notes on sonnets . . . 3

The first two 'notes on sonnets' are here and here and a related entry is here.

The Petrarchan rhyme (abba abba cde cde - the ending sestet was also sometimes cddcdd or cdcdcd), while beautiful in Italian with its richness of vowel endings, has not been as successful for poets writing in English. Many early critics insisted that the Italian model was the only true sonnet, while later critics, some with linguistic chauvinism, have thought the English sonnet both more flexible and less artificial than its Italian cousin. English is a difficult language to carry an extended rhyme sound, though of course Robert Frost did so with tremendous effect in "Design" with its abbaabba acaacc rhyme pattern:

Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth --
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth --
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.

Nonetheless, the repeating of rhyme in English most often sounds humorous rather than achieving the somewhat philosophic tone achieved by the master craftsman, Frost. Through this reasoning, many modern poets, as mentioned earlier, have either written their sonnets in blank verse, or throwing off even the iambic pentameter, with little or not metrical design. Kenneth Pitchford's "Homosexual Sonnets" might not be called sonnets at all if he had not so labeled them. They are not decasyllabic, they do not rhyme, but they do have the requisite 14-line structure, and when more closely examined, in my opinion, they also can be seen to possess five primary accents per line. Scan the following Kenneth Pitchford sonnet:

Bob, nothing in me wants to tell you again
about those seven years - we in our twenties,
a poet and a pianist, both in our first passionate sexual
physically satisfied love affair, but I never fail

to remember seeing your spotlit face brooding over
a Brahms intermezzo late at night in a deserted building
as my weekend pass rant out and I had to get back
to my infantry rifle company at Fort Lewis.

In the spring you took me to the Seattle Arboretum
so that I would learn the names of trees and plants, both
exotic and ordinary, and it began to rain and everyone left
but I kissed your wet lips, our clothes drenched, discarded,
before we escaped home to our attic, leaning against the warm chimney
for a dozen naked hours of coming and coming.

While some of the accept marks may seen arbitrary, the poem is generally east to read as five main beats to a line. Adding to the sonnet's effectiveness is the full stop at the end of the second quatrain, echoing its heritage.

Other recent and contemporary poems labeled as sonnets are more difficult to accept because of their lack of sonnet characteristics. Robert Duncan's "Sonnet I" is lyrical but has no historical sonnet traits (if you see one/some, please point it out), unless obliquely we accept the fact of Dante's name in the poem as a connection.

More later . . .