“Sestina”

As I mentioned last week, September’s set of Weekly Poems are all long-standing personal favorites—poems to which I feel a strong connection: not simply poems I admire but ones that “speak” to me in some deep way.

This week’s offering is by poet Elizabeth Bishop, a long-time favorite poet of mine. The poem’s title is descriptive of the poem’s form—i.e., a sestina is a poem of six 6-line stanzas (often, but not always, as here with a 3-line envoi). The form is built on a series of end words that change according to a set pattern:

Line 1 in the first stanza becomes line 2 in the second
Line 2 in the first stanza becomes line 4 in the second
Line 3 in the first stanza becomes line 6 in the second
Line 4 in the first stanza becomes line 5 in the second
Line 5 in the first stanza becomes line 3 in the second
Line 6 in the first stanza becomes line 1 in the second

& so on thru the six stanzas, each succeeding stanza being formed in the same order relative to the preceeding one. If this pattern were followed all the way thru a seventh stanza, then the order of the end words in a seventh stanza would have come full circle—they’d be the same as the first. In the case of Bishop’s poem, the six repeating words are “house,” “grandmother,” “child,” “stove,” “almanac,” & “tears.” As someone who’s written sestinas (actually a “fun” form in my opinion) I can tell you that Bishop’s choices are interesting—five of the six are quite flexible, but almanac seems extremely unlikely! Bishop handles it beautifully.

Of course the poem isn’t simply “about” being a sestina—title notwithstanding; it’s really poignant in an under-stated way. Hope you enjoy it this September Saturday.

Sestina

September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,

It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac

on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.

Elizabeth Bishop

A Few More Fold-Out Postcard Sonnets - 5/21

A Few More Fold-Out Postcard Sonnets were written over a bit less than three months in 1996; the date on each poem indicates when it was written. I remember them as being pretty spontaneous overall. As I mentioned earlier this month, I'll post these sonnets here on the dates they were written as a sort of 13 year anniversary.

I’m sure I envisioned more than seventeen sonnets, which is an odd number to end on, literally & otherwise, but in August I hit a wall. The poem dated 8/1 was the last thing wrote until writing “She Sells Seashells” in 2002; I then “put down the pen” again (only figuratively—I’ve pretty much only written on a computer keyboard for a number of years) until the spring of 2008.

The summer of 96 was significant to me both because I was nearing my 40th birthday in September (I think decade birthdays tend to be times of reflection), & also because I traveled from San Francisco back to Charlottesville, VA in July. I believe the 7/18 & 7/23 sonnets both were written on that trip. Since my time in Charlottesville (from 84-89) had been filled with all sorts of psychic commotion, the trip was a bit of a pilgrimage. Of course, the past—as always—had slipped away from any sort of tangibility into memory, where it’s both lost & ever present….

Some people assumed at the time the sonnets were being written that the character “Marlowe” was literally intended to be Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe character. Though I am a big Chandler fan & read him a lot around this time, this was at most a piece of the puzzle. I liked the name in general, & I also had the (reputedly) dissolute Elizabethan poet in mind along with the fictional LA detective. There also are both autobiographical & imagined details contained in the character quite separate from either of those two figures.

One final note—just because I liked the way it looked, I abbreviated state names in these poems: VT=Vermont, VA=Virginia, etc. When I gave readings I would say the state name, not the abbreviation. It seems a little confusing when used for Vermont because I don’t believe town names are ever mentioned alongside the abbreviation. I still keep this quirk up, along with my passion for dashes as sole punctuation & a few spellings that I like but some may or may not find like a tic; same goes for me & ampersands!

The streets referred to are in San Francisco, mostly either in the Mission or the Western Addition (or betwixt & between the two)— the places I loved to hang out & live in those days.

The first sonnet was dated 5/21. Here it is:

5/21


A badminton net in a VT backyard afflicted with a
Rosicrucian sunset & an outbreak of communist mosquitos
buzzing a Manachevitz buzz in Mr Marlowe’s a-
symmetrical ears— & a transistor radio

perched in a scotch pine sporting superfluous
shades & crooning Blue Bayou— which is likewise
superfluous— as Baltimore Orioles
swooping into the hedge to roost make Marlowe think

Descartes was right for no particular reason
except he’s cadaverous drunk & shouldn’t be lounging
in the tattered green & white lawn chair after all

his eyes floating westward plasmic inside a spectacular
bronze Chevy Malibu 15 miles east of Needles
where shuttlecocks & fortune cookies are likewise dissolving

© John Hayes 1996-2009

The Sonnet – A Study in Poetic Form #2

A couple of weeks ago, I recorded some observations, opinions, etc. about the Italian, or Petrarchan, sonnet form, particularly noting how its chief characteristic seems to be the division between octave (first eight lines) & sestet (final six lines), with a “turn” occurring at the point between lines eight & nine. As a writer, I find the Italian form the best to work with, & a number of English language writers—from Thomas Wyatt & John Milton to John Berryman & Adrienne Rich—have put this elegant & flexible form to use.

However, when English language poetry readers think “sonnet,” they are quite apt to think of William Shakespeare, & Shakespeare, as well as other renowned English language poets (including John Donne & Sir Edmund Spencer) used a quite different form. There is some variation between the “Shakespearean” sonnet & the “Spencerian” sonnet (tho to my mind there are more similarities than differences); as promised I’ll look at the “Shakespearean” form here.

If the Italian sonnet divides most clearly into two parts, the Shakespearean sonnet divides most clearly into four. These four parts are the three quatrains (typically with alternating rhymes: ABAB; CDCD; EFEF) & a couplet (GG). Of course, there is also a two-part structure comprising the combined quatrains set against the couplet (even as there is also a four part structure to the Italian sonnet: two quatrains making up the octave, & two tercets making up the sestet).

But I like to think first of the English sonnet’s quatrains as separate but unified entities, giving a prismatic view of the poem’s theme or “argument” (the latter term being particularly applicable to the English sonnet form as practiced by Shakespeare & Donne). So in Shakespeare’s well-known Sonnet 30 (given below), you can see the argument advancing in distinct “When,” “Then,” “Then” segments, each a separate quatrain. It’s important, I think, when contrasting the movement in the English & Italian sonnets to note that the rhyme scheme in the former tends to divide the quatrains (because each quatrain has two unique rhyming sounds) while the rhyme schemes in an Italian sonnet tend to unify the octave within itself (because the two quatrains have linked rhyming sounds) & the sestet also with itself, again because the rhymes within that section are linked. Of course the concluding couplet of the English sonnet also is made distinct because this again typically uses unique rhyming sounds.

Now—because the sonnet itself is worth a myriad of my words, here’s Sonnet 30:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancelled woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanished sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor'd and sorrows end.

William Shakespeare

It’s interesting, I think, to look at the opening phrases of the quatrains in a few other well-known Shakespearean sonnets to get a further sense of the prismatic effect:

Sonnet 18
“Shall I compare thee…
Sometimes too hot the eye…
But thy eternal summer…”

Sonnet 73
“That time of year…
In me thou see’st….
In me thou see’st…”

Sonnet 106
“When in the chronicle…
Then, in the blazon…
So all their praises…”

Sonnet 130
“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like…
I have seen roses damasked…
I love to hear her speak…”

While this prismatic effect seems in itself something that would lend itself to contemporary treatments, in fact the English sonnet form doesn’t seem to be used as much as the Italian form. My guess is we’re so familiar with the English sonnet following an expository argument in Shakespeare & Donne (et al.) that it’s difficult to see the other possible effects as separate from that. It’s true that Ted Berrigan’s sonnets retain something more like the English form than the Italian, but the prismatic character there is even more minutely & irregularly divided. One 20th century poet who did use the English sonnet form in a generally recognizable guise but with a contemporary poetic outlook was e.e. cummings—perhaps not the first person you’d think of when it comes to sonnet writing. Check out this example:


)when what hugs stopping earth than silent is
more silent than more than much more is or
total sun oceaning than any this
tear jumping from each most least eye of star

and without was if minus and shall be
immeasurable happenless unnow
shuts more than open could that every tree
or than all life more death begins to grow

end's ending then these dolls of joy and grief
these recent memories of future dream
these perhaps who have lost their shadows if
which did not do the losing spectres mime

until out of merely not nothing comes
only one snowflake(and we speak our names

e.e. cummings

In certain ways, this inhabits a thematic territory that’s not dissimilar to Sonnet 30, but cummings’ syntactical displacements take us to a wholly new territory—again, as with Berrigan (but in a very different way) the quatrain prisms sub-divide into smaller prismatic units. It’s also worth noting that tho the sonnet has a regular rhyme scheme, all of the rhymes are “off” or “slant rhymes; so while certain sounds tend to unify the quatrains, they also allow the boundaries to be much more blurred.

I’ll post at least one more exploration of the sonnet, probably next Wednesday, tho I’m still cogitating what angle I’ll explore.

Picture of e.e. cummings is from the Library of Congress (thru Wikipedia) & in the public domain.

The Sonnet – A Study in Form #1

Most folks of a European or American (in the larger sense) background will be familiar with the sonnet. We almost certainly had to read them in high school & college, & many of us have probably tried our hand at writing them, either as an assignment or for our own purposes.

So most of us know that a sonnet has fourteen lines, & that it traditionally follows a rhyming pattern. We may even know that there are different types of sonnets—the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet & the English or Shakespearean sonnet; there’s also the Spencerian sonnet, but to my mind that’s falls under the larger “English sonnet” rubric.

So the sonnet (the word, by the way, is from Italian “sonnetto,” “little sound” or “little song”) is part of our cultural backdrop & are among the best known of verse forms (because of a tendency for teachers to assign students to write haiku, I’d venture a guess that this may be about as generally known, tho to my mind it “translates” rather roughly into English because of significant cultural & linguistic differences with Japanese). But what exactly do we mean when we talk about “poetic form?” Is it all simply a matter of rhyme schemes & metrical feet & counting syllables—& if that is true is free verse “formless?”

Well, it was a rhetorical question, tho I know some folks won’t agree with my take on this matter. My answer to the first part: clear patterning such as rhyme & meter are in fact of less importance than a system of poetic thought that inhabits a particular shape (to get away from the word “form.”) Meter & rhyme may in fact reinforce the overall shape of the poetic thought, but there’s something primary behind them—poesis (to use a 50¢ Greek word) or the shape of the creation. More on this in a moment, but in terms of the second question: to my mind the term “poetic form” is a redundancy. Whether we’re talking about a poem with a high amount of clear patterning (rhyme, meter, etc.)—a villanelle, for instance“Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”—or a more “organic” creation with very little clear patterning—think, perhaps, of that perennial favorite “So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow”—and the fact is you are considering a crafted linguistic object. It has a shape.

Of course, there are those who argue that setting out to write a clearly patterned formal poem is somehow aesthetically flawed in contemporary poetics—that if one writes a sonnet, for instance, it should happen from the organic act of creation not from some pre-conceived intent—“I shall now write a sonnet.” From this perspective, poetic thought entirely dictates poetic shape. While I don’t think the “organic” argument is completely invalid, I do think it neglects the exchange between poetic thought & poetic shape—it also leaves out the fact that it’s fun to write in clear patterns! (fun & play are, thankfully, present in a lot of good contemporary poetry & poetics, tho they’re in woefully short supply on the academic side of things—& I think some of the problem with the “New Formalism” is that it tends to come down on that side).

So if we consider the Italian sonnet (by far my favorite in terms of writing them—we’ll consider the English sonnet next week), let’s put aside the various rhyme schemes you can find in any book on poetic form—or on Wikipedia, for that matter—& consider instead a movement of poetic creation thru time & shape. We typically see four stanzas—two four-line stanzas & two three line stanzas. When we read a typical Italian sonnet, however, we find that the four-line stanzas tend to combine into an eight-line unit (in terms of poetic thought) & that something happens in the space between the eighth & ninth lines (more on that in a moment). The two three line units also seem to be of a piece. Because of this the first two stanzas are thought of as one unit (the octave) & the final two stanzas form a unit called the sestet (“six lines”). What happens between the octave & the sestet is known as the “volte” or “the turn.” In common linguistic terms, it’s a sort of “if this, then that” movement—or a “however,” “moreover,” or “on the other hand.” One part of the overall shape has been created in the octave—something changes & we move to the sestet.

A word on rhyme schemes: rhyme schemes ideally tend to reinforce such shape, tho for my money a number of other techniques also can create the same shape—also, I’d venture to say that if the underlying poetic creation doesn’t have that shape, the rhyme scheme will only help marginally to create it. Having said that, it’s worth noting that while the rhyme schemes for Italian sonnets are variable, the rhyme scheme always varies between the octave & the sestet. For instance a common scheme might look like the following (each letter represents a distinct rhyming sound, with the number indicating the line):

1A, 2B, 3B, 4A
5A, 6B, 7B, 8A
9C, 10D, 11E
12C, 13D, 14E

Notice that there are not only different rhyming sounds in the octave, but the overall rhyming pattern differs between the octave & the sestet. This should reinforce the underlying turn, wich I believe to be the formal touchstone of the Italian sonnet.

So let’s look at a couple. You may object that these are both translations (there will be a good old English language Italian sonnet on Saturday), but I wanted to contrast a “formal” & “free” treatment, & believed showing two versions of the same poem might do that best. The original is a sonnet Dante Alighieri addressed to his mentor, poet Guido Cavalcanti. The formal treatment is by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the pre-Raphaelite poet & painter (the image at the top of the page is his illustration for this poem), while the freer version is by a poet whose work I like a lot, Kenneth Koch. I didn’t include the Italian original, assuming that many readers, like me, aren’t quite up to snuff with that language (I do have it if anyone is interested).

First, Rossetti’s translation:

SONNET

Guido, I wish that Lapo, thou, and I,
        Could be by spells conveyed, as it were now,
        Upon a barque, with all the winds that blow
Across all seas with our good wind to hie.
So no mischance or temper of the sky
        Should mar our course with spite or cruel slip,
        But we, observing old companionship,
To be companions still should long thereby.
And Lady Joan and Lady Beatrice
        And her the thirtieth on my roll, with us
            Should our good wizard set, o’er seas to move
And not to talk of anything but love:
        And they three ever to be well at ease,
            As we should be, I think, if this were thus.

Dante Gabriel Rosetti

SONNET

Guido, I wish that you and Lapo and I
Were carried off by magic
And put in a boat, which, every time there was wind,
Would sail on the ocean exactly where we wanted.

In this way storms and other dangerous weather
Wouldn’t be able to harm us—
And I wish that, since we were all of one mind,
We’d go on wanting more and more to be together.

And I wish that Vanna and Lagia too
And she whose name on the list is the number thirty
Were put into our boat by the magician

And that we all did nothing but talk about love
And I wish that they were just as glad to be there
As I believe the three of us would be.

Kenneth Koch

I don’t really believe there’s a right answer as to “which is best.” I like the Koch translation quite a bit, & the Rossetti one does less for me (by the way, Shelley also translated this poem). One thing I would point out: Rossetti’s “And Lady Joan and Lady Beatrice/And her the thirtieth on my roll, with us” is a mistranslation; the Italian reads “E monna Vanna e monna Lagia poi,/Con quella ch’è sul numero del trente”—it’s clear that “she whose number is thirty” is not “monna Lagia,” & readers of Dante’s La Vita Nuova will recognize her as the fabled Beatrice (because in Dante’s numerology, 30 was a very powerful number as it multiplied the perfect number, 10—that is, 3x3+1—by 3; this has to do with trinitarian theology). Otherwise, you can make arguments for either translation. Koch’s language is deliberately plain, & in fact Dante was known for using vernacular speech in his poetry; this was an integral part of the "sweet new style" he championed. Rosetti’s language is ornate, & his syntax a bit contorted; on the other hand, he does give some idea of the rhythmic & sonic effects thru his regular meter & his rhyme scheme; in fact his rhyme scheme is quite close to the original. Rossetti’s rhymes are as follows:

1A, 2B, 3B, 4A
5A, 6C, 7C, 8A
9D, 10E, 11F
12F, 13D, 14E

The main difference is that Rossetti introduces a third rhyming sound (C) into the octave. This is Dante’s rhyme scheme:

1A, 2B, 3B, 4A
5A, 6B, 7B, 8A
9C, 10D, 11E
12E, 13C, 14D

The sestets are the same—which leads me to suspect that the mistranslation of “Beatrice” for “Lagia” was intentional & rhyme-forced (or at least slant-rhyme forced).

The larger point is that both Koch & Rossetti kept the shape of the thought, the octave setting out the idea of the magic voyage involving the three friends, the sestet specifying that this will be in fact a voyage of love; not only will all the Bella Donnas be present, but the discourse will be constantly about love. It’s a case of focusing on why the magic voyage would be so marvelous. It’s a pattern of thought that seems made for the sonnet form. Try for instance, to imagine the same “narrative” in the ballad form—at that point its entire character would be changed.

Hope you folks find this interesting. All things being equal, I’ll pick up next week with the English sonnet.

Dante's First Meeting with Beatrice by Simeon Solomon