On the Value of Structure

One of the topics that almost always comes up when discussing sonnets especially in a modern context, is the question of what we gain from the strict structure of a traditional sonnet scheme. In fact, you will often see modern poets, or perhaps I should say postmodern poets, but certainly contemporary poets, write what they call sonnets that have no rhyme scheme, partial rhyme scheme, or a distinctly unsonnetlike rhyme scheme (such as heroic couplets). Similarly, you will see experiments with meter or the lack of it, and of course experiments with the number of lines: from 12 to 16 to almost any number. 

In discussing with my colleagues what a sonnet is and how a sonnet means,

I know I am almost always going to be the most traditional voice. For me, a sonnet is as I have explained in these pages of this blog, 14 lines with consistent meter, and a rhyme scheme that is not purely couplets but that extends through the entire poem in some way, usually with a break at the turn.

So obviously I value these structural elements, and of course this is not the first time I have tried to explain why on this blog. But it seemed to me to be a good time to re-specify what I think structure gives to a sonnet, and why I think it is irreplaceable.

Of course, structure gives a lot of things to sonnets, and not the same thing to every sonnet. But you are some thoughts on more general applications of structure in sonnets.

First, structure and the poem's use of it can give a tone or an emotional resonance to a sonnet. The poem I just wrote for this blog, well it has many other flaws (see my post on bad poetry for why I don't think that's a problem) is using the structure of end stopped iambic pentameter with clear octave and sestet divisions to reinforce the sense of calm and quiet that I am trying to induce with the language and the message of the poem as well. By consistently giving the reader those pauses and that regularity it can reinforce what the rest of the poem is doing. Conversely, up home I wrote not for this blog but for my own personal use when I was grappling with some emotional difficulties back over a decade ago deliberately refused to give that end stopping and therefore that consistency; The first word of most of the sentences in that poem was the last word of the line: you can see a similar approach at work albeit not in a sonnet in Gwendolyn Brooks' "We Real Cool", not that I'm comparing myself to her as a poet, where we is not the start of most of the lines but the end, giving the poem a different shape and a different sensibility. In the case of a sonnet with its expectations of regularity, this has a punctuated effect and a heightened one in terms of unsettling the mood of the poem.

This is not possible without that structure initially.

Or at least it is less effective.

Second, the structure and regularity of the sonnet allow for certain words in certain positions to draw power from pre-existing expectations. The most obvious example of this of course is the couplet in a Shakespearean or English sonnet, which takes on a heightened significance precisely because the reader is expecting that turn and that couplet after the 12 lines preceding it. But even within individual line, knowing the meter, knowing the rhyme scheme, Knowing the structure helps the reader navigate the poem.

It is perhaps unfashionable to help the reader navigate the poem nowadays, if that doesn't sound a little too cynical, but it is actually helpful as a reader to know where to look. Poetry is after all the conveyance of emotion and thought in carefully chosen words; anything that helps it do that conveying is in a sense a plus. The sonnet is not fundamentally an obscure or obscuring form; thus regularity and structure are helpful to it.

Third, for me at least as a writer of sonnets, the structure is similarly helpful in terms of making me or forcing me to think through and try to navigate how I want those words to express themselves on the page. With a form, with a pre-existing or predetermined or at least predictable structure, there is guidance not just for the reader but the writer in terms of where emotional beat should come and where key words should come. It is of course completely all right to violate those expectations, or undermine that structure, but the power of those acts also comes from the presence or the assumed presence of the structure. Randomly slapping words on the page (which of course is not what most poets that I know do) doesn't have the same effect as modifying what someone already expects (note that "not the same" does not inherently mean one is better or worse). And while there is definite value and has been forever (pretty much literally) in organic or new or invented forms, and in things like prose poetry or erasers or other forms that may not even have a traditionally defined form, but with in something like the sonnet which has form and structure, it can be used as a source of strength for the writer as well as the reader.

Finally at least for now, the sonnet as a structured poem is of course in conversation with sonnets as structured poems that have come before. And while that may mean that there is value in breaking those structures as part of that conversation, it also implies that there is value in having that conversation on the same level as the sonnets it is in conversation with. My poetry is not Shakespeare's, or Petrarch's, or any of the almost infinite list of amazing poets who have written sonnets in the past. I don't claim that it is. But one of the beauties of writing in a tradition is that you do not have to be at the apex of that tradition to be a part of its conversation. And structured sonnets allow for that conversation to be more visible.