Poetry (a Revisitation): Form

In this post I explain the qualities of six common poetic forms (villanelle, sonnet, ballad, blank verse, heroic couplet, stanza), provide an example of each form, and comment on each example.

Introduction 

We have been discussing the inherent characteristics of poetry that set it apart from other literary genres: its condensation of language, its rhythmic nature, and its dense imagery.  Now, we need to discuss the ways you can put those elements together into a cohesive form.  Although you might not choose to use a conventional form, experimenting with and learning about form will increase your sensitivity to language.  Later, if you experiment with nontraditional forms, you will have knowledge about the primary elements of poetry from which you can draw.  A successful musician who wants to create a new form will draw from what he/she knows about music theory and will move forward into unexplored territory.  If the musician does not know anything about music, then, after much experimentation, he/she eventually will return to where he/she started.  My point is that you need to explore different forms for different ideas, allowing your poems to develop organically.  You will want to decide which forms will fit best your ideas.  Again, it is your prerogative to write in a traditional form, but you may discover that you enjoy the challenge of constraint, that you find freedom in form.

Villanelle

1. It is a poem of nineteen lines.
2. It has five stanzas--four with three lines, the final with four lines.
3. The first line of the first stanza becomes the last line of the second and fourth stanzas.
4. The third line of the first stanza becomes the last line of the third and fifth stanzas.
5. Those two refrain lines follow each other to become the penultimate and ultimate lines of the poem.
6. The rhyme scheme is aba, with the repetition of the rhymes in accordance with the refrains.

Perhaps the single feature of the villanelle is the absence of narrative possibility.  Figural development is possible in a villanelle, but the form refuses to tell a story.  Its circularity prevents linear development.  Thus, the form suggests, at the deepest level, powerful recurrences of memory and emotion.  The villanelle cannot establish truly a conversational tone with the repetition of one sound thirteen times, of another sound six times, and of two lines four times.  It has songlike qualities.  Whereas the subject of most lyric poems is loss, the formal properties of the villanelle address the idea of loss directly.  The repetition of lines and the circularity of stanzas become, as the audience listens, a repudiation of forward motion, temporality, and dissolution.  Each stanza of a villanelle, with its refrains, becomes a series of retrievals.

     One Art

     The art of losing isn't hard to master;
     so many things seem filled with the intent
     to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

     Lose something every day.  Accept the fluster
     of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
     The art of losing isn't hard to master.

     Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
     places, and names, and where it was you meant
     to travel.  None of these will bring disaster.

     I lost my mother's watch.  And look! my last, or
     next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
     The art of losing isn't hard to master.

     I lost two cities, lovely ones.  And, vaster,
     some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
     I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

     --Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
     I love) I shan't have lied.  It's evident
     the art of losing's not too hard to master
     though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.¹

Elizabeth Bishop plays with the strictness of the villanelle in subtle ways.  The tone of the speaker--brave, resilient--is counter to the darkness of the form, the refrains of which suggest the finality of the losses (from small to great: a bunch of keys, a watch, a city, a relationship).  Bishop's choice of the villanelle to formalize the catalog of losses emphasizes the form's power for twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets.  It does not allow easy narrative resolution.  Its circularity slowly builds an acoustic chamber for the words, the lines, the meanings: "The art of losing isn't hard to master."  As the villanelle gains strength and speed, the coda--"The art of losing"--moves in and out of irony, grief, self-accusation, regret.  With each repetition the lines take on new meanings.  Each time the audience hears "The art of losing," it has a different force.  The words of loss become loud, more ominous, and yet, at the same time, more human. 

Sonnet

1. It is a poem of fourteen lines, usually in iambic pentameter.
2. There are two kinds of sonnet, Petrarchan and Shakespearean, with very different histories behind their forms.
3. The Petrarchan sonnet is Italian in origin.  It has an octave (eight-line stanza) which precedes a sestet (six-line stanza).  The rhyme scheme of the octave is ababcdcd, and the sestet's is cdecde.
4. The rhyme scheme of the Shakespearean sonnet is ababcdcdefefgg.  It has no octave/sestet structure.

The development of the sonnet began when Francesco Petrarca, who was born in 1304 and lived in Tuscany, published his Canzoniere, a sequence of 366 poems, 317 of which were sonnets to a lover, Laura.  The Italian originators developed one of the features of the sonnet that continues to survive: the division into an octave and a sestet.  The octave is a statement of eight lines, and the sestet is a resolution to the intellectual or emotional question in the octave.  The structure makes the sonnet a self-sufficient form, open to shades of tone and mood.  Its degree of close and repetitive rhyme reflects the rich resources of Italian rhyme.

In England, in the hands of Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, the sonnet's form changed.  Wyatt introduced the couplet, and Howard introduced more rhymes.  Their changes benefit practitioners in a language with less abundant rhymes than Italian.  Furthermore, by shifting the English sonnet away from the intellectual and argumentative Petrarchan form, Wyatt and Howard provided new resonance to the ending.  The couplet is often the loudest, most powerful part of a sonnet. 

The sonnet--either form--is short and easily comprehensible.  Its historic structure continues to allow lively debate and subtle argument.  Its sequential structure allows narrative progression, and it is capable of being musical and memorable.

     XLII 

     What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
     I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
     Under my head till morning; but the rain
     Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
     Upon the glass and listen for reply,
     And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
     For unremembered lads that not again
     Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
     Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
     Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
     Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
     I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
     I only know that summer sang in me
     A little while, that in me sings no more.² 

Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnet relies heavily on sibilance (hissing sound), alliteration, and assonance.  It is musical to the extent that it almost destabilizes the tradition of the sonnet as a measured argument.  The distinctive music and high diction quicken the pace of the octave.  The sestet, where the abandoned lover becomes a winter tree, is slower and more reflective. 

Ballad

1. It is a short narrative that is usually, but not always, in four-line stanzas.
2. The usual ballad meter is a first and third line with four stresses (iambic tetrameter) and a second and fourth line with three stresses (iambic trimeter).
3. The rhyme scheme is abab or abcb.
4. The subject matter is distinctive: communal stories of lost love, of supernatural occurrences, or of recent events.
5. The ballad maker uses regional speech and dialogue to convey the story.

It is obvious that the ballad came to poetry from song.  It is a form found in every culture, every country, every language.  Its structure and rhetoric have their roots in oral tradition.  Its form is simple, direct--almost always a short narrative--and subtly left open for the next user to add details, names and events, if necessary.  The ballad's subject matter is tabloid: death, murder, suicide, disgrace, mystery.  Although critics disagree about the meter of the ballad (accentual or accentual-syllabic), the meter is recognizable as a series of small, intense sounds.  The music builds from verse to verse, often making a hypnotic narrative.  Ballads contain plain words, short lines, vivid images, and musical rhymes.  Again, the form insists on ordinary, day-to-day language. 

     We Real Cool
     The Pool Players.
     Seven at the Golden Shovel. 

     We real cool.  We
     Left school.  We 

     Lurk Late.  We
     Strike straight.  We 

     Sing sin.  We
     Thin gin.  We

     Jazz June.  We
     Die soon.³ 

With its suppressed narrative, concealed drama, and communal theme, "We Real Cool" conveys the power of the ballad in a contemporary context, disguising a sharp and public tone with musical cadences.  Its short lines become daggers of irony.  The music of courage and the bleakness of reality play off each other in the brief, jumpy stanzas.  Its moral: the endangerment of personal risk, for society is about to punish the individual.  Gwendolyn Brooks reminds us that the role of the ballad in our time can be both moral and satirical. 

Blank Verse

1. It is in iambic pentameter.
2. It is the poetic form closest to human speech.
3. It has no end rhyme.
4. The lack of rhyme makes enjambment more possible and often more effective.

Blank verse came into English poetry from Italian literature.  The inventor of blank verse in England was Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who helped Thomas Wyatt bring the sonnet to England.  Howard translated the Aeneid into blank verse, producing strict ten-syllable lines of natural speech.  Indeed, blank verse is a natural vehicle for rhythmic speech, sustaining complex argument and emotion without rhyme.  Blank verse offers greater suspension of sentences, an acceptance of duration, and an imitation or a description of thought. 

     from "Directive" 

     Back out of all this now too much for us,
     Back in a time made simple by the loss
     Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
     Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
     There is a house that is no more a house
     Upon a farm that is no more a farm
     And in a town that is no more a town.
     The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
     Who only has at heart your getting lost,
     May seem as if it should have been a quarry--
     Great monolithic knees the former town
     Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
     And there's a story in a book about it:
     Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
     The ledges show lines ruled southeast northwest,
     The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
     That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
     You must not mind a certain coolness from him
     Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
     Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
     Of being watched from forty cellar holes
     As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
     As for the woods' excitement over you
     That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
     Charge that to upstart inexperience.  (1 -- 25)⁴ 

The modern poet who possibly gained most from the rich tradition of blank verse was Robert Frost.  After returning to America from England in 1918, he attempted to find an idiom that allowed the expression of a stylistic, dark voice and a dramatic narration.  A vernacular dramatic tone drives Frost's blank verse, which is slow and distinctive. 

Heroic Couplet

1. It is a pair of lines that rhyme.
2. The meter is iambic pentameter or tetrameter.
3. The rhyme scheme progresses as aabbcc et cetera.
4. A caesura usually occurs after the fifth or sixth syllable.

Although it is a useful, witty and musical unit, nobody could have predicted the extraordinary development of the couplet in the sixteenth century, when poets began to think, explain and argue in the form.  Thus, the couplet became the heroic couplet, the latter suggesting a high subject matter.  By the eighteenth century, the heroic couplet was the most popular poetic form.  The end-stop rhymes, the regular stresses, and the recurrent pauses made it perfect for moralizing, warning, satirizing and joking. 

     from "My Last Duchess"
     Ferrara 

     That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
     Looking as if she were alive; I call
     That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf's hands
     Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
     Will't please you sit and look at her?  I said
     'Fra Pandolf' by design, for never read
     Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
     The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
     But to myself they turned (since none puts by
     The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
     And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
     How such a glance came there; so, not the first
     Are you to turn and ask thus.  Sir, 'twas not
     Her husband's presence only, called that spot
     Of joy into the Duchess' cheek: perhaps
     Fra Pandolf chanced to say 'Her mantle laps
     Over my Lady's wrist too much,' or 'Paint
     Must never hope to reproduce the faint
     Half-flush that dies along her throat;' such stuff
     Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
     For calling up that spot of joy.  She had
     A heart ... how shall I say? ... too soon made glad,
     Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
     She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
     (1 -- 24)⁵ 

"My Last Duchess" is a dramatic monologue.  It canvasses the peculiar address of a nobleman who thinks aloud about possession, art, power and marriage but is unable to distinguish one from the other.  Robert Browning added irony to the eighteenth-century form, making it faster and darker. 

Stanza

1. It is any unit of recurrent meter and rhyme, or variants of them, in a pattern of repetition and separation in a single poem.
2. An isometric stanza has lines of similar length.
3. A heterometric stanza has lines of different lengths.
4. Quasi-stanzaic verse has loose groups of lines or paragraphs.
5. Sound and sense accumulate from stanza to stanza via rhyme and the repetition of lines.

The stanza has been an almost invisible and yet dynamic form.  At first, it was hardly a form, merely an element of it.  As time has been progressing, however, the stanza's capacity to maintain a tension between narrative and lyric and to close a story and open a drama have made it suitable to both the musicians and the narrators within the poetic discipline.  In Renaissance and metaphysical poetry, the stanza is an instrument of wit, a place where sharp turns and epigrams occur.  In Romantic poetry the stanza is an instrument of drama for following narratives and for arranging emotions.  In Modernist poetry the stanza is where change occurs, where poetry reconnects to song.

     449

     I died for Beauty--but was scarce
     Adjusted in the Tomb
     When One who died for Truth, was lain
     In an adjoining Room--

     He questioned softly "Why I failed"?
     "For Beauty", I replied--
     "And I--for Truth--Themself are One--
     We Brethren, are", He said--

     And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night--
     We talked between the Rooms--
     Until the Moss had reached our lips--
     And covered up--our names--⁶

Emily Dickinson's language and images are original and powerful.  The quatrains carry the force of her vision, achieving maximum drama between the stanzas.  The colorful argument she makes--a poignant response to Keats' claim for the relation between beauty and truth--occurs in three taut stanzas.  The erotic drama unfolds as a narrative.  Who are these two people, this man and woman, who have lost their opportunities and become siblings and not lovers in death?  The fast pace and dramatic closures of her stanzas counterpoint the story. 

Conclusion 

The best way to learn forms is to read a variety of poems by different poets.  Read them aloud.  Copy them carefully.  Study them thoroughly.  Try to absorb as much as you can of what has been done by others before you.  Practice imitation; then, engage in origination.
_______________________________________________________
     ¹Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems: 1927-1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983) 178.
     ²Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Sonnets (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941) 42.
     ³Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems (New York: HarperCollins, 1963) 73.
     ⁴Mark Richardson, ed., Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, Vol. I (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1995) 341.
     ⁵Bennett A. Cerf and Donald S. Klopfer, eds., 
The Poems and Plays of Robert Browning (New York: Random, 1934) 94-95.
     ⁶Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1960) 216.