The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

There are as many arguments about what constitutes a sonnet as there are arguments about any field of human activity. There are those who will claim that well-known examples like Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ are anamorphic, not true sonnets but types of quatorzain, which is just another way of saying ‘fourteen-line poem’. This is an argument we need not enter. There are those who recognise poems of less than fourteen lines as being CURTAL SONNETS (Hopkins’s ‘Pied Beauty’ reproduced in full in Chapter One being an example and perhaps Yeats’s ‘The Fascination of What’s Difficult’ is another).

There is also a seventeen-line variant. These are called

CAUDATE SONNETS (from the Latin for ‘tail’, same root as ‘coda’) which feature a three-line envoi or cauda. The convention here is for the first line of the cauda to be trimetric and to rhyme with the last line of the main body of the sonnet, and for the next two lines to be in the form of a rhyming couplet in iambic pentameter. Milton’s sonnet ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience Under the Long Parliament’ is an example: here are its final couplet and cauda, with line numbers, just so that you are clear:

May with their wholesome and preventative shears

13

Clip your phylacteries,¹⁸ though baulk your ears,

14

And succor our just fears,

15

When they shall read this clearly in your charge:

16

New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large.

17

Those last two words, of course, writ large, have entered the language.

In the nineteenth century the poet and novelist George Meredith developed a form of sixteen line sonnet with four sets of envelope rhymes abba cddc effe ghhg.

There are traditions in the writing of SONNET SEQUENCES, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s forty-four Sonnets from the Portuguese and Meredith’s sequence ‘Modern Love’ (in his own Meredithian sixteen-line form). Christina Rossetti’s Monna Innominata, being a sequence of fourteen sonnets, is known as a SONNET OF SONNETS. More complex sequences exist, such as one of indeterminate length in which each new sonnet opens with the last line of the previous until you reach the final sonnet which terminates with the opening line of the first. This is called a

CORONA SEQUENCE. John Donne wrote such a sequence in seven sonnets, called ‘La Corona’. More complex variations on that include the SONNET REDOUBLÉ, a corona sequence of fourteen sonnets terminating with a fifteenth which is wholly composed of each linking line of the corona in sequence. If there is no good reason for such complexity it will look like showing off, I feel. Donne’s corona had a purposeful religious structure, to make a crown of poetry to match Christ’s crown of thorns.

There are two very well-known examples of SONNET COMPETITIONS which reveal, among other things, the form’s special place in poetry. The ability to write them fluently was, and to some extent still is, considered the true mark of the poet.

On the evening of 30 December 1816, John Keats and his friend Leigh Hunt challenged each other to write a sonnet on the subject of ‘The Grasshopper and the Cricket’. Legend has it that they each took just fifteen minutes to write the following. I shall not tell you straight away who wrote which. All I ask is that you decide which you prefer:1Green little vaulter in the sunny grass,Catching your heart up at the feel of June,Sole voice that’s heard amidst the lazy noon,When even the bees lag at the summoning brass;And you, warm little housekeeper, who classWith those who think the candles come too soon,Loving the fire, and with your trick some tuneNick the glad silent moments as they pass;Oh sweet and tiny cousins, that belongOne to the fields, the other to the hearth,Both have your sunshine; both, though small, are strongAt your clear hearts; and both were sent on earthTo sing in thoughtful ears this natural song:Indoors and out, summer and winter,–Mirth.2The poetry of earth is never dead:When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,And hide in cooling trees, a voice will runFrom hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;That is the Grasshopper’s–he takes the leadIn summer luxury,–he has never doneWith his delights; for when tired out with funHe rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.The poetry of earth is ceasing never:On a lone winter evening, when the frostHas wrought a silence, from the stove there shrillsThe Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.