The Sonnet

The Fountain of Vaucluse--a painting of Petrarch's villa in the south of France--by Thomas Cole (Dallas Museum of Art) 

One of the most famous forms of poetry is the sonnet. While most English speakers are most familiar with the Shakespearean sonnet--a form not invented by Shakespeare, though certainly mastered by him--the sonnet was originally created in Italy, where another famous form, the Petrarchan sonnet (similarly not invented by Petrarch, but mastered by him) emerged. 

The form is a fourteen line poem in iambic pentameter, with various rhyme schemes. Sonnets are divided into parts of different sizes. If you divide it into two parts of seven, you don't have a sonnet. 

The Italian/Sicilian forms are divided into two parts, first part of which is made of eight lines, with the second line having six, with a turn (or volta) that occurs in the second part. A turn is a reversal or shift in the theme, thought, or direction of the poem. As a consequence, the word "however" or "but" or some similar word is not uncommon at the turn. 

The Shakespearean sonnet is a little more complex. It is divided into four parts: an introduction of four lines, a thesis of four lines, an antithesis of four lines, and a synthesis in the final two lines. It can also simply have the turn with the final two lines.

The Petrarchan sonnet is made up of two Italian quatrains, abbaabba, which is known as an Italian octave. This is followed by an Italian sestet, cdecde, or a Sicilian sestet, cdcdcd.

The Sicilian sonnet is made up of a Sicilian octave, abababab, and a Sicilian or an Italian sestet.

The envelope sonnet rhymes abbacddc, followed by a Sicilian or an Italian sestet (rhymed, in this case, efgefg or efefef, respectively). 

The sonnetto rispetto has a ottava rima, abababcc, or a risotto, ababccdd, followed by either an Italian or a Sicilian sestet.

The Spencerian sonnet has three interlocking Sicilian quatrains, abab bcbc cdcd, followed by a volta and heroic couplet, ee. 

The terza rima sonnet contains a terza rima, aka bib cdc did, followed by a turn and a heroic couplet. A terza rima is, as you can see, made up of interlocking Sicilian triplet stanzas. 

The English or Shakespearean sonnet is the one most English readers are familiar with. It's made up of three Sicilian quatrains, abab cdcd efef, and a heroic couplet. 

The blues sonnet is made up of four blues stanzas and a couplet. The blues stanza is AAa, where AA are identical words, giving us the following form: AAa BBb Ccc Ddd ee.

Naturally, one could come up with a number of other rhyme schemes, and there have been poets who have abandoned rhyme altogether. And while sonnets have traditionally been in iambic pentameter, it's possible to have different line lengths and different rhythms as well. The main restrictions remain the requirement of fourteen lines, an uneven division, and a turn. 

Take, for example, the poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot. It contains two full sonnets, both ending with the same couplet. I'll only discuss the first one, which opens the poem.

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

First note that the lines are of different lengths: 7, 11, 12, 11, 6, 10, 10, 11, 7, 11, 7, 7, 9, and 8 syllables.

While many of the lines are iambic, including the 10-syllable, making them iambic pentameter, there is some variation in rhythms. And there is a rhyme scheme: aabccddeefgg hh. The scene seems to be a party, and the narrator is proposing to someone that they leave the party; however, in the turn, we have people at the party who are intending to stay. 

I'm not going to go into a full analysis. I just wanted to point to how one experienced, Modernist poet used the sonnet form within a longer poem, and did variations on the sonnet form itself. 

Finally, one can use sonnets in a series. 

The sonnet redoubled uses fifteen sonnets, with the first sonnet providing, line by line, the final line of each of the next fourteen sonnets. In other words, line one of the first sonnet will be the final line of the second sonnet, line two of the first sonnet will be the final line of the third sonnet, etc. To say this is difficult is an understatement, and it's very likely you'll have to go back and forth, massaging each sonnet until they all work and make sense. 

With my poem Time For Love and Art, I did my own kind of series of sonnets in which I used the couplet of each sonnet as lines 1 and 3 for the following sonnet, with the final sonnet having a couplet made of lines 1 and 3 of the first sonnet, making it the entire series circular and the sonnets themselves interlocking. I'm sure it's something someone else has probably done, but you never know. 

In the end, the sonnet remains a generative form. While Modernist and postmodernist poets complain about the restrictions of the form, I would argue that the restrictions make it highly generative. I certainly have used the sonnet--much more than any other form--and I do not feel restricted or that it's been remotely exhausted. I'm particularly attracted to the Shakespearean sonnet's dialectical movement, as I am myself a dialectical thinker. And while, traditionally, sonnets have been love poems, this has hardly been the case since Baudilaire, and you'll find a great many sonnets on a great many topics. 

Indeed, there are still many ways to use and challenge the sonnet form. One could take the forms divisible into four parts and write three quatrains and a couplet on a theme, as I do in my poem Four Displays, or you can even write those four sections as four unconnected poem and create a kind of surrealist or postmodernist juxtaposition that potentially pushes the reader into more complex ways of thinking and making connections. 

So, I encourage you to write sonnets. I have used the form too in my teaching, as I explain here. Again, the restrictions are precisely what are generative of good writing and interesting thoughts. And isn't that what we expect from poetry? 

Earning Your Poetic License

You may be wondering by now why I have primarily been discussing the formal elements of poetry writing. While I have provided some reasoning for my choices--such as the relationship between the brain and rhythm, and the ear and line lengths--there are certainly other considerations when it comes to the practice of any art, including poetry. 

The argument that we should write in iambic pentameter, for example, because it's traditional expresses a sort of half-truth. In the same way that drawing and painting using point-perspective has a history--and a recent history, at that--the use of any particular form or structure in the poetry of a given language has a history. In English, iambic pentameter was introduced to English poetry by Chaucer. Old English poems were written primarily in alliterative verse. In each case, the style was developed within a given poetic tradition and came to dominate in typically organic ways, because it was able to communicate something within the language being used. 

Many mistakenly believe that because we can typically point to this or that poem as being the first to use a given structure, that means that structure was consciously developed by that person. More typically, the final form is a process of different people trying different things, with one person bringing those various elements together into that final form. While the 13th century Sicilian poet Giacomo di Lentini is the one credited with the invention of the sonnet, its form was an outcome of the poetry composed at the Court of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, including that of di Lentini. 

None of this is to take away from di Lentini's accomplishment. The sonnet as a form has since developed a long, strong history, and its form doesn't seem to be exhausted quite yet. Rather, this is to get you to think about how traditions actually emerge. If some single person developed a form or structure, it's easy to dismiss it as arbitrary. If instead it's a consequence of a process, of trial-end-error, and gained stability for good reasons, it's far less easy to dismiss its existence as arbitrary. Something that has evolved and survived is something we ought to take seriously. 

Whenever someone does something weird in a poem--invert syntax, use strange images, violate form, etc.--the common defense is that the poet can, of course, use their poetic license to do what they want. But too often, people use "poetic license" not because they were making purposeful choices, but because they did not know what else to do, and now they need an excuse for what they did. 

Did you use an inverted syntax to create a particular effect or, as Milton did, to introduce Latin structures to the English language; or did you do it because you had no idea how to fit what you wanted to say into the form you were trying to use? 

Did you use a strange image to challenge readers' conceptual categories and open their thinking to greater complexity; or did you do it because you wanted to be weird for the sake of being weird? (Not that the latter is at all problematic; I'm just asking you to be honest with yourself and others about what you're doing.)

Did you violate form, perhaps even write in free verse, because you had mastered form and are now seeking ways to create meaning through other rules you've created for yourself, creating different kinds of surprises and violations of readers' set patterns; or did you do it because you don't have the slighted idea how to write an iambic pentameter couplet, so are left with writing nothing more than prose with line breaks?

In each of the three examples above, the first scenario was an example of the poet making an artistic choice, of solving an artistic problem. It was made because the poet could in fact make a choice, having the tools available to chose among. In each of the second scenarios, the writer did what they did because they had no other choice, having not mastered the most basic skills of the art of poetry. Are you writing ungrammatical sentences because you have no idea how to write good, grammatically correct sentences? Or are you doing so because you have mastered grammar, and now you want to bend the rules for effect? Only the latter is an artistic choice. The former is merely incompetence. 

Thus, the poet must earn his or her poetic license. Master the sonnet, and then show me your free verse. Master grammar, then show me your ungrammatical sentences. Master imagery, then show me your odd images and juxtapositions. 

It is precisely because you have to earn your poetic license that this blog focuses on formalism. You cannot deform without knowing what the form is or was supposed to be. More, you need to understand what poetic form and structure do, why poems have across history and across cultures developed similar structures that allow us to universally recognize certain combinations of words as poetry. You are proposing to work within a particular global tradition. That means you have to know and understand what that tradition is. And it means you need to know and understand what poems are and why they have the structures they do. A house has a frame and paint, but that doesn't make it a painting any more than a set of words with line breaks make that set of words a poem. 

(It's been said that mediocre artists borrow, but great artists steal. Here is where I stole the above image.)

Poetry, the Quadrivium, and the Trivium

The Trivium is part of a Medieval educational system that was designed to provide the student with a complete education. The Trivium is made up of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. The other part of that educational system was called the Quadrivium--arithmetic (number), geometry, astronomy, and music. 

You may be wondering what the Quadrivium could possibly do with poetry. Well, one can view geometry as number in space (patterns), music as number in time (rhythms), and astronomy as number in space and time. Using this formula, one could easily argue that well-written poetry is akin to astronomy, especially those poems that use things like iambic pentameter (note the use of number--"penta" means "five," which is the number of iambic syllable patterns in a line). As John Steinbeck once wrote, "Poetry is the mathematics of writing and closely kin to music." 

We have already spent a great deal of time discussing several aspects of the Quadrivium within poetry, even if we haven't exactly been calling it that, and we will spend even more on the issue of number in the future. However, for this lesson, I want us to focus on the Trivium.

Poets, perhaps more than anyone else (excepting lawyers), must master the Trivium. 

Mastery of grammar should be obvious: how can you be said to be a language artist if you have not mastered the language itself? Only if you fully know and understand why your language works the way it does can you properly use it, beautifully use it, twist and bend it. Thus, it is important that one understand how the different parts of speech work, what kinds of sentences there are, and how to diagram sentences. To be a poet, one must love language enough to want to know how the words and the sentences work.

I'm not going to be spending time on grammar lessons. That's not the point of this blog. I'm assuming you have mastered grammar and that you are here to learn about the tools you need to write poetry, and to give you some ideas about poetry writing, challenge the way you think about poetry, and provide you with my own ideas about poetry. However, there is much that can be said about the other elements--logic and rhetoric--and their importance to poetry.

First, logic. You may think that logic has nothing to do with poetry. You may even have some romantic idea that poetry transcends logic and reason. And you are, perhaps, right about the latter statement. But, in order to transcend something, you have to include it. But there is, as I have argued, a rationality in poetic verse. 

Poetry both infers and, in complex ways, demonstrates. Logic shows when inference and demonstrations are valid. We have to keep in mind that the word "logic" comes from the Greek "logos," which can be translated as word, account, thought, reason, idea, or principle. A dialogue thus occurs "through logos"--meaning there is necessarily a logic to dialogue, and thus to plays, which combine action with dialogue. Insofar as poetry is made up of words and ideas, and are products of our thoughts, it should be clear that we cannot avoid logic. Logic just clarifies our thinking. 

You have perhaps heard complaints about "logocentrism" and about logic itself. However, those who oppose "logocentrism" have to use logic to make their arguments. Those arguments can only be better or worse, and use good or bad logic, but logic is inescapable. Given this fact, I would argue that you should master logic--certainly before you can criticize it. And at least a familiarity with formal logic should benefit your thinking and, thus, your poetry. (Symbolic logic is another thing altogether--we'll leave that to the logicians over in the philosophy department.)

Rhetoric is the art of making an argument, the art of persuasion. Each work of art is trying to make some sort of argument, and the language arts perhaps more clearly and obviously. After all, we make most arguments using language. Thus, rhetoric is central to all forms of poetry. 

Aristotle argued that good rhetoric requires the use of logos, ethos, and pathos. 

Logos we have just covered. 

Ethos, from which we derive the word "ethics," has to do with the reader trusting the writer or speaker. Part of persuasion comes from your reader trusting you, and you can only create true trust by being a trustworthy person. How that can be demonstrated in a poem will certainly vary form poem to poem, from topic to topic, and is perhaps less tangible in poetry than in a scholarly paper or a speech. 

Pathos is emotion, how we create emotion in our writing or in a speech. We do not create true pathos by being melodramatic or sentimental. It has been said that sentimentality occurs when there's a lack of sentiment. Sentimentality if felt by the reader when the writer fails to communicate emotion well. One could perhaps say that sentimentality is pathos without ethos. 

It should be obvious that pathos is central to poetry. It's perhaps the one thing most early poets focus on--sometimes to the exclusion of all else. Which is why there is so much sentimental poetry out there. The way to create true pathos is through the use of appropriate imagery and through the use of story. But in the end, like most aspect of poetry, it takes practice to communicate emotions well, and you are bound to miss the mark on either side, by being either too sentimental or too cold. More, what works for one reader won't work for another. You just have to play the numbers--if you find a large-enough number of your readers get the emotion in the poem, you can consider it a success in its pathos. 

To be persuasive, you have to have good style. Of course, good style means different things for different kinds of writing. "A good style must, first of all, be clear. It must not be mean or above the dignity of the subject. It must be appropriate" (Aristotle). The style of an article intended for a mass audience is necessarily going to be different from that intended for scientists with advanced degrees, and both should be different for different kinds of novels, whether romance or literary, and everything in-between. And of course, poetry should itself have its own, and each poem should have its own, style. 

Style is more than just decoration. "Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it" (Nietzsche). The reader ought to be able to feel your conviction. Style, then, is part of the ethos of rhetoric. 

It is important for poets to master the Trivium. The Trivium must be mastered before you can challenge any part of it--if you decide to challenge any part of it. To paraphrase Don Barthelme, you have to be able to write masterfully well-written sentences before you can write bad sentences in your poetry or prose. Thus, it is important to know the rules of the language before one can challenge them. And challenge them we must for, as Octavio Paz once wrote, "Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings." The greatest poets have always challenged the rules of grammar, logic, and rhetoric--and of ethos and pathos. But they have also always been their masters as well. 

Meter

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Verse is metered language. What, though, is meter? 

"Meter" comes from the Ancient Greek "metron," meaning "measure." When we measure, or count, our lines, we are writing in meter. 

The simplest way to write meter is to simply count syllables. When we are writing poems with lines containing the same numbers of syllables, we are writing in what is called syllabics. In syllabics, we are not concerned about the placement of stressed and unstressed syllables or the length of syllables. These are common in languages which are not stressed, like Japanese, or tonal, like Chinese. However, in a language like English or German, our words are either stressed or unstressed. As a result, syllabics often sound stressed anyway.

Coincidentally, the Greek language, on which we have based most of our regular syllabic structures, wasn't stressed, but rather was made of long and short syllables. Such poetry is called quantitive verse. 

Most readers of poetry will be familiar with poetry with lines containing patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables, called feet. The best-known poetic foot in the English language is the iambic foot, which is a simple alternation of unstressed and stressed syllables. 

We mark stressed syllables with a "/" and unstressed syllables with a "˘", which sounds "da-DUM."

   ˘ / ˘ / ˘ / ˘ / ˘ /

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

  ˘ / ˘ / ˘ / ˘ / ˘ /

Thou art more lovely and more temperate!

Here, in Shakespeare's famous sonnet, we have lines of alternating iambic feet. Since there are five iambs, we call this a pentameter--"penta" for "five," meaning five-count. An iambic pentameter is thus a five-count of iambs. 

• Dimeter: contains two metrical feet
• Trimeter: contains three metrical feet
• Tetrameter: contains four metrical feet
• Pentameter: contains five metrical feet
• Hexameter: contains six metrical feet

These are going to be the most typical meters. As Frederick Turner and Ernst Poppel argue in their essay The Neural Lyre (also found in Turner's book Natural Classicism, above), we're typically going to find the ten syllables of iambic or trochaic pentameter to be most "comfortable" in English because it fits into our auditory moment of about 3-4 seconds. If we're using anapest or spondee, then, a trimeter or tetrameter would fit that moment best. 

This, of course, gets us to the issue of regular rhythms. The most common regular rhythms in poetry are the following:

iamb:      ˘ / (ex: compare)

trochee: / ˘ (ex: summer)

spondee: / / (ex: Bang! Bang!)

anapest: ˘ ˘ / (ex: of unstressed)

dactyl: / ˘ ˘ (ex: beautiful)

There are, of course, others:

pyrrus: ˘ ˘

tribrach: ˘ ˘ ˘

amphibrach: ˘ / ˘

bacchius: ˘ / /

cretic: / ˘ /

antibacchus: / / ˘

molossus: / / /

The tribrach and the molossus are the most difficult to create because if there are three unstressed syllables in a row, we'll tend to hear one of the unstressed syllables as stressed; and equally, if there are three stressed syllables in a row, we'll tend to hear one of them as unstressed. To get your listener to hear a tribrach, you would likely have to have a very strongly stressed syllable on either side of it.

With most of these feet (excepting tribrach and molossus), you can use each of them to create a regular rhythm. With all of them, though, you can use them in combinations. For example, the Sapphic stanza is made up of three Sapphic lines and an adonic line. The Sapphic lines are two trochees, a dactyl, and two trochees, while the adonic line is a dactyl followed by a trochee. Thus, the Sapphic stanza is as follows:

/ ˘ / ˘ / ˘ ˘ / ˘ / ˘

/ ˘ / ˘ / ˘ ˘ / ˘ / ˘

/ ˘ / ˘ / ˘ ˘ / ˘ / ˘

/ ˘ ˘ / ˘

Note that the first three are 11-syllable lines (hendecasyllabics) in pentameters of mixed feet.

As one can imagine, there are a large number of potential combinations of syllabics, meters, and feet--an infinite variety if we ignore the requirement for the creation of line lengths that fit in the auditory moment. It's possible to create very complex meters and then repeat them in each line--or in alternating lines, or some other pattern. I would recommend that if you want to retain the word as a form of verse, though, that there be some kind of regularity--the simple and the complex have to be in balance--otherwise, you'll simply end up creating prose. And there's no need to figure out the meter and feet to write prose.

Another way meter is created is through the use of the caesura. A caesura is a pause in the middle of a line. The caesura helps to create a rhythm both within the lines and across the lines. If you use punctuation in the middle of your line, you'll create a natural caesura. But even without punctuation, the reader will create a natural (though weaker) pause in the middle of a long-enough line. While many English poems aren't built around caesuras, traditional Germanic (including Old English/Anglo-Saxon) verse was built around the caesura, with patterns of alliteration being determined by that internal pause.

Finally, in contradistinction to the caesura, where there's a pause in the middle of a line, there's enjambment, which means the syntax of a line isn't contained by that line, but is rather continued into the next line. Another way of putting it is that the line doesn't end with punctuation. The result is that a line that ends with punctuation is a harder pause than one without punctuation.

Regular number of syllables, feet, caesuras, and enjambment (and rhymes) are all ways to create meter, and to make for complex meters. It's important to both maintain regularity and disrupt that regularity simultaneously in order to prevent the reader from getting bored.

Remember, too, that changes in patterns are meaningful to the reader. Take advantage of that fact. If there's a change in feet (using a trochee instead of an iamb in a particular line, for example), then that word should probably be important. The same could be said of rhymes--your rhyming words should be more important than articles or prepositions, unless they're being used there for some kind of effect (meaning, they have meaning in being there).

Of course, there are also variations in stress--some syllables are more stressed than others, and this creates a more complex music over the regularity of the meter.

Things get even more complex if we read poems aloud, because then we add things like pitch, loudness, length, and timbre. Much of this will of course depend on how the reader chooses to read it, if the person has a high or low voice, if they think it would sound better loud or quiet, with longer or shorter time pronouncing given syllables, and personal, regional, or cultural speaking patterns.

All of this means that metered poetry is fundamentally musical. Encyclopedia Britannica's entry on rhythm even contains musical notation. This musicality brings both sides of the brain together--music and language--into a fuller, more complex art.

Verse is metered language. Meter is an artistic tool. It is what makes poetry a language art. The more we think about these kinds of rules, the more artistic our art will be.