanks
-a


[This message has been edited by Andrea345 (edited 11-24-2001).]

[Clive2]

Andrea - as far as I can see, this is Yeats writing a mixture of an English and an Italian sonnet, a sort of nonce sonnet. I imagine he broke the line in two to emphasise the shift in action, and that the indentation indicates it isn't to be seen as a new line but a sort of fractured line. I've seen this elsewhere. So, yes - this counts as a sonnet for me.

[Harry Rutherford]

For what it's worth, I've always read this as all being from a 3rd person point of view, with the volta being a shift to a different time, not to bring out the harm Troy will do to Helen, but that Helen will do to Troy.

Or perhaps more just a sense of great historic consequences in the making- from this action, the destruction and founding of great empires will arise. Yeats had a whole load of frankly batty theories about history and fate, and I seem to remember he was keen on identifying Maud Gonne as a kind of Helen figure. But I'm dredging a lot of this up from the depths, so don't take my word for it.

Harry
fantastic poem, isn't it?

[Andrea345]

Clive -
So sonnet mixtures are legal? Now I'm wondering what the scope of the form is. And that broken line is meant to be scanned as one line, read as one line, counted as one? If that's so, then my guess was correct.

Harry,
I got the third person, but third person limited was the way I was seeing it. The third person limited shifts according to the rhyme pattern until it becomes objective third person in the final stanza.

I do like the idea that Helen does Troy better than Troy gets Helen. It fits better with Clymenestra's revenge against Agamemnon.

But now you've given me a new name, "Maud Gonne" who I'm going have to go look up.

Guys, thanks
-a
and you too, David

[Howard Miller]

"I do like the idea that Helen does Troy better than Troy gets Helen. It fits better with Clymenestra's revenge against Agamemnon."

A number of the choral songs in Aeschylus' Agamemnon discuss how Helen is the cause of the suffering and destruction of both Greeks and Trojans, and, following Klytemnestra's murder of Agamemnon and Cassandra, discuss how Helen's destructiveness continues even beyond the end of the Trojan War itself. Of course, all the references to Helen as destroyer are instances of dramatic irony as Klytemnestra is her half-sister and just as destructive in her own way. Yeats is of course drawing heavily upon Aeschylus.

Howard

[Andrea345]

Howard,
Do you have a favorite translator for Aeschlyus' Agamemnon? I've always wondered what happened to Helen after Troy. Thanks for the reference.

-a
Klytemnestra - I'll get that spelling down eventually.

Here's two links David Mascellani sent me. The first link, Rhetorical Figures in Yeats' "Leda and the Swan" (http://soucc.southern.cc.oh.us/home/bedwards/rhetoric.htm) by Barbara Edwards-Aldrich does a great job demonstrating what rhetorical & poetic devices Yeats used like brachylogia, anastrophe, and the synecdoche which was confusing me so badly in the first stanza. I'd recommend having a good dictionary of poetic or rhetorical devices at hand while reading for more simplistic definitions.

The second link comes from a course paper description. I think Herbert Lindenberger of Stanford deserves the credit. In this link he's collected the versions of Yeats' manuscripts of the poem. Interesting revision process.
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/english/courses/sites/lindenberger/ENG150/paper2.html

Thanks David
-a


[This message has been edited by Andrea345 (edited 11-25-2001).]

[Howard Miller]

I like the Robert Fagles translation of Agamemnon (it wouldn't hurt to read the entire trilogy of which Agamemnon is the first part, The Libation Bearers and The Euminides being the second and third).

Helen and Menelaus, upon leaving Troy, were blown by a storm to Egypt where they spent a number of years. Euripides' Helen deals with this just as his Orestes refers to them after their return to Greece. Telemachus, Odysseus's son, visits Helen and Menelaus in Greece in search of news concerning his father in Book IV of The Odyssey.

"Klytemnestra" is one of the transliterations of the name from Greek, "Clytemnestra" being the other.


Howard

[Howard Miller]

My choice for the best work on Greek myth in general is The Greek Myths by Robert Graves. Most of the myths exist in several versions and Graves gives all of them, as well as a great deal of background material. Edith Hamilton's Mythology has been the standard for decades, but she simply summarizes the best-known version of each myth, leaving out the alternative versions as well as many myths altogether. Hamilton's book is a good start, but for those with a serious interest in mythology Graves' is a necessity.

Howard

[Andrea345]

Howard,
Thanks for the tip. I'd like to see the variations on the myths but is the Hamilton book the standard b/c it's less technical or because it's lighter in the satchel? What I'm getting at is would the layperson be able to read the Graves material?
-a

[Dunc]

Ozymandias has the rhyme scheme ABABA CDC EDE FEF. It has fourteen lines, iambic pentameter, the volta after line 8 - the poet plainly thinks he's writing a sonnet, albeit a non-conforming one, and I agree with him. Leda and the Swan has the Shaxper / Petrarch mix and the stepped eleventh line, but again it's plain where he's coming from.

No survey of the sonnet in English would leave either of them out.

Which just goes to show that if you write well enough, you can do whatever you like with the form - unless you're posting in Merciless, of course. Regards / Dunc

[Julie]

Originally posted by Howard Miller:
My choice for the best work on Greek myth in general is The Greek Myths by Robert Graves.

Good choice.

For people looking for a starting point, sort of a dictionary of myths, I like The Meridian Handbook of Classical Mythology, by Edward Tripp. It gives a brief overview of a character, setting, author, or poem/drama, plus giving references for where the characters appear in literary works. It can be an absolute godsend if you're trying to remember, for example, just where in "Prometheus Bound" Aeschylus mentions the Graeae.

It also has a pronunciation index, and cross references a few of the confusing spellings (but just a few).

This isn't really a book you'd sit down a read. It's a book you'd look stuff up in.

Julie

[Julie]

Originally posted by Dunc McReil:

Which just goes to show that if you write well enough, you can do whatever you like with the form - unless you're posting in Merciless, of course. Regards / Dunc

Hey, I posted a abbbabbbcdcdcd sonnet with no volta to merciless once.

Of course, I bribed everyone beforehand.

Julie

[Andrea345]

Dunc,
Thanks for the 'minder about Ozymandias. I know when I read it, I didn't glom onto the idea that it was a sonnet when I first read it. Now I'll go back and take a closer look.

Julie -
Thanks for the book recommendation. As far as the posting goes - I was under the impression that the volta made a piece a sonnet. At least that's what I'm reading these days.

I'm only learning some of the formal rules right now but I was under the impression that while the rhyme scheme could be dithered with, the volta was the sonnet. One of the reasons I posted this poem was to begin a discussion about sonnets. Can a formal piece really still be considered a sonnet without the volta? or does it come down to 14 lines of patterned rhyme?

I'm truly interested b/c I need to learn what the formal rules are as well as what's considered acceptable.

Thanks guys,
-a

[Julie]

Originally posted by Andrea345:

Julie -
Thanks for the book recommendation. As far as the posting goes - I was under the impression that the volta made a piece a sonnet. At least that's what I'm reading these days.

Well, you'll get into arguments over that, really. I'm going to be highly inflammatory and claim that the people who insist on there being voltas often go to great lengths to find voltas in poems they want to be sonnets.

Heck, I wrote a poem which a critter claimed was a sonnet only because I threw in a volta on the last word.

The last word? Oh, I don't think so, Mister Critter, sir.

I ended up changing the last word, too, just out of spite. Mwahaha!

Ahem. Where was I?

Oh yes, the volta.

Let's take one of my very favorite sonnets, by Edna St. Vincent Millay (who is starkly underrated).

If I should learn, in some quite casual way,
That you were gone, not to return again--
Read from the back-page of a paper, say,
Held by a neighbor in a subway train,
How at the corner of this avenue
And such a street (so are the papers filled)
A hurrying man--who happened to be you--
At noon to-day had happened to be killed,
I should not cry aloud--I could not cry
Aloud, or wring my hands in such a place--
I should but watch the station lights rush by
With a more careful interest on my face,
Or raise my eyes and read with greater care
Where to store furs and how to treat the hair.


What do you think? Volta, or no volta? I would say there is no turn, or there is no more turn than you could find in this sentence: If I should learn you died, I wouldn't cry aloud.

But those who want to find a volta probably can find one at line nine. What came before was the setup, what came after the punchline? I'm not sure.

But if anyone wants to argue that this lovely poem isn't a sonnet, well, I think they're nuts. (Like peeKAHNS and AHLmonds.)

Julie

[Andrea345]

oooo! Julie. Good one. I love Millay. I'm gonna love watching this thread grow. I'm looking at this too.

Thanks!
-a

Gonna go look for the Millay poem I love so much & post it to Voyages in a few days.

[Dunc]

Aw, c'mon Julie! Edna says, IF lines 1 to 8 THEN lines 9 to 14. That's a volta, beyond a doubt - a complete change of direction.

They like to say Shakespearean sonnets have the volta after line 12. It's always seemed to me that Shakespeare is doing something quite different with that final couplet. For me, the greatest finale in the Sonnets is,

<dd>This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,</dd>
<dd>To love that well which thou must leave ere long.</dd>

but I reckon it's a different idea to a volta - a capping, or a punchline, not a discourse on a new idea. Regards / Dunc

[This message has been edited by Dunc McReil (edited 11-26-2001).]

[Julie]

Originally posted by Dunc McReil:
Aw, c'mon Julie! Edna says, IF lines 1 to 8 THEN lines 9 to 14. That's a volta, beyond a doubt - a complete change of direction.

A complete change of direction? Surely you jest. That's like driving north for eight miles, then driving north for six miles, then claiming the last six miles were a different direction than the first six.

Piff.

There's nothing change of direction-like in: If this is Tuesday, this must be Belgium.

Let's compare to a sonnet with a definite volta, Coleridge's "Work without Hope":

All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair--
The bees are stirring--birds are on the wing--
And Winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

Yet, well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,
For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!
With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live.


Heck, he even broke the poem in half for us, to show where the volta hit. This is quite an odd little sonnet, with its unusual rhyme scheme and upside-down form, but it's still a sonnet, right? It's got the volta; heck, you don't even have to stretch to find it. (And I really like that last rhyme.)

Millay isn't even on the same planet, volta-wise!

Julie

[Julie]

Originally posted by Dunc McReil:

They like to say Shakespearean sonnets have the volta after line 12. It's always seemed to me that Shakespeare is doing something quite different with that final couplet.

*snip*

but I reckon it's a different idea to a volta - a capping, or a punchline, not a discourse on a new idea. Regards / Dunc



I agree with you. Shakespearean sonnets often function as a cohesive unit, perhaps burrowing deeper, or expanding, or shining brighter lights onto the subject as the poem progresses, but quite often without any sort of surprise, or twist, or turn. They simply build, line after line:

I love you
I really love you
I really really love you
I really really really love you
Yes, I really really really really love you
No doubt about it, I really really really really really love you...

And frankly, sonnets are short enough that it works. They are long enough to withstand a volta, but short enough that they don't need one.

Julie

[Harry Rutherford]

On the subject of 'standard' rhyme schemes--

I thought I'd check the first great English sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella, and Sidney's first six sonnets go

abab abab cdcd ee
abba abba cdcd ee (this is also the one Wyatt used)
abab abab cc deed
abab abab cc dccd
abab baba cdcd ee
abab baba cc deed

then no. 7 repeats a pattern for the first time.

And, skipping forward 400 years, Auden wrote a sequence of fourteen line poems (The Quest) with patterns like

abab cddc efe ggf
aa bb cc dd efef gg
aba cdbbcd efefe

and the 21 line

aababa ccdede fghifggh

I would describe all of these as 'sonnets'.

Harry

[Andrea345]

I would describe all of these as 'sonnets'.


So, Harry, is what you're saying is that there's huge variety in the rhyme scheme or that 14 lines and a rhyme scheme make a sonnet? I'm getting used to the idea of variety in the rhyme scheme, it seems to me that that's where the flexibility is.

I'll have to go read some more poetry, but I'll be looking at the idea of a characterization or idea behind each rhyme scheme (abab different in some way than cddc) & check out to see if the idea of a volta holds true. For example, is the couplet in the scheme abab abab cc dccd the volta?

Which Auden pieces are you referring to?

I'm at the point where I'm wondering if 14 (now 21) metrical lines with a rhyme scheme is just called a sonnet. Julie?

Very interested
-a

[Howard Miller]

Sonnet Forms?

Try these two by Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, Sonnets I and XXVIII from Sonnets, First Series:


Sometimes, when winding slow by brook and bower,
Beating the idle grass,--of what avail,
I ask, are these dim fancies, cares and fears?
What though from every bank I drew a flower,--
Bloodroot, king orchis, or the pearlwort pale,--
And set it in my verse with thoughtful tears?
What would it count though I should sing my death
And muse and mourn with as poetic breath
As in damp garden walks the autumn gale
Sighs o'er the fallen floriage? What avail
Is the swan's voice if all the hearers fail?
Or his great flight that no eye gathereth
In the blending blue? And yet depending so,
God were not God, whom knowledge cannot know.


Not the round natural world, not the deep mind,
The reconcilement holds: the blue abyss
Collects it not; our arrows sink amiss
And but in Him may we our import find.
The agony to know, the grief, the bliss
Of toil, is vain and vain: clots of the sod
Gathered in heat and haste and flung behind
To blind ourselves and others, what but this
Still grasping dust and sowing toward the wind?
No more thy meaning seek, thine anguish plead,
But leaving straining thought and stammering word,
Across the barren azure pass to God:
Shooting the void in silence like a bird,
A bird that shuts his wings for better speed.


Heh heh heh.


Howard

[Andrea345]

Okay,
I’m quoting Howard here, “basically, in a sonnet, you show two related but differing things to the reader in order to communicate something about them.”

Julie, I’m gonna have to agree with you and Dunc that the Millay does have a volta because the reaction is so unexpected from the setup. In other words, the fact of her not crying aloud is remarkable and made more so by the fact that, as the final couplet says, “read with greater care / Where to store furs and how to treat the hair.” That’s a pretty astounding final word. She’s following the English (Shakespearian) model of rhyme (abab cdcd efef gg ) and she has the piece neatly divided according to the rhyme scheme. For the abab rhyme pattern she’s developing the setting. The cdcd pattern is used for describing the death. efef is the volta, the quatrain showing (again quoting Howard) “(the) contrastive idea, emotion, state of mind, beliefs, actions, events, images, etc.,” which is what she would do & that's unexpected. The couplet does not resolve this tension but adds the final punch.

I can read this piece as an “I don’t care” as well as a “totally frozen in the headlights, focus on the nearest object & push the idea away.” I prefer the 2nd reading, but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone challenged me on that read. The reaction, though, is quite unexpected. The entire piece is a sterling example of understatement to me.

As far as Howard’s (you blighter) 1st piece (Sonnet I), the rhyme scheme is waaay out there: (abc abc ddbbbd ee). At least it sorta changes / repeats based on ideas within the first sestet. To me, the volta occurs at line 7 with the introduction of the 2nd rhyme scheme. The first idea is most clear to me in l 4-6, “what is the point of writing at all” as a fear (simplistically put). The change occurs when comparing it to falling leaves & the sighing wind or the swan’s voice unheard by human ears, its flight unseen by human eyes. The couplet still remains the punch line. It brings in the unknowable God. Tuckerman assumes the reader believes in god & that the analogy between the swan in flight unseen by human eyes is still as much of a fact as the unknowable god. So, yes, I think there is a twist to this piece as well.

I leave the other piece to other people. Now, those couplets as punch lines...

-a


[This message has been edited by Andrea345 (edited 11-28-2001).]

[Howard Miller]

Unfortunately, the passage you've quoted from me is (a) indeed mine, b) several years old, and (c) a view with which I no longer necessarily agree (I've simply got to stop leaving artifacts behind).

Does that solve or complicate your dilemma?

Howard the Flexible

[Dunc]

This praise of unorthodoxy is like leaving a loaded gun near children - no good can come of it. Despite, or more probably because of, the best efforts of paedagogy, they'll embrace aberration and cite this thread for the defence. What have we done? [Reaches for hemlock. Then remembers Sonnet 99 has ababa cdcd efef gg, and Sonnet 126 has aa bb cc dd ee ff. Sighs and pours a double Talisker instead.] Regards / Dunc

[Andrea345]

rats, Howard,
Your "artifact" was one of the best writeups I've read. darn. darn. darn. darn.
You are so lucky. I almost typed the thing in by hand. It made sense.

Sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo -

is this piece by Rhina P. Espaillat a sonnet?
Interlude
Say that a happy woman at that stage
given to counted blessings counts them now
not to be comforted, not to assuage
vague disappointment, but to watch them bow
before memory's curtains as they close
on this good Second Act. There's more ahead,
but what - and how it ends - nobody knows.
Say she recites what those old players said
who made her laugh and vanished with Act One;
Listens for exit lines as yet unheard
although foreshadowed, as the deed undone
cries out in retrospect; mouths every word,
long-wished-for or long-feared or still to say,
before the last applause has died away.


Frankly, I thought when Turco defined sonnet as : "fourteen - line poem written in iambic pentameter and rhymed in various ways" but then went on discussing where the volta showed up in the forms I just assumed the volta was there, by definition. I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out that volta. rats. oh, well, it was good stuff.

But what about the 20 line sonnet by Milton I saw Hollander write about or the 21 line Auden piece Harry's gonna give me the title to?

What's a sonnet?

[Andrea345]

Reaches for hemlock. Then remembers Sonnet 99 has ababa cdcd efef gg, and Sonnet 126 has aa bb cc dd ee ff. Sighs and pours a double Talisker instead.] Regards / Dunc

naw Dunc, this child isn't gonna go around calling her 14 lines of rhymed work sonnets. I'm truly interested in the parameters but the function of the basic forms seem pretty clear and consistent - it's just the "what's acceptable substitution" which I bitterly resent (I'll explain why later).

I just hate seeing people go around calling something a "sonnet" when it's not or, as in my case, being afraid to call something a sonnet when it falls within acceptable parameters. I don't know or understand what those parameters are now that the volta has been removed from my world. rats. I've got more reading to do.
-a

[Dunc]

No, no, not YOU, Andrea - THEM! Dunc

[Howard Miller]

Simple solution: Just as beginners in sonnet writing are told to learn to master strict iambic pentameter before they begin to work with variations, so too beginners should master the 3 standard forms first. Having done that, you will have a base of knowledge from which to work.

So, for your purposes at this point in your artistic life, consider the strictly-defined forms as your guide and goal. Learn what they do and how they work, then you'll also have some idea about what variations will and won't work.

Howard, leaving quickly before Goddess Julie shows up with thunderbolts

[Andrea345]

Howard,
You didn't answer my question about what to call the piece by Rhina Espaillat, or should I go find someone dead?

heh
-a
You know I'm gonna do the forms & you're going down with me as I revise them. oh, I forgot, they've got rhyme and rhyme makes me battier than... what I'm working on now. Dunc, I think you just volunteered as well.

double heh

[This message has been edited by Andrea345 (edited 11-29-2001).]

[Howard Miller]

Espaillat's is a perfectly standard Shakespearian sonnet.

Except . . . there are some who insist that a "proper" Shakespearian must have 3 quatrains and a couplet, each of which is a separate unit. Espaillat's enjambments cross the dividing lines so the poem isn't divided 4/4/4/2. Personally, I have no problem with such enjambments, nor am I insistent on such divisions. But then, I'm a softie.


Howard

[This message has been edited by Howard Miller (edited 11-29-2001).]

[Andrea345]

rats Howard,
Now, I am on the verge of giving up the volta. I thought in the Shakespearean sonnet, the volta was the couplet. This is probably where I'm getting confused but the couplet seems like a natural extension of the metaphor of the quatrain above it. I can actually see the volta in the Millay and Yeats pieces easier than I can see any kind of shift here.

On the other hand, I think I might be getting what Julie & Dunc were writing about some of Shakespeare's sonnets. I've read, what, only about twelve of those haven't paid such close attention. Julie's example of
I love you
I love you a whole lot
I love you I love you a whole lot

seems more like what's happening in this piece than anything unexpected.

I thought I'd picked a good example too. rats. I'd been saving it too just this question. darn.

-a


[This message has been edited by Andrea345 (edited 11-29-2001).]

[gecian]

A long Auden sonnet; it's probably the 21-liner you're thinking about.

The Crossroads, no. 3 from The Quest

Two friends who met here and embraced are gone,
Each to his own mistake; one flashes on
To fame and ruin in a rowdy lie,
A village torpor holds the other one,
Some local wrong where it takes time to die:
This empty junction glitters in the sun.

So at all quays and crossroads: who can tell
These places of decision and farewell
To what dishonour all adventure leads,
What parting gift could give that friend protection,
So orientated his vocation needs
The Bad Lands and the sinister direction?

All landscapes and all weathers freeze with fear,
But none have ever thought, the legends say,
The time allowed made it impossible;
For even the most pessimistic set
The limit of their errors at a year.
What friends could there be left then to betray,
What joy take longer to atone for; yet
Who could complete without the extra day
The journey that should take no time at all?

Rhyming schemes & metre in The Quest, (Auden thought it a sonnet sequence, would one care to debate style with him?):

I, The Door, abab cddc efe ggf
II, The Preparations, abba cddc efe fgg
III, see above.
IV, The Traveller, abab cdcd efg feg, hexameter
V, The City, abab cdcd efg efg
VI, The First Temptation, abab cdcd efg egf
VII, The Second Temptation, abab cdcd efe gfg
VIII, The Third Temptation, abab cdcd efg gfe
IX, The Tower, abba deed efe eff (some slant-rhyme)
X, The Presumptuous, abab cdcd efgf ge
XI, The Average, aabbccddeffegg (I have seen a couple of other 20th cent. sonnets with this pattern; anyone know if it has a name?)
XII, Vocation, aba cdb bcd efefe
XIII, The Useful, ababc dcde fggfe
XIV, The Way, in rhyming couplets with varying metre.
XV, The Lucky, abcacb defdfe gg. Pentameter and hexameter alternate as: hphpph hphpph hh
XVI, The Hero, abab cdcd efe gfg
XVII, The Adventure, abab cdcd efg efg
XVIII, The Adventurers, abba cddc eff geg
XIX, The Waters, abaccb dedffe gg, tetrameter except for IP couplet.
XX, The Garden, abab cdcd efg fge


If you leave out the weirdest ones, there's a general pattern of octet/sestet. Auden used this pattern in most of his sonnets (e.g. the famous Who's Who: he wrote few strict Petrarchan/Shakespearean ones. The octet is typically Shakespearean, the sestet varies (as in the Italian sort). Larkin did something similar in Autobiography at an Air Station.

The Quest has some delightful lines. And, speaking of lines, there's a stepped line in XI.

[This message has been edited by gecian (edited 11-29-2001).]

[Howard Miller]

Gerard Manley Hopkins' "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection" is a 24-liner that I think has every right to be considered a sonnet with the rhyme pattern:

a b b a a b b a c d c d e* d (d) f f (e*) g g (g) h h* (h)*

The asterisks refer to identities rather than rhymes; the ( ) refers to shortened lines. There is a distinctvolta in the middle of L. 16, the first of the f-rhyme lines.

Howard

[This message has been edited by Howard Miller (edited 11-29-2001).]

[Dunc]

Can't agree with gecian that the octet is typically Shaxperian or that Shaxperian and Petrarchian sonnets are in some kind of parallel beyond line-count. William's a 12+2 man, and the 2 are spent on capping or punchline. (It occurs to me as I write this that the last couplet of Let me not to the marriage of true minds probably does represent a volta - but it's the exception.)

Once you allow the Auden example to be called a sonnet, you're using the word in its ancient Provençal (sonet) meaning of just being a 'little song'. Thus in one easy stride we move onto Humpty Dumpty's turf, where any word you use means exactly what you want it to mean, without waiting for consensus.

Sonnet 99 with its extra line is just that - a sonnet with an extra line. I don't think Sonnet 126 with its 12 lines and couplet form can properly be called a sonnet. The possession of 14 lines is basic to the form, the structure, the means of expressing ideas, the utility, the fundamental fact that sonnets of 14 lines and ten syllables a line work in English. (Sonnets also should be self-contained - a sonnet-sequence using the 14 lines as a mere verse-form doesn't count.)

That's the base one can gingerly depart from. At least, at the time I'm posting this, that's what I think. Regards / Dunc

[Howard Miller]

Shakespeare's a 12/2 man? Think again.

"Sonnet XXIX"--volta at L. 9
"Sonnet XXX"--volta at L. 9
"Sonnet LXII"--volta at L. 9

To name just 3. Shakespeare in fact was quite flexible and moved with ease back and forth between the 8/6 Italian and the 12/2 Spenserian. That, in fact, is the greatest strength of the English form.


Howard

[Howard Miller]

Then, of course, there's always the curtal sonnet:

"Pied Beauty"

Glory be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

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.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Howard

[This message has been edited by Howard Miller (edited 11-29-2001).]

[Dunc]

29: grant you the volta.
30: disagree - this is a 12+2, and L9-12 are parallel to L5-8, not different.
62: is interesting, having both a volta at L9-12 and a third part, L13-14, for a capping thought.

Ah shortness of life! Ah resort to generalities! Yet, by preponderance he's a 12+2 man, and not narrowly. Interesting stuff. Regards / Dunc

[gecian]

Consider this:

A shilling life will give you all the facts:
How Father beat him, how he ran away,
What were the struggles of his youth, what acts
Made him the greatest figure of his day;
Of how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all night,
Though giddy, climbed new mountains; named a sea;
Some of the last researchers even write
Love made him weep his pints like you and me.

With all his honours on, he sighed for one
Who, say astonished critics, lived at home;
Did little jobs about the house with skill
And nothing else; could whistle; would sit still
Or potter round the garden; answered some
Of his long marvellous letters but kept none.

It is pretty clearly divided into an octet and a sestet (though you could argue the volta's at L7). However, the octet rhymes ababcdcd -- the Shakespearean rhyme pattern. In my view, this sort of sonnet is essentially Pet., because of its division, with a more manageable rhyme scheme.

[gecian]

Suppose you started with an 8/6 pattern, and cut two lines of the octet. To maintain the symmetry of the sonnet, you would have to cut 2*6/8 lines from the sestet. The result is a 6-4.5 sonnet, which is Hopkins's curtal sonnet.

The normative Quest sonnet goes quatrain/quatrain/sestet. If you added two lines to one quatrain, to maintain symmetry you'd have to add two lines to the next, and 2*6/4 = 3 lines to the sestet. Result: 21-liner, which you can see above.

Hopkins's Heraclitean fire could be called a sonnet variant, if only because it clearly is designed to look like one. (Outside sonnets, I haven't seen ANYONE using abbaabba).

A sonnet could, perhaps, be defined as a fourteen-line metrical poem with a volta of sorts somewhere; and a sonnet-variant as a poem that, though not fourteen lines long, is clearly derived from some form of (fourteen-line) sonnet, or has some distinctive design features (technical, NOT volta) of the fourteen-line sonnet. (The examples mentioned above, for instance, or Geoffrey Hill's sonnets-sans-couplets.)

(Imagine having Marvell's To His Coy Mistress called a sonnet on the grounds that it has a volta at "But at my back I always hear/Time's winged chariot hurrying near.")