Poetry by the Numbers: (6) The Sonnet

       ♫ Oh, I could write a sonnet, about your Easter bonnet ♫ is perhaps the best popularly known reference to this poetic form, derived from the Italian for sonetto, ‘little song’.  The 13-century poet Giacomo da Lentini is credited for inventing the form at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in Palermo, Sicily.

There are six different forms of this fourteen-line form, as cited on Literary Devices.net:

1. Italian Sonnet
2. Shakespearean Sonnet
3. Spenserian Sonnet
4. Miltonic Sonnet
5. Terza Rima Sonnet
6. Curtal Sonnet (fewer than fourteen lines)

Since we are focusing on how Poetry by the Numbers functions in English, let’s consider how the form, itself, drives meaning in Shakespeare—the most popular English sonneteer.

            AShakespearean sonnet is written in fourteen iambic pentameter lines, with a rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg.  The first thing to notice is its regularity, its comfortable predictability in structure: three quatrains, followed by a couplet, comprising fourteen lines.  In his article, “Synchronicity, Symbolism, and the Meanings of Numbers,” Mateo Sol tells us that the number 12 signifies cosmic order, creativity, and individual expression.  Its significant manifestations are in the number of months in a year, and hours in day.  We can also note that there are 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute—the number 12 multiplied by the number of fingers on a healthy hand.

            Given the significance of the number 12, It is fitting, then, that Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73—as is true in many of his sonnets—is focused on Time (with a capital T).  Over and over in 126 sonnets Shakespeare presses his fair young man, to marry—to cheat time and preserve his beauty through the generations. (Interestingly enough, it’s possible that Princess Diana is the descendant of the subsequent marriage.) In Sonnet 73, Shakespeare reflects on the age difference between him and the young man—a poignant yearning for a May/December love.  The narrator compares himself to the “Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”  He is “twilight,” he “fadeth” as the sun does as it sets.

            The sonnet form is predominantly a Love poem, embodying the course of reproductive love—the quatrains repeating the number four: for the four seasons; the four corners of the earth, and four winds (north, south, east, west); four elements (air, fire, earth, water), four humors (melancholic, phlegmatic, choleric, and sanguine), and four stages of traditional love: (courtship, marriage, children, old age).  Sonnet 73 is a love poem—a love that has now been “Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.”

            Beauty and Love are intimately related—reproduction in the human realm is not unlike that of the animal: intercourse is enhanced by the perception of beauty. Sonnet 73 contrasts Beauty in its glory, with Beauty spent: yellow autumn leaves (as opposed to the green of summer); throngs of mating birds (as opposed to barely a tweet); sunset (as opposed to dawn and noon light); ashes (as opposed to blaze); old age (as opposed to youth).

            Along with the three great themes of Time, Love, and Beauty that the Shakespearean sonnet form drives, there is the final couplet’s seal.  In his book The Dynamics of Tonal Shift in the Sonnet, Morton D. Rich identified how the structuring of the sonnet creates a significant change in mood and tone.  In most sonnets, there is a turn of voice or argument, called the volta (after the Italian for “turn”).  Dr. Rich discerned that this volta usually occurs at the end a list, or after a sentence is completed.  He claims that most often in a Shakespearean sonnet, this happens before the ending couplet.  The couplet, two rhyming lines, in its insistent repetition, asserts finality, The g rhyme sets us up for another quatrain.  But then we don’t have the alternating rhyme. We are done.  We are done.

            Finally, the sonnet is a fourteen-line poem.  As Sol notices for us, the number 14 is twice 7—the number of the chakras, the energy centers in a body; the colors in a rainbow; and days of the week.  It is a magical number.  The British have a special word for a two-week period—a fortnight (fourteen night).  And the number 14 clears the hurdle of the ominous 13.  When reflecting on the enormous topics of Time, Love, and Beauty, it is incantatory to have a number that represents luck—double luck.

            Write a sonnet in which you find a specific situation in which Time, Love, Beauty are at stake.  

Works Cited:

Cover Art: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/525232375291172572/

Text:

Literary Devices: https://literarydevices.net/sonnet/

Sol, Mateo. “Synchronicity, Symbolism, and the Meanings of Numbers.”

https://lonerwolf.com/meaning-of-numbers/

Poet's Glossary: https://poets.org/glossary/sonnet

Rich, Morton D. The Dynamics of Tonal Shift in the Sonnet. Lewiston: Edward Mellon, 2000.

Shakespeare, William.  Sonnet 73.

Because I Can Teach:

Poetry by the Numbers: Stanzas
https://becauseicanteach.blogspot.com/2020/01/poetry-by-numbers-colors-of-stanzas.html

Poetry by the Numbers: What 2, 3, 4 line stanzas mean.
https://becauseicanteach.blogspot.com/2020/01/poetry-by-numbers-2-3-and-4-line-stanzas.html