So You Want To Be A Poet?
Part Three: Write a Sonnet, Whydoncha

In the first of these articles we looked at why you wanted to be a poet, and this was the beginning: you have chosen to write poetry rather than prose. You have a reason for this, and as part of that you have decided who your audience is. A basic principle is that you must make sense - even if in the development of your work you then rise above it! You will be judged not only by your audience, but by the 'poet over your shoulder' - and by the different poet who is yourself at a future time.

In the second article, we looked at the mechanics of poetry, the formal structures, if you will. We looked at meter, rhythm, to rhyme or not to rhyme, and some of the general principles concerning the choice of words. Most of the examples were from relatively short poems: as I said in the first of these articles, there are great long poems, and eventually I will say something about these - but if you are reading this article, it is probably best to start your own career with short poems.

In this third article, we will look at the fixed forms, as they are called.

Now actually, as I got into this, I started writing about the sonnet. Because I wanted to deal with the whole thing about fixed forms at one shot, I thought this was going to be a brief introduction, followed by the other fixed forms.

But no!

(Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?)

I should have remembered what John Frederick Nims said about the fixed forms in Western Wind: an introduction to poetry: "The most famous - and most notorious - is the sonnet, which has no rival in popularity. It has been a favorite of some of the best poets - and some of the worst."

So, as you will see, the whole of this article will be concerned with a single Fixed Form.

Now, why should you be interested in Fixed Forms at all? It's really part of the general theme of the first parts of these articles. You need to know how the great poets achieved their results, and how they made their mistakes. Even if they never get off your desk, the construction of poems of the classical forms is instructive; and even the modern American poets were unable to resist the temptation! John Berryman (1914-1972), for example, wrote a set of 115 sonnets (Berryman's Sonnets; 1967) in the Petrarchan form.

The general idea of the simple lover writing sonnets to his beloved is part of the modern common heritage. In 1933 Irving Berlin boasted:

I could write a sonnet
About your Easter bonnet
And of the girl I'm taking
To the Easter Parade.

This sonnet was - and indeed is - the most popular form for short poems, not only in English but in essentially all the European languages. It appears the form began in Italy; the word comes from the Italian sonnetto, which means little sound, or little song, according to John Frederick Nims. Merriam Webster, agreeing that it began in Italy, says the title came from Old Provençal sonet which means song, or air. The OED favors an Italian origin.

A sonnet has fourteen lines (but see later). In Italian or English, each of the lines has ten syllables. There are various ways of arranging the lines into stanzas, and there are a number of specific rhyme schemes.

One of the most distinguished early writers of sonnets was Guido Cavalcanti (1255-1300). He left about 50 poems, two of which were canzone, and the remainder were sonnets and ballades (ballate). They were principally addressed to two women, Mandetta and Giovanna, whom he calls 'Primavera' ("Springtime"). Love is his dominant theme, generally love that causes deep suffering. His poetry has been translated into English by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (The Early Italian Poets, 1861; later retitled Dante and his Circle) and by Ezra Pound (The Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcante, 1912). This general pattern of writing sonnets in series addressed to an individual has persisted to the present day.

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) , in his first collection of verse, La Vita Nuova, (c. 1293) tells that he had taught himself the art of making verse by the time he was eighteen, and had sent an early sonnet to the most famous poets of his day, including Cavalcanti. Cavalcanti responded, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.

The name most frequently associated with the early development of the sonnet form in Italy, of course, is Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), called Petrarch. In 1326, after his father's death he moved from Arezzo in Tuscany to Avignon. There began his chaste love for a woman known only as Laura, to whom he addressed his poems. He is regarded as the founder of the humanist movement, believing in the continuity between classical culture and the Christian message. In 1337 he left Avignon for Vaucluse, a place of retreat, where he produced much of his major works. In September 1340 he received invitations from both Paris and Rome to be crowned as poet: he chose Rome, and was crowned on the Capitoline Hill on April 8th, 1341. He is credited with the first well-known sonnet form: the fourteen lines are arranged in two stanzas, an octave with a rhyming scheme abbaabba and a sestet with a variable rhyming scheme - cdecde, or cdcdcd, or cdcdce, or some other arrangement, that never ends in a final couplet. The octet presents the theme or problem of the poem, and the sestet presents a change in thought or a resolution of the problem. His Canzoniere contains 317 sonnets.

When this was later brought to England, together with other Italian verse forms, by Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547) in the 16th century, it was modified (apparently by Henry Howard, who retranslated some of Petrarch's sonnets which Wyatt had translated earlier) to what is now called the Shakespearean form: this has three quatrains, each with an independent rhyme scheme, and is ended with a rhymed couplet (abab;cdcd;efef;gg). Again, the sonnets often formed a sequence of independent but related sets of love poems. An early example is Sir Philip Sydney's Astrophel and Stella (1591). Shakespeare's own 154 sonnets were published in 1609: the dates of their composition are not known.

The other English form of the sonnet is called the Spenserian form, after Edmund Spenser (1552-1599). His master work was The Faerie Queen, the first folio edition of which was published in 1609. He published English versions of poems by the 16th century French poet Joachim du Bellay, and of a French version of a poem by Petrarch in 1569, when he entered Pembroke Hall at the University of Cambridge. His first important work, The Shepheardes Calender, (1579), "can be called the first work of the English literary Renaissance" (Meriam Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature). In 1595 he published Amoretti, a sonnet sequence. The Spenserian form has three quatrains, and a final rhymed couplet, but the rhyming scheme is interlocked: abab;bcbc;cdcd;ee.

[Spenser also introduced the Spenserian stanza, which consisted of eight lines of iambic pentameters, followed by a ninth line of iambic hexameter; this last line is called an alexandrine, and it is used to complete the thought presented by the first eight lines. The rhyming scheme is ababbcbcc. Spenser used it for The Faerie Queen; it was regarded as a revolutionary innovation in its day. It was revived in the 19th century by the Romantic poets - Byron in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; John Keats in The Eve of St. Agnes; and by Percy Bysshe Shelley in Adonis.]

The Petrarchan sonnet form has also continued to be used by English poets: it too was revived in the late 19th century, for example by Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) (This doesn't mean that the 44 poems were translations of Portuguese originals - 'The Portuguese" was Robert Browning's nickname for her!). William Wordsworth also used this form, for example in The World is Too Much with Us, as did John Keats. As I mentioned above, John Berryman found this a tempting form for his 115 erotic sonnets.

The sonnet form also entered other languages - French, where the decasyllabic line was replaced with a dodecasyllabic line, because that fits better with the language; German, and Polish and the other Slavic languages.

One of the greatest more modern sonnet sequences is Die Sonnette an Orpheus (Sonnets to Orpheus) by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). This cycle of 55 poems was published in 1923. The form he uses is somewhat different. The lines are decasyllabic, but the poems consist of four stanzas: two quatrains, and two triads; and the rhyme scheme varies: abab;cddc;eff;gge; or abba;cddc;efg;hfe; or abba;cddc;efe;gfg; or abab;cdcd;eef;ggf. There are other variations, but this indicates the kind of license the poet allows himself, without losing the disciplined structure of the form.

Below are a number of examples of these different forms, by a number of distinguished poets. Now try your hand at it!

Petrarchan Sonnets
The world is too much with us; late and soon
From 'Sonnets from the Portuguese'
After Dark Vapours Have Oppress'd Our Plains
Sigh As It Ends

Spenserian Sonnet
Sonnet LXXV

Shakespearian Sonnet
Sonnet 30
Summer Storm
Never Again Would Birds' Song Be The Same