Scanty Plot of Ground
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Scanty Plot of Ground: A Book of Sonnets, edited by Paul Muldoon and published by Faber, is out now.
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Of the innumerable traditional verse forms, the sonnet is not only the most persistent but also the most pervasive. As Carl Phillips has reminded us, its persistence has to do with its near indestructability:
The sonnet has a greater tolerance for innovation – while retaining its essential formal structure – than do many fixed forms . . . The sonnet is always recognizable, despite the innovation. You can remove the rhyme, the meter of a sonnet, and it’s still possible to retain the sonnet’s mode of delivery of information, its logic, its argumentation. This isn’t so for the villanelle or sestina, for example. Nor for the limerick. Nor for the rondeau.
The pervasive aspect of the sonnet – its widespread occurrence – may be explained partly by its comparatively complex origin story. The generally accepted theory is that we first encounter it at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II from the thirteenth-century Sicilian poet Giacomo da Lentini, who seems to have taken the strambotto, an eight-line stanza rhyming abab abab hitherto used in Sicilian songs, and promptly added a sestet. Some scholars claim that other, deeper, sources may be the Arabic muwashshah, which had developed in Muslim Spain in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as well as verse forms (also of Arabic origin), associated with French and Spanish troubadours. Like an invasive species – bamboo or the American bullfrog, or the ‘switchgrass beachgrass’ that open Carl Phillips’s sonnet, ‘Invasive Species’ – this ‘little song’ made its way from Sicily to Tuscany and became particularly associated with Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), the author of the sequence of sonnets known as Il Canzoniere. Like Dante Alighieri before him, Petrarch dedicated his sonnets to a specific woman but retained within them many of the generic conventions associated with courtly love.
It was two courtiers, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, who imported the form from Italy into England in the sixteenth century. The ‘form’ to which I refer is the Petrarchan sonnet, its rhyme scheme abba abba cde cde. The conventional way of thinking about this structure is that the first eight lines involve a setting down of a circumstance and the remaining six lines involve a twist on it that might include anything from a mild proviso to a blatant rebuttal. What looks to some like a lopsided relationship between the octave and sestet will appear to others as an embodiment of the Golden Ratio. Two quantities are in the golden ratio if their ratio is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the two quantities. That ratio is generally given as 1.618 or, in terms of the mathematical division of a line, a ratio of 8 to 13. The golden ratio was called the ‘extreme and mean ratio’ by Euclid and the ‘divine proportion’ by Luca Pacioli, the Italian mathematician who counted among his inventions the double-entry system of bookkeeping.
The sonnet is sufficiently capacious to take in almost anything.
The mathematical aspect of the sonnet is much to the fore in its other main manifestation, that associated with William Shakespeare. The Shakespearean sonnet consists of three quatrains and a couplet rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. The effect of this final couplet is partly reminiscent of the envoi, the short stanza concluding a troubadour’s ballade, but it functions mostly as a version of the Euclidean QED (quod erat demonstrandum) we find at the end of a theorem or mathematical proof. William Bell Scott in ‘Of Poetry’ puts it memorably:
But not the less our Shakespeare knew
Another way; by full discourse
To show his picture as it grew,
Worked out in many-sided force.
Then when the heart can wish no more,
With a strong couplet bars the door.
Both forms incorporate the volta or ‘turn’ – an ‘often breathtakingly indefinable pivot [that] remains a vital component of the governing structure’, as Christina Pugh describes in ‘On Sonnet Thought’. In broad terms, the Petrarchan sonnet seems open to discussion while the Shakespearean sometimes gives the impression of a mind made up, perhaps inflexibly so.
The single most astute comment on the form in general comes from Paul Oppenheimer in his magnificent 1989 study, The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self, Consciousness, and the Invention of the Sonnet, where he asserts that the sonnet was:
the first lyric form since the fall of the Roman Empire intended not for music or performance but for silent reading. As such, it is the first lyric of self-consciousness, or of the self in conflict . . . The new form was quickly understood as a new way of thinking about mankind. Emotional problems, especially problems in love, needed no longer merely be expressed or performed: they might now actually be resolved, or provisionally resolved, through the logic of a form that turned expression inward.
The sonnet allows us the impression of observing the thought-process of the speaker of the poem to such an extent that what we’re engaged with is not a poem at all but a form of drama. We are privy to a revelation that seems to be enacted in real time.
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Whether it be Petrarchan or Shakespearean, hesitantly rehearsing an argument or wholeheartedly making a claim, the sonnet is sufficiently capacious to take in almost anything. The same is true of this anthology, one that by necessity presents a very partial view of a vast subject. The sonnets gathered here are first of all ones with which I have a particular connection. They do double duty, though, by giving a sense of the history of the form. While I focus on the sonnet in English, there are a few poems in translation. These include César Vallejo’s ‘Testimony’; Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘The Unicorn’; Charles Baudelaire’s mind-bending ‘Correspondences’; and the scurrilous ‘Arsehole’ by the Zutiste tag-team of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud – the former providing the quatrains, the latter the tercets – for their unlikely vision of a Promised Land.
The sonnets are presented alphabetically by author surname, the rationale being that the form has proved durable beyond the specifics not only of place but time. Part of the reason for that durability is the sonnet’s specific duration. It’s the perfect length in which to address a subject without either glossing over it or blaring on ad nauseam. Michael Theune writes tellingly of the sonnet’s physical footprint, the square footage of the real estate it occupies: ‘Formally, virtually every sonnet is, at least in part, a concrete poem that looks like a sonnet.’ Quite apart from any aural considerations, there’s no accounting for the physical impact of the poem on the page. An architectural image – of a mausoleum, perhaps? – lies behind Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s succinct description in ‘The Sonnet’ of the form’s own capacity for succinctness:
A Sonnet is a moment’s monument, –
Memorial from the Soul’s eternity
To one dead deathless hour.
The ‘scanty plot’ or close quarters of the sonnet are emphasised in William Wordsworth’s ‘Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room’, the ‘room’ referring to the ‘stanza’ (the Italian root of which means ‘a room’). The ‘fret’ connects partly to an ‘interlaced pattern’ but is also etymologically related to a term for a ‘shackle’. Imagery associated with imprisonment abounds in the sonnet in English. Although many practitioners find that the confines of the sonnet are in fact liberating, the general sense is that it’s a form preoccupied with limitations. Take John Keats and his diagnostic:
If by dull rhymes our English must be chain’d,
And, like Andromeda, the sonnet sweet
Fetter’d . . .
At the heart of ‘If We Must Die’ by Claude McKay is the image of being ‘penned’, ‘constrained’ and ‘pressed to the wall’. The word ‘penned’ is particularly evocative, since it summons up both the Federal Penitentiary and the pen that may indeed be mightier than the sword. In his groundbreaking The African American Sonnet: A Literary History, Timo Müller points out that:
African American poets evoked the boundedness of the sonnet not so much to assert national or cultural belonging, as to trouble the limitations such concepts imply.
Take Wanda Coleman and her ambition that her ‘American sonnet’ be:
as open as possible, adhering only to the loosely followed dictate of number of lines. I decided on 14 to 16 and to not exceed that, but to go absolutely bonkers within that constraint.
For Terrance Hayes, the revamped ‘American sonnet’ that he inherited from Coleman may indeed be ‘part prison’ but it is a prison with a recreation yard – perhaps even a sequence of interconnected recreation yards. A number of Black poets have risen to the challenge of the sonnet cycle (including the ‘crown’ of sonnets) that has exercised many, from Lady Mary Wroth to Edna St Vincent Millay. This edition features examples from ‘A Wreath for Emmett Till’ by Marilyn Nelson and ‘House of Unending’ by Reginald Dwayne Betts, among others. The title ‘House of Unending’ hints at the idea of continuity in the sonnet tradition that reflects the perpetual conversation between poems from different eras and different traditions – as testified by this anthology with its wide-ranging gathering of voices.
The ongoing capacity of the sonnet to allow for both chaos and control is one that will ensure its viability even in our increasingly fractious and factional of times. The sonnet is supremely well adapted to allowing for the related phenomena of grave restraint and giddy release. It is accommodating while insisting on a few basic house rules. It is a room which we may make our own while being simultaneously mindful of, and oblivious to, the other guests who have occupied it over the centuries.
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Paul Muldoon is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel, for which he received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Among his other awards are the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 2003 Griffin Prize, the 2015 Pigott Prize and the 2017 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Born in County Armagh in 1951, he has lived since 1987 in the United States, where he is the Howard G. B. Clark Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. In 2022 he was appointed Ireland Professor of Poetry.
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