7 Week 7 – Poetic Forms/ The Sonnet
Leigh Hancock; Candace Bergstrom; and Alan Lindsay
From the origin of poetry until the middle of the 19th century almost all poems were written in formal verse (sometimes called “closed form”), meaning that they all had a set rhythm, meter and rhyme. These forms might look quite different, ranging from the the 14-line, two-stanza Petrarchan sonnet to the 3-line, 17-syllable haiku to the strangely interlocking villanelle or pantoum. Most of us grew up on formal poetry: ballads, sonnets, haiku, and cinquains, just to name a few. We learned to equate poetry with rhyme, and some of us still feel awkward when we encounter poems lacking this element.
Formal poetry requires that individual words and sentences conform to a set pattern of rhythm, meter and rhyme. This can be quite tricky, as the poet must balance meaning (let’s say she’s trying to describe homesickness) with form (she needs a n eight-syllable line that ends with a rhyme for alligator). Formal poetry presents an obstacle course for the poet to run through as gracefully as possible. Done well, formal poetry is magical.
The vast majority of formal poems have a set, steady beat, which we call rhythm. Most of these poems also have a set number of accented beats per line, which is called meter. Finally, most formal poems rhyme in consistent although sometimes complex patterns. They may repeat lines or stanzas in a set pattern. All of these things help determine the type of formal poetry we are reading.
The Varieties of Formal Poetry
There are many, many types of formal poetry; in this chapter, we will look take a deep dive into one of the most celebrated forms in the English language: the sonnet. Consisting of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, the sonnet can employ a variety of rhyme schemes.Although early sonnets almost always take love as their subject, later sonnets examine everything from _________ t _____________.
Sonnets generally have a volta, or “turn., where the sonnet suddenly switches direction and the poet seems to be saying one thing and then suddenly starts saying another. The volta may bring about the answer, at the end of a sonnet, to the question being asked. Or it may occur where a false claim is replaced by a true claim, as in Michael Drayton’s Sonnet 61 in which he tells us in the first part of the poem, “I’m so glad we broke up,” and in the second, “But can we get back together.”
Credit for the invention of the form is given to the Italian poet Giacomo de Lentino in the 14th century, but Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), created one of the two most common sonnet forms, the Petrarchan or Italian Sonnet. This sonnet is broken into two stanzas: an eight-line octave and a six-line sestet. Its rhyme scheme is usually abbaabba cddcee, although it also sometimes uses cdedce for the final six lines. The volta generally appears at the point where the octave–which introduces a problem–divides from the sestet, where the solution to the problem is p