Poetry, Part 1: How Form Makes Meaning: The Petrarchan Sonnet, Sprung Rhythm and the Villanelle

Hook: rules that make you stronger

A hockey game has strict rules: three periods, offside lines, a fixed rink size. Nobody says the rules ruin hockey. The rules are what make a great play look great.

Poetic forms work the same way. A sonnet must turn in a set place. A villanelle must repeat the same two lines four times each. Poets choose these limits on purpose, because the form itself carries meaning: a turn can feel like a change of heart, and a refrain can feel like a thought you cannot stop thinking.

The Petrarchan sonnet: Hopkins's God's Grandeur

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 to 1889) was an English poet and Jesuit priest. He wrote God's Grandeur in 1877, but almost none of his poems were published in his lifetime; his friend Robert Bridges published them in 1918. The poem opens (public domain):

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

Glossary: charged = filled, as with electric charge; shook foil = shaken metal foil, which flashes when it catches light; reck his rod = pay attention to God's authority.

The octave (paraphrase): God's greatness fills the world and flashes out like light from shaken foil, or gathers like oil pressed from olives. So why do people ignore it? Generation after generation has tramped the earth; everything is scorched by trade and smeared with labour. The poem's fifth line is all repetition:

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

The soil is bare, and people's feet, in shoes, can no longer even feel it.

The sestet (paraphrase): And yet nature is never used up. A deep freshness lives at the heart of things. Even when the last light leaves the west at night, morning springs up again in the east, because the Holy Ghost broods over the bent world like a bird protecting its young, with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

The villanelle

A villanelle has 19 lines, two rhyme sounds and two refrains. Line 1 (A1) and line 3 (A2) return alternately at the end of each stanza, and both close the poem together.

Probably the best-known villanelle in English is Dylan Thomas's Do not go gentle into that good night (published 1951), addressed to the poet's dying father. Its two refrains are its title line and:

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

In between, the poem describes four kinds of men (wise, good, wild and grave) who all fight death at the end, then turns directly to the father. Because the refrains return again and again, the form becomes a plea repeated until it breaks: the son keeps asking because he cannot accept the answer.

A villanelle to scan and analyse

This villanelle was written for this lesson, so you can study the whole form at once:

The Backyard Rink

The rink will freeze if we just learn to wait. My father floods it in the bitter cold, and stars come out above the garden gate.

I watch the water spread and settle straight, a mirror for the porch light's yellow-gold. The rink will freeze if we just learn to wait.

My brother wants to skate. It's half past eight; he tests the edge, too eager to be told, and stars come out above the garden gate.

The hose goes stiff; the minutes accumulate; Dad's breath is smoke, his mittens wet and old. The rink will freeze if we just learn to wait.

By morning it is smooth. We hesitate, then glide out, scraping, laughing, loud and bold. The stars go out above the garden gate.

Dad's older now. He lets me hold the weight of the hose this year, out in the bitter cold. The rink will freeze if we just learn to wait; the stars come out above the garden gate.

Text features of poetry

Form is not only rhyme and metre. Read these features as choices:

• Title: God's Grandeur announces a hymn-like subject; a villanelle's title is often its first refrain.
• Line breaks and enjambment: a sentence running past a line end (the bent / World) creates suspense or a double meaning at the break. Hopkins breaks bent from World so that the world itself seems to bend.
• Caesura: a strong pause inside a line. Line 4 of God's Grandeur begins with the single word Crushed and a full stop, then a question: the reader has to stop hard.
• Stanza breaks and white space: in a villanelle they separate each return of a refrain; in free verse they can show silence or time passing.
• Refrains: repetition with variation.
• Punctuation: Hopkins's ah! is a feature too, an exclamation that sounds spontaneous inside a strict form.