A Brief History of the Sonnet - Chapter 13 The First Stirrings of Modernism (Rimbaud and Hopkins).

 Rimbaud's sonnet is so powerfully moving  I can read it again and again.  But for poetry in English, no one is as powerful as Hopkins at his best, just as for drama Shakespeare is, for the novel, Dickens, maybe, for prose, Joyce and for fantasy Tolkien. Hopkins might be too rich and for years I stayed away from him as my literary mentor said he had a tinkle in his words that irritated him, my mentor being more the R S Thomas kind, whom too I love but RS Thomas and Dylan Thomas/Hopkins come from two extreme ends of the poetic spectrum. Hopkins is not just a complete poet but an inventor, a discoverer, an explorer like James Joyce and and Eliot or an RS Thomas are only complete poets with no add ons.

Take "Pied Beauty."

Some people say it has only ten and a half lines, in terms of metre, and some say eleven, but what manner of radical, extreme thinking would imagine up an idea that a sonnet can be curtailed to create an eleven line one that can be called a curtal sonnet. Only a genius, obviously. But the poem first:

Pied Beauty 

BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.

1. He expands our vocabulary and knowledge of poetic technique as well as diction and various other things with words like pied (a pun), dappled (seldom used, freshly used, a favourite word of Hopkins'), brinded (never used before or after, perhaps), rose-moles (neologism and compounding), stipple (newly used), fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls (compounding of a very unlikely kind to form a four-word combine into an almost single word), fallow (noun made out of adjective), fold (pun as noun and verb), plough ( metonymy), áll trádes (look at the use of those accents for bringing in sprung rhythm!), trim ( original usage), counter (half-word to mean opposite to or running counter to), fickle (changing) freckled (who would use a world like this in a poem in such a place or juncture), adazzle (Why the a? To add a syllable obviously), dim (in the shadow), and fathers-forth (neologism/compounding) 

Inscape is there, definitely, into/of Pied Beauty, and instress too of "fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls" , which when imagined is awe-inspiringly creative, though not as much as the AND in Windhover. Duns Scotus was never this interesting.

What about the metre? No more the mouldy iambic for Hopkins but one entirely his own.where each line can have any number of unstressed syllables or unaccented ones but must have the same accented ones or stressed ones as all other lines of the sonnet so the rhythm is immaculate like the Virgin he worships. Immaculate and impeccable rhythm, beat, metronome, it dances along or marches along like none other and can be done only by him and was never before or has not been attempted ever after!

To come back to the poem as sonnet or poem what we have here is a mini tour de force where Hopkins does everything with titling, imagery, figures of speech, and sound devices that other poets do and just as well but adds to it like a cake with many terraced layers, and as for what he does with meaning or structure or rhyme scheme or form it is simply explosive and implosive.  His superstructure is amazingly, decadently, a riotous affair, one that makes up more than enough for his austerity in his philosophy that is unmistakably Jesuit and monastic, ascetic, and ashram-based! This is cake with frills, garnishing, bows, geegaws, toppings, cherries, patterns, and totally designer!

Let's have a brief look at the rhyme scheme. Abc, abc, dbc, dc. Intricate and interlocking. Simple to/but "it's complicated". And the alliteration, it is so full of assonance and consonance. As for the images, visual (rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim) and auditory (the packed, breathless alliteration and the rhyme scheme that stands for the pied and dappled nature of beauty and things) and kinetic (swift, slow), as well as tactile (rose-moles) and gustatory (sweet, sour), and the figures of speech that are implicit and explicit metaphors (pied, dappled - showing the binary nature of existence)  and metonymy, and a single simile (as a brinded cow), as well as personification (God as father) and the stanza break for structure etc., it is all exquisite. We are in the presence of a master who has just broken the pattern of the sonnet open and blown our heads off, in the bargain, teaching us the true beauty of what poetry really means! And finally, the meanings that collide into one another and blow your head off, running counter, spare, strange, original, no matter how! Praise it!

At the back of Hopkins' mind is the Psalms, no doubt, with a verse like "the heavens declare the glory of God" and Shakespeare's "oh, what a piece of work is man", but there is also Keats with his "beauty is truth and truth, beauty' that is all ye know and all ye need to know on earth" as well as "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." Hopkins is agreeing but also going beyond it, or countering it, when he says" He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change." Philosophically, it is to put Being above, or as transcendental to, its outcomes, even ones like Beauty.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44399/pied-

A Brief History of the Sonnet as a Form - Chapter 12 - The First Stirrings of Modernism (Arthur Rimbaud)

Writing poetry is one of the greatest pleasures in the world. So is reading it and learning how to write it, at least for those who are addicted to it. If one is on Facebook these days, for instance, the number of poets writing and the anthologies, poetry magazines, chain poetry attempts and individual or group collections coming out or the poetry pages or groups there are simply mind-boggling. As are the sheer number of poems posted everywhere else.

In this series, I would like to dwell on where it really matters. What people really love about poetry nowadays is imagery. Naturally enough they prefer visual imagery. I teach poetry. Students nowadays are excited by poems being made into videos and images. But those slightly more experienced know that putting an image to a verbal one makes it a one to one correspondence and kills it by killing the imagination’s ability to use the inner eye.

Here is a beautiful sonnet by Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1861)

It is a green hollow where a stream gurgles,
Crazily catching silver rags of itself on the grasses;
Where the sun shines from the proud mountain:
It is a little valley bubbling over with light.
A young soldier, open-mouthed, bare-headed,
With the nape of his neck bathed in cool blue cresses,
Sleeps; he is stretched out on the grass, under the sky,
Pale on his green bed where the light falls like rain.
His feet in the yellow flags, he lies sleeping. Smiling as
A sick child might smile, he is having a nap:
Cradle him warmly, Nature: he is cold.
No odour makes his nostrils quiver;
He sleeps in the sun, his hand on his breast
At peace. There are two red holes in his right side.

Arthur Rimbaud
October 1870

– As translated by Oliver Bernard: Arthur Rimbaud, Collected Poems (1962) (http://www.mag4.net/Rimbaud/poesies/Sleeper.html

This poem that deals with the tragedy of war that sends youth and children out to die is made effective by breaking Romanticism in the way it should be, not in terms of form but in terms of theme, and making it stand on its head in building up first a very calm and beautiful atmosphere or surrounding, so peaceful that one is lulled into a false sense of security, along with the poem's protagonist and not its narrator, and then breaking this spell of beauty like a pot over our heads, in breaking the suspense by introducing first the word "sick." Then comes the realization the poet gives us that the youth is dead and finally that he is the spoil or prey of war as a climax at the very last second. This gives us a severe jolt and shock which the War Poets do not necessarily have in their poems.  But the horror is heightened by the beauty of the surroundings described in classic imagery and it is only later we see that yellow "flags" instead of flowers maybe ironical and not nationalistic.

One needs to observe life carefully, lovingly, intensely, and be in love with life with an eye for its amazing details and wanting to find the language for describing it. Then read such poets to see how they defamiliarize things with words, make it slightly askew. An example is Rimbaud using “crazily catching silver rags” (kinetic imagery) in the second line and “bubbling” in the fourth. And the masterpiece is of course “two red holes.” The second is an example of an auditory image but coupled with “light” it again becomes beautifully askew. And what a line is: "Pale on his green bed where the light falls like rain."   

Yes. Observe carefully using all the five inner and outer senses, read, jot down for use, keeping in mind that unleashing the imagination fully means using the five external and internal senses.

Too simple a formula, you may think, but so effective in the case of Rimbaud.  As for his mastery in the sonnet form, it is in how well he says what he has to say while casting it in the form or mould which is what today's poets are unable to do. The beauty of the rhyme scheme is lost in the translation but not much else is, as the effect is not lost. With Rimbaud and Hopkins in terms of content here and of form in the latter, we enter the beginning of modernism in the world of the sonnet.

(This article appeared here earlier in a slightly different form when I was a columnist for Plum Tree run by Niamh Clune.  https://ontheplumtree.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/wednesday-on-the-plum-tree-in-the-sandbox-with-dr-ampat-koshy/ )