Poetic Forms: Sonnet, Dramatic Monologue, Haiku and Free Verse

Hook: why not just write a paragraph?

You could text a friend: I'm sorry I forgot your birthday. Or you could write it as a haiku. Or a fourteen-line sonnet. Or a speech in the voice of your guilty calendar. Each version would make your friend feel something different, even though the message is the same.

That is the point of form. The shape of a poem, how many lines, where they break, whether it rhymes, who is speaking, is part of what it means. In this lesson you will meet four forms from four different times and places.

Form 1: the Petrarchan sonnet

The Italian poet Petrarch (1300s) made this sonnet famous. It divides 14 lines into an octave (8 lines) that presents a problem or argument and a sestet (6 lines) that answers or turns it. The volta usually comes at line 9.

Holy Sonnet 10 (Death, be not proud) by John Donne (written about 1610, published 1633; public domain)

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so; For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me. From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow, And soonest our best men with thee do go, Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery. Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell, And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then? One short sleep past, we wake eternally And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Glossary: thy pictures = images of you (rest and sleep look like death); soul's delivery = the soul's release; poppy = opium, a drug that brings sleep; swell'st = swell with pride.

John Donne (1572 to 1631) was an English poet and priest. He is the best-known of the metaphysical poets, who built poems on clever arguments and surprising comparisons. Here the speaker uses apostrophe (talking directly to Death) and argues like a lawyer. In Donne's Christian belief, death is only a short sleep before eternal life, so the poem ends in a paradox: Death, thou shalt die.

Form 2: the dramatic monologue

In a dramatic monologue, a character (not the poet) speaks to a silent listener in a specific situation. We only hear one side of the conversation, so we must infer the setting, the listener's reactions and the speaker's true character. The speaker usually reveals more than they mean to.

My Last Duchess by Robert Browning (1842; public domain) opens:

That's my last Duchess painted on the wall, Looking as if she were alive. I call That piece a wonder, now:

The speaker is the Duke of Ferrara, in Renaissance Italy. He is showing a portrait of his late wife to an envoy who has come to arrange the Duke's next marriage. As he talks, he complains that the Duchess smiled at everyone and everything, as if his gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name were worth no more than a sunset or a branch of cherries: She had / A heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad, / Too easily impressed. Then comes the chilling line: I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together. He never says what the commands were. He moves straight on to the dowry, then points out a bronze statue of Neptune taming a sea-horse.

How the form works: the poem is written in rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter, a very controlled pattern, like the Duke. But the sentences constantly run over line ends (enjambment), so the rhymes are hardly noticed and the speech sounds natural and smooth. Control hidden under charm: that is the Duke.

Form 3: the haiku

The haiku comes from Japan. Its best-known master, Matsuo Bashō (1644 to 1694), wrote this one in 1686:

furu ike ya / kawazu tobikomu / mizu no oto

A close translation: old pond: / a frog jumps in, / the sound of water.

Features of the traditional haiku:

• Three short phrases of 5, 7 and 5 sound units (on). Japanese sound units are shorter than English syllables, so many English haiku use fewer syllables.
• A season word (kigo): the frog is a spring word in Japanese poetry.
• A cutting word (kireji): ya creates a pause that sets two images side by side: the ancient still pond and the sudden splash.
• Concrete images with no explanation. The reader must feel the meaning: one tiny moment of sound makes the silence of the pond more noticeable.

Form 4: free verse

Free verse has no regular rhyme or metre, but it is not shapeless. Poets use line breaks, repetition and the rhythm of speech to create structure.

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer by Walt Whitman (1865; public domain)

When I heard the learn'd astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

The whole poem is one sentence. Four lines begin with When and keep getting longer, like a lecture that won't end. Then the shift (How soon...) and the lines relax until the last: perfect silence at the stars.

Text features of poetry

In poems, text features do a lot of work:

• Title: often the first clue (My Last Duchess: last implies there were others, and there will be more).
• Line breaks: a break makes the reader pause and puts weight on the last word of a line (She had / A heart: the pause makes us wait for his judgment).
• Stanza breaks and white space: mark shifts in time, speaker or idea.
• Punctuation: Browning's dashes (how shall I say?) show the Duke pretending to search for words; Bashō's cutting word works like a colon or dash.
• Capitalization: Donne capitalizes Death, turning it into a character he can address.
• Layout and glosses: in anthologies, footnotes and glossaries help with old words. Use them, but read the poem first.