Shirley Satterfield

Sonnets Are the ‘Little Songs’ of Wise Poets

Form. Form. Form. Form is what the sonnet is all about. All types of sonnets are written by the same basic rules of being a total of fourteen lines written according to a strict rhyme scheme and meter of certain common patterns employed at discretion of the poet. And most often iambic pentameter, a meter of ten syllables per line with a strong syllable being followed by a weak one, is used in the English speaking world.

The sonnet itself had it’s beginning in Italy and was the invention of Giacomo da Lentini who served as a poet in the court of Fredrick the II, the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in 13th century Sicily. The early sonnets always presented a problem or a perplexing situation at the beginning and ending with a solution or a wise reflection on the problem. And classically the problem involved the love for a dispassionate beautiful woman and a broken-heart-ed suitor. But as time went on, and the form evolved, these sonnets also included a more realistic woman and and were written on a variety of subjects by the time of Shakespeare.

In the English tradition there are three main types of sonnets: the Italian (Petrarch-an) sonnet, the Spenserian sonnet and the Shakespearean sonnet, The Italian sonnet is characterized by an octave of eight lines with an ABBAABBA rhyme scheme and a sextet with a with either a CDECDE or a CDCDCD rhyming pattern as seen in this example by Milton:

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide;
“Doth God exact day labor, light denied?”
I fondly ask, But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or His own gifts. Who best
Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best, His state
Is kingly: thousands at His bidding speed,
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.

The Shakespearean sonnet is written in three quatrains of four lines each and ends in a couplet with a rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG as in this example:

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do their death bury their parents’ strife,
The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which, but their children’s end, nought remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

The Spenserian sonnet is a very complex form with the interlocking rhyme scheme of ABAB BCBC CDCD EE making the poem a tight unified ,
little unit, and although these poems are relatively short, they are in really huge masterpieces in form.

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I write it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
Vain man, said she, that doest in vain assay,
A mortal thing so to immortalize,
For I myself shall like this decay,
and eek my name be wiped out likewise.
Not so, (quod I} let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse, your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name.
Where when as death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.
…………………………..

This is first a three part series on this most historically important form of poetry which will include an article about the works of contemporary writers and the life and works of Elizabeth Browning, a lady master of the sonnet. Contemporary poets vary both the rhyme schemes and meters of the seemingly “simple” sonnet.

Excilia Saldaña: La Latina Matriarch of Cuban Poetry

Award winning Cuban poetess Excilia Saldaña is the Wise Poet of this week. Born in on August 7, 1946, she was raised in Havana by her grandmother and her young teenage mother, and being raised in a matriarchal family like that, Saldaña became the poetic voice of those women born into into the Afro-Cuban tradition. She wrote about such issues as motherhood and the role of Afro-Cuban women in Cuban society, and the guilt and shame inherently associated with being born a woman. And being a Black Cuban national descendant of West African enslaved people, she must have been keenly aware of violence against woman in the history of her people and the shame of being a victim of such violence.

According to statistics 62% of the Cuban population is of African decent and of the Afro-Cuban tradition of the Santeria religion, meaning The Way of the Saints, which is a hybrid of the original religion of the Yoruban people of West Africa and Roman Catholicism. They believe that there is only one God but that the forces of nature are overseen by lesser godlike beings called corishas, spirits which are pleased through divination. Saldaña’s family roots were dug deep into this tradition of religion and culture, music, dance and literature. She was most known as an academic and a children’s author, but she was also an accomplished poet whose poetry was translated from Spanish into both French and English, and she was recognized by the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba for her excellent writing, and her first book of poems entitled Enlloro was unpublished during her lifetime but won acclaim from the Casa de las Americas Prize board shortly after her death on July 20, 1999.

Her poem entitled Anonymous Landscape is a poem about the shame of just being an average woman and not famous or a man and is the voice of a woman feeling quite insignificant.

Anonymous Landscape

Every afternoon
The woman sits
before an open window
guilty of not being air, water
–or at least a wing that flies-
of being only a woman before an open window.

Every afternoon
the sky hangs itself out to dry
beyond the open window
ashamed of not being man, flesh, body
—or at least earth—
of being only sky beyond an open window,
Secret passion of guilt and shame:
a golden woman of violet sky
every afternoon through an open window.

Although this poem about feeling insignificant initially reads plain and almost prose-like in style in the beginning and the body of the piece, it ends with the vivid imagery of a golden woman and a violet sky and signifies the true significance of a mere woman who is not a man, This poem flares up into color at the end.

Writer William Faulkner: The Free Spirit of the South

William Faulkner, he was the legend the English class who was known as the writer whose intellect was so big that his mind could not be contained in a formal classroom or in a regular nine to five job.
He started out in the lower elementary grades as a good student, but this free spirit grew bored and dropped out of high school after repeating the 11th and 12th grades in order to read and study on his own. And legend has it that this man was such a voracious reader that he would about bankrupt the library shelves of all it’s books, and he was also even fired from his postal job in the mail room of a university for reading other people’s mail.

Faulkner was quite the Southern rebel as an author, for rather than writing for the traditional publishers of the day, he wrote mostly motivated just by the art of it, and thus, he faced the rejection of both his short stories and his early books, such as his World War I based novels entitled Soldiers Pay and Flags in the Dust, although the latter did finally find a publisher. He even wrote a biting satire mocking the established Southern literary scene entitled Mosquitoes. He was also quite dispassionate about the formal technique the publishers expected when he said in an interview,

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no ,mechanical way to get writing done, no shortcuts. The young writer would be a fool to follow such theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes…

Faulkner was much influenced by such modernist writers such as James Joyce, often employing a Joycean brand of stream of consciousness style.

Faulkner was born William Falkner in New Albany, Mississippi on September 25, 1897 but was raised in Oxford, Mississippi, located in Lafayette County, by his businessman father Murry Cuthbert Falkner, and his mother, Maud Falkner, and he was much inspired by stories of the bold life of his Civil War hero great grandfather Colonel William Clark Falkner, who was also a legend as a railway builder and an author in his own rite. And young Falkner even emulated his great grandfather by doing a stint in The Royal Canadian Air Force during WWI, however, he did not see combat.

The young William Falkner later adopted the pen name of Faulkner which was the result of a misprint of his name on a title page. Most of his most important novels such as The Sound and the Fury and as I Lay Dying were set in a fictional county and based on Lafayette County and the town of Oxford called Yoknapatawpha County and the fictional town of Jefferson and dealt with such sophisticated subjects as Southern racism in America and the complex relationships between the the members of a poor white family while transporting the decaying corpse of their dead mother across the county to the nearby town of Jefferson. The expression of each person’s thought processes along the way was expressed in stream of consciousness writing. And the book proves to be quite gristly and private thoughts quite dicey with each character harboring their own secret ulterior motives for making the arduous trip across creek and county.

In writing these masterpieces Faulkner proved himself to be one of the South’s most accomplished writers by winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Faulkner died of a heart attack on July 6, 1962 while dwelling in a nursing facility in Byhalia, Mississippi.

Erza Pound: The Wise Poet Arrested for Treason

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound, born in the rural Idaho on October 30, 1885, was a pioneer in the early Imagist movement in which poetry was characterized by succinct language and exact detail in visual images. And the man influenced such greats as Elliott, Robert Frost, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway. But this poet also had a dark side; he was a fervent fascist sympathizer who wrote against the United States in various anti-American fascist publications while living as an ex-patriot in Great Britain. And then he blasted America and the President of the United States in numerous radio broadcasts while living in Italy during WWII.

Consequently, he was arrested by the American forces in at the war’s end in 1945 and charged with treason. However, he was found to be mentally insane by the court after his arrival back to the States and was confined to St. Elizabeth Hospital for the criminally insane for the next twelve years of his life.

He had written 70 poetry books and published his work in 70 other publications in his lifetime, but it was while he was still in Italy imprisoned in a 6 foot by 6 foot open air cage that he began to write the most important section in his masterpiece book, The Cantos, entitled The Pisan Cantos for which he won the Bollingen Prize by the Library of Congress, a controversial move by the Library indeed. The Cantos was a lengthy poem of 116 sections that was never really finished by Pound during his 12 year long stay at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, but this small portion of Canto I amply illustrates the stark beauty of his lovely and succinct and detailed verse.

Canto I 
BY EZRA POUND
And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller,
Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day’s end.

Ezra Pound was not just a master of complex poetic verse, but he was also an expert linguist proficient at the classic languages of Latin and Greek and had become a professor of the Romance languages of French, Spanish, and Italian after graduation from Hamilton College with a BA in philosophy and the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his Masters Degree in the Romance languages.

On the urging of his fellow poets, Pound was released from the hospital in 1958 and set sail for Italy where he quietly lived until his death in 1972.

Dr. Seuss: The Pied Piper of Children’s Poetry

Dr. Seuss, born Theodor Seuss Geisel on March 2, 1904, was the author who spirited away a generation of children from their parents into a world of mesmerizing rhymes, strange characters, and free thinking. And with personified characters such as The Grinch Who Stole Christmas he imparted values to the children of the WWII post baby boom such as the importance of spiritual things over materal goods and the importance of being able to think outside the box and resist the status quo.

Seuss was the most wildly popular illustrator and children’s author of his time, and the secret to this Bard’s success lay in large part to his enchanting rhymes and mesmerizing meters. His most commonly used meter was called anapestic tetrameter which consists of two weak syllables followed by a strong syllable from this example from Wiki Pedia

And today the Great Yertle
that Marvelous he
Is King of the Mud. That is all
he can see.

But some of his verse also contained a kind of meter wherein every other was the stressed syllable called amphibrachic tetrameter, and most of his rhyme schemes most often consisted of AABB and ABCB all these elements together giving the poetry a the sing-songy appeal most familiar to children:

All ready to put up the tents
for my circus.
I think I will call it the circus
Mcgurkus

……………..

“Dr. Seuss”Giesel was an undergraduate at Dartmouth College and a graduate student at Lincoln College where he adoted the “Dr.” in front of his name when he did not finish his doctorate studies. After college he became an illustrator for Vanity Fair Magazine and a prosperous advertiser for Standard Oil. During WWII Giesel became a satirical political cartoonist for New York’s PM Magazine and wrote his first children’s book entitled “And To Think That I First Saw It on Mulberry Street, which
was subsequently rejected by 30 publishers before it found a home. All in all he wrote 60 children’s books and one adult book which flopped. He said about adults, “Adults are obsolete children. To hell with them.”

‘Dr. Seuss” Giesel was born Springfield, Massachusetts and died on
September 24, 1991 in La Jolla, California at the ripe old age of 87 and sold over 600 million copies of his books and won the Pulitzer prize for his massive contribution to literature. He led a long, prosperous and prolific life,

Mark Twain: The Man of the Mighty Mississippi

The stock advise for aspiring writers is to “Write what you know,” and Mark Twain did just that. He was born, with the given name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835 in the town of Florida Missouri, but was raised in the town of Hannibal situated right on the iconic Mississippi river. And so being intimately acquainted with this beloved waterway, he used this river and his hometown as the setting for two of his most loved novels; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the sequel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and it was this idyllic setting that Twain used to write his adventure stories and dealt with such serious topics as slavery, the value of freedom and human worth.

In fact, the primary plot of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn involves quest of two individuals to find freedom by escaping from their circumstances by way of the Mississippi river. Jim is an escaped slave, who is headed for the free state of Illinois and Huck is the wild-child who is running away from a tyrannical drunken father and the social norms of society which don’t make sense to him and being imposed on him by his very religious guardian, the widow Douglas. Thus, the wild and woolly river itself symbolizes freedom for the both of them as they both flee from their “owners.” This book is also a kind of coming of age story for Huck as he comes to the realization that the norms and common beliefs of his elders really are often unjust, unfair, and just plain wrong when he utters what are probably some of the most important words in American literature, “All right, then. I’ll go to hell,” regarding the common belief in his hometown that those helping an escaped slave will suffer eternal damnation. This statement is in fact the climax of the book and the moment when Huck truly becomes free in his own mind and finds the courage to become his own independently thinking man.

Mark Twain, himself, was also an independently thinking man and a truly colorful, larger than life, public figure who mastered many trades in his lifetime. He was a printer, a journalist, a steamboat pilot, a witty humorist and public speaker, as well as the author of 20 novels. And in his books about the American South, he was also a master of writing in local dialect of the town, thereby making his characters come alive through their unique colloquial speech.

“Pap” Finn, for example, was the course drunken father of Huck who did not believe in education, and his profound ignorance becomes apparent when he blasts his son for learning to read,

Don’t you give me none o’ your lip….You’ve put on considerable frills since I been away. I’ll take you down a peg before I get done with you. You’re educated they say-can read and write,…I’ll take it out of you. Who told you you might meddle with such hifalut’n foolishness, hey?—who told you you could?

Pap Finn goes on to blast the “govment” for giving black people the right to vote in free states in a later part of the book.

Now while Twain denigrates Huck’s abusive father, he elevates Jim, the escaped slave, with dialogue when Jim speaks about the realization of his true worth as a person when he says;

I’s rich now, come to look at it. I owns myself, en I’s wuth eight hund’;d dollars. I wish I had de money, I wouldn’ want no mo’ .

Twain was one of America’s greatest and most endearing writers of all time and more than succeeded in writing “The Great American Novel”, and was adept at capturing both the entertainment value of adventure in a book and also highlighting the important issues of his day. He was truly larger than life and a real versatile literary genius with a whole range of talent.

He died on April 21, 1910 of a heart attack.