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The
language of poetry
Gillian Clarke introduces the sonnet
‘You’ve written a lot about sound. How about form this time?’
the editor helpfully suggested. Of course, form is sound, and sound is form.
The pattern on the page is the tune in your ear. A haiku looks and sounds like
a haiku, a sonnet looks and sounds like a sonnet. This is because words are
not silent. They speak out loud in your mind. The human ear and heart love rhythm
and rhyme as the human eye loves pattern.
A sonnet is a poem of 14 lines written, usually, in iambic pentameter, that
is, each line contains 5 strong beats, as in most of Shakespeare. See in line
2 in the Shakespeare quotation opposite, how the 5 words ‘then’ ‘scorn’
‘change’ ‘state’ and ‘kings’ carry 5 stressed
beats.
A sonnet’s line endings rhyme in various ways. Using the ‘abc’
as a code, look at the two main sonnet sound patterns: the Italian sonnet: a,b,b,a/,a,b,b,a/,c,d,e,c,d,e,
and the Shakespearean sonnet: a,b,a,b,/c,d,c,d,/e,f,e,f,/g,g. The Italian sonnet,
(also called Petrarchan after the 14th century poet, Petrarch), has 8 lines,
then 6 lines. Often there’s a pause between the two parts, and often the
thought in the poem shifts at that point. The Shakespearean type of sonnet is
usually printed in a block, without verses, though we can hear the pattern of
three 4 line verses followed, if Shakespeare himself wrote it, by an almost
always unforgettable final rhyming couplet. Most of Shakespeare’s sonnets
are love poems, and his concluding couplets are mood music for lovers:
For thy sweet love
remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
It’s an emagazine tradition that I illustrate the article with a poem of my own. My variation of the form uses an a,b,c,a,b,c,/d,e,f,d,e,f,/g,g pattern. The poem is one of nine written for Aberglasne, a beautiful Medieval garden, now restored, and the tragic story, which dates from about 1600, is true.
What the Wood Remembers
Places are made of hearsay and memory.
There’s talk in these trees of five young servant girls
found dead in their beds one winter morning choked,
they say, by the fumes of a blocked chimney.
Think of the house waking to cold ash, no curl
of smoke from thirty hearths burning.
The silence of the dead instead of chatter
and quick feet running on the stairs,
fuel for the fires and jugs of scalding water,
slop buckets, the sculleries awash, clatter
of crockery on slate, the chink of silver.
People of no account, poor farmers’ daughters.
No names. No documents. No graves. Instead
just talk of a tragedy, five young girls dead
This article first
appeared in emagazine 14, December 2001.