The sonnet is a poetic style that is at once simple and beautiful. It is relatively easy to do, and rather harder to do well. I have been writing sonnets for more than a decade. Some of them may have been halfway decent.
But of course you know all that. I’ve been posting sonnets for many weeks. Let’s take a step back: what is a sonnet?
In terms of structure, a sonnet — at its most basic — is a poem in fourteen lines. It is usually, but not always, written in iambic pentameter, which is to say the rhythm of each line sounds something like “dah DAH dah DAH dah DAH dah DAH dah DAH.”1
A sonnet’s lines are usually grouped as follows: two stanzas of four lines (two quatrains, or an octave) followed by an additional six lines (a sestet). There are many types of rhyme schemes used in sonnets; Petrarch, Spenser, and Shakespeare all had their preferred type. Shakespeare, actually, more typically structured his sonnets something closer to three quatrains and then a final couplet. There isn’t a single standard form, and you can break the rules if you see fit.2 Transcend them too far, though, and a poetry pedant might label your “sonnet” a quatorzain.
But that’s just mechanics. True sonnets, really good sonnets, have what is called the turn, or volta, midway through. A shift in perspective, theme, et cetera. This stems from the sonnet’s Italian roots, where the octave and sestet pose a question and then answer it. You don’t have to make it a formal change. It doesn’t have to be call-and-response. You don’t even have to make the volta coincide with the start of the sestet; if you take the Shakespearean route, you can put it anywhere you want, even with the final couplet if you so choose. That said, if you don’t have some sort of a literary “turn” in your sonnet, you might as well be writing an advertising jingle.
Let’s take a look at the volta in action. To begin, here’s a sonnet by one of my very favorite American poets, Edwin Arlington Robinson:
The Tree in Pamela’s Garden
originally published in Avon’s Harvest, 1921
Pamela was too gentle to deceive
Her roses. “Let the men stay where they are,”
She said, “and if Apollo's avatar
Be one of them, I shall not have to grieve.”
And so she made all Tilbury Town believe
She sighed a little more for the North Star
Than over men, and only in so far
As she was in a garden was like Eve.Her neighbors—doing all that neighbors can
To make romance of reticence meanwhile—
Seeing that she had never loved a man,
Wished Pamela had a cat, or a small bird,
And only would have wondered at her smile
Could they have seen that she had overheard.
This sonnet, I think, is one of Robinson’s overlooked masterpieces. (Well, not totally overlooked, other people like it too. But the man’s reputation rests largely upon “Richard Cory” and “Miniver Cheevy” in the popular mind!) I adore it for personal reasons. Take our protagonist, Pamela: she dwells, like most of Robinson’s creations, in the fictional setting of Tilbury Town, a sort of idealized New England idyll that is home to an array of characters. Tragic? Comic? Tragicomic? You’ll find them all here.
The way I read the poem, our protagonist is obviously outside the societal norm on gender. This was, after all, the era of the “Boston marriage.” I think, though, that Pamela might have been intended as asexual, and more than a little asocial to boot. The specifics don’t matter. The point is, she swears off men, or appears to do so. She is happy with her life; in the privacy of her garden, she notes her intentions quite specifically.
After the eighth line comes the volta in its traditional place. We shift from Pamela to her neighbors; they worry about her, and though they surely gossip about her visible abnormality (“romance” in this poem being used in its older sense, meaning something like “drama”) they simply remark among themselves that they wish Pamela had some non-human companionship to dull the pain of living a life without a husband. Their pity is well-meaning, but we as the audience are privy to the dramatic irony. Pamela is quite happy; she overhears her neighbors’ remarks, and is privately amused.
I don’t think that I’d be entirely happy were I to learn that I was the subject of unwelcome pity. Although I suppose it’s nice that her neighbors care. And, as noted, the fact that they’re so off-base is a little bit funny to her.
You liked that sonnet? Let’s have another one by Robinson, a less happy one!
Ben Trovato
also originally published in Avon’s Harvest, 1921
The deacon thought. “I know them,” he began,
“And they are all you ever heard of them—
Allurable to no sure theorem,
The scorn or the humility of man.
You say ‘Can I believe it?’—and I can;
And I'm unwilling even to condemn
The benefaction of a stratagem
Like hers—and I'm a Presbyterian.“Though blind, with but a wandering hour to live,
He felt the other woman in the fur
That now the wife had on. Could she forgive
All that? Apparently. Her rings were gone,
Of course; and when he found that she had none,
He smiled—as he had never smiled at her.”
Appropriately for a sonnet (that art form of Italian origin), this sonnet has an Italian title. “Ben trovato” is idiomatically defined by Merriam-Webster as “characteristic or appropriate even if not true.” The original Italian is Se non è vero, è molto ben trovato: if it is not true, it is very well found.
Like some of Robinson’s poems, this one has a darker theme.3 The sonnet is narrated by a deacon commenting on the lives, presumably, of his parishioners. He is not entirely opposed to what happened, he says. Even if it was not right, it was done well.
And then we get to the turn, and we see that he was talking about a local woman who disguised herself as her husband’s mistress to comfort him on his deathbed.
That’s just...who even imagines a scenario like that?
Right. One more sonnet. This one, I think, has a turn which should be sufficiently obvious. It’s also one of my own sonnets: I wrote it almost exactly five years ago as an adaptation of the song “Me Haces Tanto Bien” by Amistades Peligrosas. I think I first heard this song in a Spanish class, as an undergraduate. The first quatrain is actually a pretty direct translation of the song’s lyrics.
No further comment, save that there isn’t really a message to be derived here. Some sonnets are just sonnets.
Me Haces Tanto Bien
This thing of ours is sure to do me in;
The fire in your eyes has burnt me through
And yet you draw me closer still to you,
Your fingertips raise sores upon my skin.
I would prefer a kindly note instead,
An hour’s visit maybe twice a year,
For something dulls my mind when you are here,
The promise of your touch fills me with dread.O give me strength to bear the things you say
And hold me close no matter what the cost.
It cannot hurt me now; I shall be lost
Without you. Yes, it chills me to the bone
But worse would be to see you turn away:
My darling, I’m afraid to be alone.
“Iambic pentameter” means five iambs, or feet. An iamb is an unstressed and a stressed syllable. This is very typical of English-language poetry. There are non-pentameter sonnets; for example, Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote some very serviceable sonnets in tetrameter (four iambs), and Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote some sonnets in his unique “sprung rhythm.” That said, iambic pentameter is very much the norm.
W. H. Auden’s sonnet that begins with the line “Here war is simple like a monument” does an excellent job of violating the “rules” of the sonnet for emotional effect.
Some of his contemporaries made note of these tendencies. “The world is not beautiful to him, but a prison house,” as Harry Thurston Peck wrote of him; Robinson, for his part, replied mildly that “the world is not a prison house, but a kind of spiritual kindergarten, where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell G-d with the wrong blocks.” It is a cruel irony that Robinson, depressive and solitary, eventually found love and had a decent life until his eventual death from cancer. Peck, meanwhile, was abandoned by his friends and subsequently shot himself in the head.