What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why

Sonnet

“Sonnet” is derived from the Italian, meaning “a little song.” You’ve undoubtedly encountered this form, which is perhaps the most widely known of all poetic structures. A sonnet has fourteen lines, and is traditionally written in iambic pentameter, with a standard rhyme scheme. There are two traditional types of sonnets written in English, the Petrarchan (or Italian) sonnet and the Shakespearian sonnet.

The Petrarchan sonnet has an octave (eight lines) of the rhyme scheme abbaabba, followed by a sestet (six lines) of the rhyme scheme cdecde or cdcdcd. The Petrarchan sonnet makes the clearest use of a key structural element, the voltaor “turn” of thought that divides the poem. The “turn” happens after the octave, and signals a shift in emphasis or focus. Here’s an example of a Petrarchan sonnet, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why”:

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,

I have forgotten, and what arms have lain

Under my head till morning; but the rain

Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh

Upon the glass and listen for reply,

And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

For unremembered lads that not again

Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,

Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,

Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:

I cannot say what loves have come and gone,

I only know that summer sang in me

A little while, that in me sings no more.

The Shakespearian sonnet also contains a dividing of thought, but with an emphasis on the closing couplet to provide this shift. The Shakespearian sonnet has the following rhyme scheme: ababcdcdefefgg. Here’s a sonnet by Shakespeare:

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damasked, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak; yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound:

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare.

Contemporary poets have often abandoned the traditional rhyme scheme and metrical regularity of the sonnet, while still preserving its shape and argumentative structure. Other poets have found inventive ways to preserve a sense of formal intricacy, as with Ted Berrigan’s sonnet:

In Joe Brainard’s collage its white arrow

He is not in it, the hungry dead doctor.

Of Marilyn Monroe, her white teeth white-

I am truly horribly upset because Marilyn

and ate King Kong popcorn,” he wrote in his

of glass in Joe Brainard’s collage

Doctor, but they say “I LOVE YOU”

and the sonnet is not dead.

takes the eyes away from the gray words,

Diary. The black heart beside the fifteen pieces

Monroe died, so I went to a matinee B-movie

washed by Joe’s throbbing hands. “Today

What is in it is sixteen ripped pictures

does not point to William Carlos Williams.

Your assignment is to write a 14-line sonnet, following one of these procedures:

1)A sonnet in iambic pentameter, blank verse (that is, unrhymed) lines.

2)A sonnet using one of the two rhyme schemes sketched above, but which uses the rhyme scheme internally (that is, inside lines) as opposed to end-rhymes. Feel free to play with slant rhymes, assonance, and eye rhymes here—and play with the patterns, rather than following them strictly.

Don’t work with these metrical/rhyming forms, and instead imitate the pattern of one of the sonnets given in handout.

Whatever you choose, remember that a sonnet employs figurative language and meditates on a single subject. Perhaps more than any assignment we’ve done in class, writing a sonnet means carefully weighing each word.

(read also the definition of the sonnet in the Norton pages 2042-2045 and all the poems referenced in that section)

Selected Sonnets

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503—24 September 1542)

Who so list to hount, I knowe where is an hynde,

But as for me, helas, I may no more:

The vaynetravaill hath weried me so sore.

I ame of theim that farthest cometh behinde.

Yet may I by no meanes my weriedmynde

Drawe from the Diere: but as she fleeth afore,

Faynting I folowe. I leve of therefore,

Sins in a nett I seke to hold the wynde.

Who list her hount I put him owte of dowbte,

As well as I may spend his tyme in vain:

And, graven with Diamonds, in letters plain

There is written her faier neck roundeabowte:

Noli me tangere, for Cesars I ame,

And wylde for to hold though I seme tame.

John Milton(9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674)
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.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (28 July 1844 – 8 June 1889)

The Windhover

To Christ our Lord

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-

dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéerplód makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

The curtal sonnet is a form invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and used in three of his poems.It is an eleven-line (or, more accurately, ten-and-a-half-line) sonnet, but rather than the first eleven lines of a standard sonnet it consists of precisely ¾ of the structure of a Petrarchan sonnet shrunk proportionally. The octave of a sonnet becomes a sestet and the sestet a quatrain plus an additional “tail piece.” That is, the first eight lines of a sonnet are translated into the first six lines of a curtal sonnet and the last six lines of a sonnet are translated into the last four and a half lines of a curtal sonnet. Hopkins describes the last line as half a line, though in fact it can be shorter than half of one of Hopkins’s standard sprung rhythm lines.

Pied Beauty

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; / 5
And álltrádes, 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: / 10
Praise him.

Seamus Heaney (13 April 1939—30 August 2013)

The Seed Cutters

They seem hundreds of years away. Breughel,

You’ll know them if I can get them true.

They kneel under the hedge in a half-circle

Behind a windbreak wind is breaking through.

They are the seed cutters. The tuck and frill

Of leaf-sprout is on the seed potatoes

Buried under that straw. With time to kill

They are taking their time. Each sharp knife goes

Lazily halving each root that falls apart

In the palm of the hand: a milky gleam,

And, at the centre, a dark watermark.

O calendar customs! Under the broom

Yellowing over them, compose the frieze

With all of us there, our anonymities.

Strange Fruit

Here is the girl’s head like an exhumed gourd.

Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth.

They unswaddled the wet fern of her hair

And made an exhibition of its coil,

Let the air at her leathery beauty.

Pash of tallow, perishable treasure:

Her broken nose is dark as a turf clod,

Her eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings.

DiodorusSicilus confessed

His gradual ease among the likes of this:

Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible

Beheaded girl, outstaring axe

And beatification, outstaring

What had begun to feel like reverence.

Bernadette Mayer

You jerk you didn’t call me up

I haven’t seen you in so long

You probably have a fucking tan

besides that instead of making love tonight

You’re drinking your parents to the airport

I’m through with you bourgeois boys

All you ever do is go back to ancestral comforts

Only money can get—even Catullus was rich but

Nowadays you guys settle for a couch

By a soporific color cable t.v.set

Instead of any arc of love, no wonder

The G.I. Joe team blows it every other time

Wake up! It’s the middle of the night

You can either make love or die at the hands of the Cobra Commander

Incandescent War Poem Sonnet

Even before I saw the chambered nautilus
I wanted to sail not in the us navy
Tonight I’m waiting for you, your letter
At the same time his letter, the view of you
By him and then by me in the park, no rhymes
I saw you, this is in prose, no it’s not
Sitting with the molluscs & anemones in an
Empty autumn enterprise baby you look pretty
With your long eventual hair, is love king?
What’s this? A sonnet? Love’s a babe we know that
I’m coming up, I’m coming, Shakespeare only stuck
To one subject but I’ll mention nobody said
You have to get young Americans some ice cream
In the artificial light in which she woke

Laynie Browne

fromDaily Sonnets, #108

So as not to wake you I undress on the stairs

Bulb extinguished as I write like a bee

upon this controversial table

My absence is something

I cannot explain by white space

and yet your look misunderstands

what the children resemble as they sleep

Remembering the charm of responsibility

is as inexplicable as human form

Further than habits gathered or dropped

There is no permanence in

devotion of that kind which does

not require a guardian even in rest

You may undo or walk away from anything else

Dawn Lundy Martin

When the bed is empty, we pull the shades to block light,

light of resemblance to remembery, long light of waiting,

an impatience in the glows of it. The here of the now and the glow

that days make in the room, without the body but with the stench

of it. So we say, vacancy and abject, against the was, against

a philosophy of once and then not. Not-being against.

A child once grew here. As lines on a wall. As

growing without knowing what would one day not be. A

gnawing grows. Grew and was. Protection is curled. Motion-

less. I envy her in her room. Hers with paint and dolls and hand-

prints. Great green and glowing under blankets with a hand

that nurtures the heart of the mouth, purrs into mouth, loves

the heart. Heart beating within another—blushing blood—

God, the beating, lit, and doing what it does.

Dan Beachy-Quick

The Cricket and the Grasshopper

The senseless leaf in the fevered hand

Grows hot, near blood-heat, but never grows

Green. Weeks ago the dove’s last cooing strain

Settled silent in the nest to brood slow

Absence from song. The dropped leaf cools

On the uncut grass, supple still, still green,

Twining still these fingers as they listless pull

The tangle straight until the tangle tightens

And the hand is caught, another fallen leaf.

The poetry of the earth never ceases

Ceasing — one blade of grass denies belief

Until its mere thread bears the grasshopper’s

Whole weight, and the black cricket sings unseen,

Desire living in a hole beneath the tangle’s green.