Andrew, you call that unconventional? Here is a sonnet by the composer John Cage:

This is the first line of my sonnet
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
And this is the last. Fill in the rest yourselves.

Brian, good man--yet I wish he had framed both the first and last lines in iambic pentameter.

Well Cage's is certainly wittier than Andrew's.

Nemo

Can't...stop...looking.

Ugh, I have no self-control.

A traditional and respected poetic form does not "evolve" beyond its obvious boundaries. The task is to work within its confines. Ask, for example, Robert Frost, writing about 600 years after Petrarch gave us the sonnet. Want to quibble about rhyme scheme? Nearly all Italian words end in vowels. Hence the original rhyme scheme, although there were other options. Shakespeare gave us the "English" rhyme scheme for our sonnets, more suited to our language, and modified the octet and sestet to three quatrains and concluding couplet. Milton, for example, classicist to the bone (not to mention implicit critic of Shakespeare in many ways), used Italian models for the sonnet, and that was fine. But not all 14-line poems are sonnets. That is patently obvious. Too much license is simply too much license. There is no such thing as a trimeter sonnet. Ask Wordsworth, Shelley, and many others.

Here you go:

The Kraken

Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

- Alfred, Lord Tennyson*

*Obscure poet and brother to the great Frederick Tennyson, who always wrote 14-line sonnets.

Andrew's "late entry into the contest" is drably devoid of wit. As are all the varieties of cranky fundamentalism with which he and other self-appointed guardians of tradition have been cluttering up the discussion. Here's a late entry of my own:

Bake-off Blues

Oh, no! This sonnet’s rhymes are way too slanty
To sit well with a staunch traditionalist.
Such deviations disarrange my panties
Into the painful mother of all twists.

I will brook no metrical variations.
I’m a strict stick-to-long-established-norms guy
With no permissive eye for innovations.
I know a guy who knows that Book of Forms guy.

I say with fatwa certainty
Which poem is “not a sonnet.”
The wrong feet? Or wrong quantity?
Anathema upon it!

Plus, disapproval puckers my behind
Each time I find the volta hard to find.

In my opinion, "Mower's Song" is one of the weakest of the ten poems under discussion. But its relative lack of appeal has nothing to do with its heterodox meter.

And is Andrew really convinced that Robert Frost was a strict adherent to the Petrarchan sonnet template? Boy, will he be surprised when he reads "The Oven Bird."

Chris, how interesting! I would have thought "The Oven Bird" proves my main point. Yes, I know it well.

As for the rest, I am happy we (in America and many locations elsewhere) live in a free country, with the First Amendment obviously thriving.

Thank you for your dissenting opinions.

I adhere to mine, thank you.

How about 13:

Grief that is grief and properly so height
Has lodging in the orphaned brain alone,
Whose nest is cold, whose wings are now his own
And thinly feathered for the perchless flight
Between the owl and ermine; overnight
His food is reason, fodder for the grown,
His range is north to famine, south to fright.
When Constant Care was manna to the beak,
And Love Triumphant downed the hovering breast,
Vainly the cuckoo's child might nudge and speak
In ugly whispers to the indignant nest:
How even a feathered heart had power to break,
And thud no more above their huddled rest.


Felicity of Grief! — even Death being kind,
Reminding us how much we dared to love!
There, once, the challenge lay, — like a light glove
Dropped as through carelessness — easy to find
Means and excuse for being somewhat blind
Just at that moment; and why bend above,
Take up, such certain anguish for the mind?
Ah, you who suffer now as I now do,
Seeing, of Life's dimensions, not one left
Save Time — long days somehow to be lived through:
Think — of how great a thing were you bereft
That it should weigh so now! — and that you knew
Always, its awkward contours, and its heft.

Both of those are by Edna St. Vincent Millay, who also wrote tetrameter sonnets, which like Shakespeare's 145, are not sonnets because they are not in iambic pentameter. And then there's Hopkins. Thank goodness we can be a little lax about rhyme scheme (though thanks to Surrey, not Shakespeare). Still, what are we to make of Blake?

We get pretty far before even considering free verse sonnets, or Emerson's "prose sonnet," etc.

I personally find a consideration of what is sonnety about these things much more interesting than a discussion of what is not sonnety about them. The latter seems easy, while the former seems fascinating, challenging, and expansive. But that's just me.

And by the way, just for the record, all the sonnets I've written have been pretty damned "traditional."

David R.

If the sometimes a bit heated discussion here has caused many to search out and look (or re-look) closely at notable sonnets, then all for the best. Difference of opinion is healthy if it results in learning and respect for others' views. If mine has been a stodgy and overly classical stance, in the opinions of some, then all right. So be it. I have, in fact, come to see that there have been more variations in the sonnet form by true poets than I had thought there had been. And I thank the posters. Yet if I live and die by the traditional sonnet in iambic pentameter, in either the English or one of the Italian rhyme schemes, I would respectfully submit that I stand in good--if not universal--company.