A Brief History of the Sonnet - Chapter 20 (The Conclusion - A Meditation on Form/s in Verse/Poetry)

 I have told you the definition of the sonnet. I have given you the note on what M H Abrams said of it, where it began and where all it has spread to in its key moments, the poets whose names matter in it, the best examples, and also through their content a glimpse of how the content and the form itself has undergone changes, showing also the history of the changing times in minuscule, and the theoretical concerns it had and still holds for us. The fact that it ends with a discussion on the form is no coincidence as it ends as of now here in this book with me with postmodernity which is meta-form oriented, postcolonial albeit of an underlying note kind, and with democratic left-leaning nationalism with a holistic attempt to combine Western and Eastern elements rather than to deconstruct them with an either/or approach. Meanwhile I also bring in trauma, disability, ethnic and minority studies, affect theory, feminism, ecocriticism etc., briefly in flashes and touches for those with the eyes to see.

I spoke of the beginnings of the sonnet in Old Provencal with the Sicilian school of poets, and with Lentini, then of the arrival of the form in glory in Italy with the terza rima sonnet, then the Petrarchan sonnet, and of Dante, Cavalcanti, Michaelangelo, and Rafael. Then I spoke but not in order of the English Spenserian sonnet, the Shakespearean, the Miltonic, the Wordsworthian, the Shelleyesque, and the Keatsian sonnets, and after that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Emily Bronte, DG Rosetti, the curtal sonnet and Hopkins, and then going away from England, of Irish Beckett, the American Berryman and ee cummings and Edna St Vincent Millay, the French Rimbaud, the German Rilke, the Russian Pushkin and his Onegin sonnet, the South American Neruda, and finally of the Latin caudate sonnet of Berni, of Sonnet Mondal's version, of the immured sonnet and Philip Nikolayev, of the roseate sonnet and myself and also of the Indians including Micheal Madhusudan Dutt, Toru Dutt, Sri Aurobindo, Henry Derozio, Vikram Seth using the Onegin sonnet, Santosh Bakaya, Dev Mishra, Daipayan Nair and Geethanjali Dilip for their voluminous production of roseate sonnets and the anthology of sonnets coming up edited by Gauri Dixit, Sunita Singh, Vineetha Mekkoth and Bhuvaneshwari Shivakumar Shankar.

But I want to end talking of forms on a comparative note. Even among the sonnet forms people still try out the terza rima sonnet, the Shakespearean and the Petrarchan, and the roseate sonnet form rather than the variants, or a free verse version or mongrel one, and this is due to the fact that it offers a fine balance between ease and difficulty that holds the interest of poets enough and intrigues them enough to try them out. So this matters in form-making.

We see that Greece had many forms like the epic, tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, all in verse, and ode, elegy, lyric, threnody etc. But slowly things changed and verse was left behind for prose in tragedy, comedy and tragicomedy, over time, in history, leading to the novel and short story and prose drama, and the rise of non-fiction in prose, and only the lyric and occasional poetry survived, while the epic faded as too difficult. Courtly love poems died out when there were no more courts as did bucolic and pastoral poetry, and love poems in such backgrounds or rural settings as the city became important, and in the same way while there have been many forms worldwide that tried for pre-eminence slowly free verse gained ascendancy over meter and urbanized-in-content poems took over. We see now that while the freed haiku, the gogyoshi or five liners, and the limerick,  the sonnet, and the ghazal are practiced many French forms like the villanelle are never or seldom tried out due to their difficulty. I love forms and have tried to keep writing in a form, this one, to keep it alive, with my contribution to the art knowing that no one will try one unless it has a harmony between what we ask of the poet and the freedom it gives him that is his creative input, even to make half the rules, which only I have done, which shows my mastery and greatness as a teacher and form-maker as well as skills, competencies and values creator in the students by encouraging their sleight of hand, and that is what makes my form attractive. There are two factors at work, one is that in language there is the principle of ease over labour while in form people want order in the midst of chaos, yet not too much of it. The same happens in prose too, which is why no one reads "Finnegan's Wake" but talk of it but all read "Old Man and the Sea", the latter has form and ease, while the former looks formless, and offers too much difficulty to the reader. It is the same with writers and poets.

To end, this is not a decrying of the attempts of a Hopkins or e.e.cummings, or a Sonnet Mondal or Philip Nikolayev or of the attempt at making the roseate sonnet more complicated than it is, as Dev Mishra has tried extremely well and successfully, or even by making it a syllable based or word based form like the 'tideling' which is a form by Daipayan Nair, or even my friends in spirit in other forms like those who want to make the haiku, tanka or gogyoshi (a five liner) most strict and old fashioned, or Duane Vorhees's couplette, or those who want to write stilted, laboured, artificial ghazals only, like Agha Shahid Ali did in English. Such attempts are towering and overawe us, but remain as mountains no one tries to scale again. The real way forward, even for Ghazals, is to listen to a Shabir Ahmad Mir and free it or an Amita Paul who asks for the same balance. Or for five liners to be loose tankas etc. The balance always has to be between less rigor and more of allowance or laxity. Lyrics and love poems sans harp or lyre will continue ad nauseam as well as didactic poems and cause-based ones and ones of social outrage on recent events.

Let me end by repeating that sonnets have a skeleton, it has fourteen lines, and those are divided into stanzas, rhymed or not, metered or neutered, that invariably, naturally, break themselves into structurally constituent parts that fit well into each other, and often lead to narrative poems or sequences and intricately beautiful images, sounds, figures of speech and interlinked layers of words and meanings. Things like rhyme, meter, line length, and syllabic or word count should not matter here though rhythm and beat must,  not of the metronome; but in a more organic or musical notation as in an onomatopoeic, repetitive, incantatory, evocative, hypnotic fashion. Then sonnets will add beauty immeasurable to our world and be relevant even today if on topical issues and I have offered you the best examples for you to enjoy and see why they do and even try out if you want, if you are poets. 

Read, relate, and enjoy to your heart's content, till my next sally into the lands of poetry, its forms, critical literary explication, and my own unique brand of poetry-loving, literary theory craziness. 

THE END