You Can Write Poetry - Jeff Mock [37]
The English sonnet (also called the Shakespearean sonnet, after the poet who honed it to its finest achievement in English) is composed of three quatrains and a concluding couplet. It's rhymed ababcdcdefefgg. Here's Shakespeare's Sonnet 130:
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak; yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound.
I grant I never saw a goddess go:
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
Shakespeare puts a twist in the convention of the sonnet as the form of love poems. Frequently, the sonnet idealizes the speaker's loved one as the perfection of beauty, but Sonnet 130 says that this speaker's loved one is far from perfect. In fact, through the three quatrains, it seems she lacks any beauty. The concluding couplet, however, spins the poem around: While the speaker's loved one isn't perfect, she is as beautiful as any woman made perfect through false comparisons. Notice especially the rhyming couplet, rare and compare, that ends this sonnet. This change in the rhyme scheme from the Italian sonnet to the English—the addition of a rhyming couplet to end the poem—makes for an emphatic ending. It provides a sense of finality. The final word, compare, is literally and metaphorically the final word on the subject. The rhyme snaps the poem shut.
The Spenserian sonnet is a combination of the Italian and English sonnet forms. It uses the three quatrains and concluding couplet of the English sonnet, and it interlocks the rhyme scheme from one quatrain to the next, like the Italian sonnet. The Spenserian sonnet is rhymed ababbcbccdcdee. Here's Edmund Spenser's Sonnet 79, with modernized spelling:
Men call you fair, and you do credit it,
For that yourself you daily such do see:
But the true fair, that is the gentle wit,
And virtuous mind, is much more praised of me.
For all the rest, however fair it be,
Shall turn to naught and lose that glorious hew:
But only that is permanent and free
From frail corruption, that does flesh ensue.
That is true beauty: that does argue you
To be divine and born of heavenly seed:
Derived from that fair Spirit, from whom all true
And perfect beauty did at first proceed.
He only fair, and what He fair has made:
All other fair, like flowers, untimely fades.
The sonnet, in whichever form, is a challenge. It has a demanding metrical structure and sophisticated rhyme scheme. Its brevity calls for precise expression. The finest sonnets, in order to achieve that precise expression, are often highly metaphoric, which generally means the use of an extended metaphor.
While the sonnet is often the form of love poems, it's by no means limited to that subject, as evidenced by e.e. cummings's sonnets "next to of course god america i" and "pity this busy monster, manunkind," poems I recommend to you. Other modern masters of the sonnet form are Edna St. Vincent Millay, W.H. Auden, John Berryman and Robert Lowell. I recommend their sonnets to you also.
The Villanelle
Another form, more complex than the sonnet, is the villanelle. It may be written in any meter and with any line length—often iambic pentameter, but iambic tetrameter is common as well. The villanelle consists of five tercets and a quatrain, rhymed aba aba aba aba aba abaa. The complexity of the form, however, lies not in its rhyme scheme, but in an intricate pattern of repetition: The first line is repeated as the sixth,