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Eternal glory to the inventor of the sonnet.
—-Paul Valery
Poet, Mollycat Jones (Christine Potter), in her title is riffing off of metaphysical poet, John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets or Divine Meditations” originally published in the first edition of his Songs and Sonnets (1633). Donne wrote 19 “Holy Sonnets” in direct address to God, and he employed violent and sexual imagery. Donne’s “Holy Sonnets” is one of his most dramatic devotional lyrics.
With wit and in the voice of an angry cat (because the poet slept too late), Jones brings together God and cats in the sonnet form. We love how the cat is the speaker in the poem, and from a superior position, addresses and critiques humans for their slothful forgetfulness.
The poem is a one-stanza 14-line sonnet with a rhyme scheme of—abba abba cdcd ee (see below). We scan the first line as: “my BOWL of LAMB and GRA-vy FROM the CAN”—a line of iambic pentameter. We do this to show how the poet embraces some of the conventions of the traditional sonnet (see below) while blowing some of the conventions out of the water to make the poem uniquely her own.
In the ending couplet, there’s a turn (or volta see below), continuing in the cat’s voice and perspective, in which the cat pronounces, essentially, that humans are inferior to felines and fit only to serve them.
Origins of the Sonnet:
Credit for the invention of the form is given to the Italian poet Giacomo de Lentino in the 14th century. It is not however Lentino but Francesco Petrarca, known as Petrarch, who is most closely associated with the early form of the sonnet.
Petrarch established the themes (see below) and dominated the practice of the Italian sonnet.
Although it’s very likely the English poet Chaucer encountered the form in the late 1300s, it took approximately 200 years for the sonnet form to make its way from Italy to England.
In the mid-1500s Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (usually referred to simply as “Surrey”) and Thomas Campion translated Petrarch into English for the first time.
Surrey is credited with creating the now Standard English form of the sonnet (see below), although that form is more closely associated with Shakespeare, who perfected it.
General Form:
The sonnet is one of the most recognizable of poetic forms. It is a poem consisting of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. Not much more can be said by way of set-in-stone definition. In fact, even these absolutes of the sonnet have been challenged. Shakespeare wrote one 15-line sonnet.
Others have written 16-line poems they have called sonnets. Some, like Philip Sidney, have written iambic hexameter or other lines in what otherwise are called and seem to be sonnets.
However, these two criteria remain the most fundamental for sonnets written in the English language: 14 lines of iambic pentameter. Beyond that, sonnets generally are divided into sub-stanzas, differently depending on the subgenre, as we’ll see below.
Sonnets generally have a volta, or “turn” as well. The volta is where,