[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.