Keatsean Sonnet Flashcards
Keatsean Sonnet
- lyrical
- a quatorzain
- metrical pattern at discretion of poet
- rhymed, rhyme scheme ABC ABD CAB CDE DE.
- composed with pivot late into the sonnet, between the last tercet and the couplet.
a quatorzain
14 lines, made up of 4 tercets followed by an unrhymed couplet
(le quatorzain, est un poème, stance, strophe, etc. composé de quatorze vers
lyrical
Petrarchan Sonnet
Octave: abbaabba
[volta]
Sestet: cdecde or cdcdcd or a similar combination avoiding the closing couple
After Francesco Petrarca
Dans les sonnets de Pétrarque (m.)
on trouve le plus souvent l’organisation suivante : les deux premiers quatrains ont un schéma de rimes croisées et identiques en ABBA ABBA. Les deux tercets proposent des variations en rimes croisées, embrassées ou plates comme : CDC DCD ou CDE CDE, etc.
Pétrarque rend célèbre le sonnet dans son Canzoniere. Ses sonnets riment sur les modèles abba abba cde cde (38 % de tercets parallèles), abba abba cdc dcd (36 % de tercets retournés) et abba abba cde dce (21 % de tercets à tête inversée)4 mais l’on trouve des formes très variées à la même époque ; seule une disposition des tercets en ccd …, c’est-à-dire la création d’un distique au milieu du poème, était prohibée — d’où le paradoxe du sonnet en France qui l’impose systématiquement dans ses deux formes régulières.
Volta
talian word for “turn.” In a sonnet, the volta is the turn of thought or argument: in Petrarchan or Italian sonnets it occurs between the octave and the sestet, and in Shakespearean or English before the final couplet. See Thomas Wyatt’s “Whoso List to Hunt, I Know where is an Hind” and William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 [“Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame”] for examples of voltas of each type.
Le sonnet en Angleterre
Le sonnet a été introduit en Angleterre par le poète Thomas Wyatt, au début du XVIème siècle (1501-1600), sous forme de transpositions des formes pétrarquistes et ronsardiennes.
Spenserian Sonnet
ababbcbc cdcdee
Shakespearean Sonnet
ababcdcdefefgg
abbaabba octave
Petrarchan Sonnet, 1st pt.
blend of three brace-rhyme
quatrains: the middle four lines, whose sounds overlap
the others, reiterate the identical envelope pattern but
with the sounds reversed, i.e., baab
Petrarchan sestet
The sestet, with its element of unpredictability, its usually more intense
rhyme activity (three rhymes in six lines coming after two in eight), and the structural interdependence of the tercets, implies acceleration in thought and feeling.
Spenserian and Shakespearean patterns
offer relief to the difficulty of rhyming in Eng. and invite a division of thought into three quatrains and a closing or
summarizing couplet;
Even though such arbitrary divisions are frequently ignored by the poet, the more open rhyme schemes tend to impress the fourfold structure on the reader’s ear and to suggest a stepped progression toward the closing couplet.
Innovations in the sonnet tradition
alternating: where the tercets alternate with the quatrains (Catulle, Mendès); * caudate , with “tails” of added lines (G.M. Hopkins, Albert Samain, R. M. Rilke);
chained or linked: each line beginning with the last word of the previous line;
continuous , iterating , or monorhymed on one or two rhyme sounds throughout (Giacomo da Lentini, Stéphane Mallarmé, Edmund Gosse); *
corona: a series joined together by theme (It.) or rhyme or repeated lines (Sp. and Eng., e.g., John Donne) for *panegyric; *
curtal: a sonnet of ten lines with a halfline tailpiece, divided 6 + 4 ½ (Hopkins);
dialogue: a sonnet distributed between two speakers and usually *pastoral in inspiration (Cecco Angiolieri, Austin Dobson);
double: a sonnet of 28 lines (Monte Andrea);
enclosed: in which the tercets are sandwiched between the quatrains (Charles Baudelaire, Jean Pierre Rambosson);
interwoven: with medial as well as end rhyme;
retrograde: reading the same backward as forward;
reversed: (also called sonettessa ), in which the sestet precedes the
octave (Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Ricarda Huch)—for a reversed Shakespearean sonnet, see Rupert Brooke’s “Sonnet Reversed”;
rinterzato: a sonnet with eight short
lines interspersed, making a whole of lines (Guittone d’Arezzo); *
terza rima: with the linked-tercets aba bcb rhyme scheme;
unrhymed: where the division into
quatrains and tercets is still observed, but the lines are blank ( Joachim du Bellay, J. R. Becher). In Eng., the 16-line poems of George Meredith’s sequence
Modern Love (1862) are clearly related to the sonnet in their themes and abbacddceff eghhg rhyme scheme
AMAZING sonnet comparison chart: https://www.poetrymagnumopus.com/topic/1061-sonnet-comparison-chart/
alexandrine
François de Malherbe – abbaabbaccdede pattern
The French alexandrine (French: alexandrin) is a syllabic poetic metre of (nominally and typically) 12 syllables with a medial caesura dividing the line into two hemistichs (half-lines) of six syllables each. It was the dominant long line of French poetry from the 17th through the 19th century, and influenced many other European literatures which developed alexandrines of their own.
sonnet arrived in England from Italy
Th e sonnet arrived in England from Italy via Thomas Wyatt, who preferred the sestet’s closing couplet. Wyatt adhered to the Petrarchan octave; Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey established the ababcdcdefefgg rhyme scheme, a pattern more con genial to the comparatively rhyme-poor Eng.
lang. in that it filled the 14 lines by seven rhymes, not five. This pattern was popular in the Ren. Wide variation existed in rhyme schemes and line lengths; Shakespeare was its best practitioner. A rhyme scheme more
attractive to Spenser (and in its first nine lines paralleling his *Spenserian stanza) was ababbcbccdcdee , a compromise between It. and Eng. patterns. Th e period also saw many *sonnet sequences, including those of Philip Sidney ( Astrophil and Stella , pub. ), Samuel Daniel ( Delia ), Michael Drayton ( Idea ), Spenser ( Amoretti ), Lady Mary Wroth ( Pamphilia to Amphilanthus ), and Shakespeare. It remained for John Milton to introduce the true It. pattern, to break from sequences to occasional sonnets, to have a wider sense of content, to give greater unity to the form by frequently permitting octave to run into sestet (the “Miltonic” sonnet
anticipated by the Elizabethans), and to give a greater richness to the texture by employing *enjambment. And sonnet-like structures of 14 lines have even been discerned in the stichic verse of Paradise Lost , a practice later echoed by William Wordsworth and Thomas
Hardy. Milton’s was the strongest influence when, after a century of disuse, the sonnet was revived in the late 18th c. by Thomas Gray, Thomas Warton, William Cowper, and William Lisle Bowles and reestablished in the early 19th by Wordsworth (who eased rhyme demands by use of an abbaacca
octave in nearly half of his more than 500 sonnets), by Anna Seward, and by John Keats, whose frequent use of the Shakespearean pattern reaffirmed its worthiness. By this time, the scope of sonnet themes had broadened widely; in Leigh Hunt and Keats, it even embraced an unaccustomed humor. Sonnet theory
was also developing tentatively during this period (as in Hunt’s “Essay on the Sonnet”) to eventuate in an unrealistic purism in T.W.H. Crosland’s Th e English
Sonnet (1917) before it was later more temperately approached. Since the impetus of the romantic revival, the form has had a continuing and at times guished use, as in D. G. Rossetti ( Th e House of Life ), Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning ( Sonnets from the Portuguese ), and A. C. Swinburne. Few poets of the 20th c. (W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Geoffrey Hill, and Seamus Heaney might be named)
matched the consistent level of production found in the earlier work, although an occasional single sonnet,
such as W. B. Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” has rare beauty.
