moi621 (imported) wrote: Mon Dec 03, 2012 12:01 am
Then what is a poem. And a sonnet for that question.
Moi
Iambic, therefore I think
You are confusing verse with poetry and both with poems, by defining the latter entirely by formal structures, some of which (like rime) are widely recognized as superficial and non-essential. C.S. Lewis, commenting on the poet Lawmon, whose Middle English work the Brut is, at over 16,000 lines, the longest poem in the English language, says that Lawmon was incapable of writing a poem but occasionally able to write poetry. What Lewis means is that Lawmon's retelling of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae is shapeless and chaotic, but that there are passages, such as when Arthur looks out over the carnage of battle and compares the fallen knights in the river to steely fishes with swords and then compares the scales of the metaphorical fishes to the shields of knights and their fins to spears that are of great beauty and inventiveness.
[Hū ligeð in þan stæme stelene fishes
mid sweorde bigeorede heore sund is awemmed
heore scalen wleoteð swulc goldfa3e sceldes
þer fleoteð heore spiten swulc hit speren weoren.
The fourteen-line sonnet of Shakespeare is only one of several forms which the sonnet can take. The original meaning was of a short song; Donne's Holy Sonnets have neither a fixed number of lines nor regular stanzas, though Donne recognizes the stanza as a sub-unit in constructing the sonnet; he puns of the Italian meaning of stanza, room. I am by no means a champion of vers libre, and if you want a good formalist introduction to poetry and poems, Timothy Steele's All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing is quite good. Steele's published volumes of verse Sapphics against Anger, The Color Wheel, and Towards the Winter Solstice are also worth reading.
Steele's description of an approaching storm at the beach:
Breeze sent a wrinkling darkness
Across the bay. I knelt
Beneath an upturned boat
And, moment by moment, felt
The sand at my feet grow colder,
The damp air chill and spread.
Then the first raindrops sounded
On the hull above my head.
