[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

“Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday” as usual and enjoy the weekend, but I got caught this week and ran short of time. This week’s is gonna be a quick one.

I was looking to do something on George Meredith’s sonnet series called Modern Love. He’s known for his novels. At least he was. I think The Egoist is the only one many would recognize these days, and I’ll wager few have read it. Modern Love is the story of a marriage as it falls apart told over the course of fifty sixteen-line sonnets. The story is engrossing as only the best soap opera like guilty pleasures no one admits to can be. I very much want to do a post on it in the future, but I got caught up by the idea of a sixteen-line sonnet. Can you do that?

I was of the impression that the sonnet was a set form. It’s usually a thought posited in an octave with a volta, or turn, taken in a sestet that may or may not resolve the thought. It doesn’t have to be laid out with a break that way. You can set stanzas in various ways or leave it all as one beautiful verse lump. There are plenty of rhyme schemes to choose from. The one thing I’d never seen as anything but a constant is that a sonnet has fourteen lines. When defining the form, length is the characteristic that first pops to mind. I’d be surprised if I’m alone in that.

from The House of Life
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)

The Sonnet

A Sonnet is a moment’s monument—
Memorial from the Soul’s eternity
To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be,
Whether for lustral rite or dire portent,
Of its own arduous fulness reverent;
Carve it in ivory or in ebony,
As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see
Its flowering crest impearled and orient.

A Sonnet is a coin; its face reveals
The soul,—its converse, to what Power ’tis due—
Whether for tribute to the august appeals
Of Life, or dower in Love’s high retinue,
It serve; or, ‘mid the dark wharf’s cavernous breath,
In Charon’s palm it pay the toll to Death.

James Matthew Wilson sets out to define poetry in his fantastic Poetry in an Age of Unmaking. At one point he jokes that instead of calling their works poetry, writers who work outside of traditional restraints would make much more money if they sold their stuff using the more profitable short prose narrative category. But there’s cachet to being called poetry. I hadn’t considered there being cachet to being called a sonnet. I’m still not certain there is. If you’re already working in what’s uncontroversially called poetry, does it matter that the work carries the name of a form? Is it worth less to take the name of a form once you’ve stretched the definition?

My Meredith reading was fresh on the heels of a book club meeting where we got into ontology so I was filled with half formed wonderings about what constitutes a thing. Is there an ideal sonnet in the world of forms? Does sonnetness exist? Is a sonnet simply a name for a category we define as needed? I dismissed those thought as quickly as you should, but I am caught asking why something that isn’t a form wouldn’t be content not being one. My car is a fine vehicle, but it isn’t a motorcycle. Nor does it need to be.

I looked around in case a sixteen liner has always been a variation that’s so rare it’s rarely come across or gets mentioned. Poetry Foundation has a page with a variety of sonnet forms and notes “The stretched sonnet is extended to 16 or more lines, such as those in George Meredith’s sequence.” A quick Google search shows “stretched sonnet” in a few comment sections but with “has the sound and feel of a sonnet but…” type explainers.

None of my books had any reference to stretched sonnets. Turco’s The Book of Forms skips from the fifteen-line rondeau to the eighteen-line heroic sonnet, so no stretched but heroic implies subcategories. John Drury’s The Poetry Dictionary doesn’t use the term stretched, but it’s got this: “Meredith’s 1862 sequence, Modern Love, contains sonnets of sixteen lines each.” It also mentions that John Hollander wrote thirteen-line sonnets but then reins in the definition with “Free-verse sonnets, oddly enough, might hardly qualify as sonnets if they departed from the fourteen-line standard. The “little song” can be corrupted only so much.” So, a bit of liberty here or there, but don’t push it.

My other books make no allowances and carry on assuming fourteen is and always was the only option. I don’t have an answer. Meredith is continuing tradition or he’s a dangerous lunatic and agent of chaos. I can’t object to either claim, but the only two authorities I found that addressed the question mentioned him. It seem as though if there is a carve out, it’s a Meredith carve out.

I had fun looking through those books and realize that while a lot of people are familiar with within-the-guardrails sonnet variations, it’s interesting stuff and high school was longer ago for some of us than others, so here’s a few quick examples of some standard layouts.

Giacomo da Lentini was a notary in the court of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Drury writes in his dictionary that “Officials called notaries, who were actually lawyers, wrote and exchanged [sonnets], as did the emperor,” which bothers me a lot. If you’re translating from Italian, why say his position is notary when whatever your translating actually means lawyer? Why not go straight to lawyer? I’m trying to imagine a translator shrugging, “Someone will tell ‘em.”

Lentini is credited with creating the form; taking the strambatto, a folk ballad octave with an abababab rhyme, and pairing it with a sestet rhymed cdcdcd or cdecde. The example below has an ababcdcd which I blame on yet another possibly imprecise translator, but I like the poem so decided on it anyway.

Sonetto 26
Giacomo da Lentini (1220 – 1270)
translated by Leo Zoutewelle

I’ve seen it rain on sunny days
And seen the darkness flash with light
And even lightning turn to haze,
Yes, frozen snow turn warm and bright

And sweet things taste of bitterness
And what is bitter taste most sweet
And enemies their love confess
And good, close friends no longer meet.

Yet stranger things I’ve seen of love
Who healed my wounds by wounding me.
The fire in me he quenched before;
The life he gave was the end thereof,
The fire that slew eluded me.
Once saved from love, love now burns more.

The Renaissance poet Francesco Petrarca is the man responsible for popularizing the form and spreading it throughout Europe. The Petrarchan sonnet’s octave is set to abbaabba. The sestet offers a barrel of options: cdcdcd, cdecde, cddedd, cdecdee, or cdcdee.

The poet saw a woman named Laura. She was married to another, and he knew her only from a distance and possibly a few brief meetings. He was so struck that he wrote over three-hundred sonnets for her.

I
Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374)
translated by Marion Shore

You who hear within my scattered verse
the troubled sighs on which I fed my heart
in youthful error, now that I in part
am someone other than I was at first;
for all the varied ways I cry and curse
amid the empty hope and wasted art.
I ask that those who suffer by Love’s dart
may pardon me, and pity me my worst.
But now when I reflect how I became
a common tale to all, it brings me grief,
so that I grow ashamed that now it seems
the fruit of all my wandering is shame,
and true repentance, and the clear belief
that what the world adores are fleeting dreams.

The Shakespearian sonnet, ababcdcd efefgg, may be the best known nowadays. This selection was featured in A Survey of Modernist Poetry by Laura Riding and Robert Graves. The poem was broken down in that book in a manner that so impressed the poet and critic William Empson, only a student when he read it and yet to be expelled for condom possession, that he expanded on their way of reading the work and wrote Seven Types of Ambiguity, a modern classic of poetic analysis.

129
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Th’ expence of Spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action, and till action, lust
Is periurd, murdrous, blouddy full of blame,
Sauage, extreame, rude, cruell, not to trust,
Injoyed no sooner but dispised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated as a swallowed bayt,
On purpose layd to make the taker mad.
Made In pursut and in possession so,
Had, hauing, and in quest, to have extreame,
A blisse in proofe and proud and very wo,
Before a joy proposd behind a dreame,
All this the world well knowes yet none knowes well,
To shun the heauen that leads men to this hell.

In A Survey of Modernist Poetry, Riding and Graves also consider E.E. Cummings’s “Sunset.” The sparse words and broken syntax paint a picture in pieces, like an impressionist artist might. In their view, the form does the same. “In the actual poem the slowing down extends over the sestet of this fragmentary sonnet (the fragmentary line, -S, being an alliterative hang-over.” It’s meant to evoke a fourteen-line sonnet, hidden and hinted at.

SUNSET
e.e. cummings (1894-1962)

stinging
gold swarms
upon the spires
silver

chants the litanies the
great bells are ringing with rose
the lewd fat bells
and a tall

wind
is dragging
the
sea

with

dream

-S

Percy Shelley wrote a sequence of five sonnets in terza rima, a rolling rhyme scheme used in various forms but in a sonnet, one that carries over four tercets before ending in a couplet, so aba bcb cdc ded ee.

from Ode to the West Wind
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

V

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Sonnets have gone in and out of style. In Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, a sonneteer is defined as a “small poet, in contempt.” Popularity hurts the form in a Yogi Berra sort of way. Lewis Turco writes in The Book of Forms,

“What one usually means when one makes such a claim is that nobody can write a sonnet anymore because the form has been done to death. It is not the form that is dead, however; it is the burden of tradition that lies upon the sonnet that stifles the would-be sonneteer. When one thinks ‘sonnet’ one doesn’t think merely of the form, one thinks of all the sonnets one has read, and when one goes to write, one still thinks of all those sonnets. As a result, one often winds up writing a sonnet like Shakespeare, or John Milton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), and thinking, ‘I want to write like me, not like somebody else,’ and one grunts in disgust, crumples the paper, and tosses it into a wastebasket. But if one can unburden oneself of the weight of tradition, the form remains to be used in a new way, for it is neutral and merely waits for a poet to breathe new life into it.”

Like by adding two lines, maybe?

I’ll leave you with Landor, because he’s reliably funny. Here’s his non-sonnet response to a request for a sonnet.

CCLXVII
Walter Savage Landor (1775 – 1864)

Does it become a girl so wise,
So exquisite in harmonies,
To ask me when do I intend
To write a sonnet? What? my friend!
A sonnet? Never. Rhyme o’erflows
Italian, which hath scarcely prose;
And I have larded full three-score
With sorte, morte, cuor, amor.
But why should we, altho’ we have
Enough for all things, gay or grave,
Say, on your conscience, why should we
Who draw deep scans along the sea,
Cut them in pieces to beset
The shallows with a cabbage-net?
Now if you ever ask again
A thing so troublesome and vain,
By all your charms! before the morn,
To show my anger and my scorn,
First I will write your name a-top,
Then from this very ink shall drop
A score of sonnets; every one
Shall call you star, or moon, or sun,
Till, swallowing such warm-water verse,
Even sonnet-sippers sicken worse.