Reading Poetry, and Finding the Volta

22 07 2022

Over the years, I’ve been paying attention to the place of the turn in poetry pedagogy, investigating handbooks and textbooks to see how they attend to the turn, or not. Is the turn mentioned? Is it featured? Is the volta at least mentioned as a key part of the dynamics of the sonnet? Some of what I’ve discovered from this work can be found here, and here, and here.

I’ve also been interested in thinking about the place of the volta in discussions of the sonnet. Some of my thinking on this topic can be found here and here.

My most recent bit of exploration into Tom Furniss and Michael Bath’s Reading Poetry: An Introduction has turned up something very interesting: poetry pedagogy that explicitly recognizes the significance of the volta in sonnets. Though substantive, it’s still something of a brief recognition, a shining moment, with some sparkly follow-up. No matter what, though: it’s all worth considering.

“Part Three” of Reading Poetry, “Texts in Contexts/Contexts in Texts,” is about how information from outside of a poem informs a reading of that poem, including “Genre,” the explicit topic of chapter 11, and the chapter immediately preceding the chapter on “The Sonnet.” The chapter on the sonnet opens with a section titled “The Sonnet as a Fixed Form,” and in it the authors make clear that the sonnet was explicitly selected by them to continue the “discussion of genre…because [the sonnet] is in many ways a representative form as well as a distinctive genre” (280–I’m citing the first edition, from 1996). The authors liken the sonnet to a limerick, noting that the sonnet “is another example of a fixed or ‘closed’ form because its defining characteristics are largely formal” (280). Knowing about the sonnet’s form is crucial: “Arguably, it is possible to make sense of many poems without consciously identifying their genres, but to read a sonnet without recognizing that it is a sonnet is likely to frustrate any competent understanding” (280). 

The section “The Sonnet as a Fixed Form” then glances at Shakespeare’s sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”), noting its rhyme scheme while also observing that “It is not difficult to show how this structure of three quatrains and a final couplet corresponds to particular developments in the argument of the sonnet,” including how, at the beginning of the third quatrain, “the speaker turns” (281). This interest in the turn only builds. The authors go on to state,

As this brief analysis shows, the overall argument of the poem has a logical structure that corresponds to the divisions of the verse form into three four-line sections and a final couplet. Each quatrain contains a stage of that argument, or a unit of sense that is syntactically complete by the end of the quatrain. Shakespeare’s argument depends on a contrast between the tenor and vehicle of his proposed metaphor, a contrast which turns on the word “But” at the beginning of line 9. That turn in the argument occurs at the place which had become the most important of the structural divisions in the sonnet form as it had evolved in Italy and elsewhere in the two hundred years or more before 1609 [the date of the first printing of Shakespeare’s sonnets]. (281)

The authors then define the sonnet: “A sonnet is a short poem in iambic pentameters, fourteen lines long, which can often be divided into two parts know as the ‘octave’, the first eight lines, and the ‘sestet’, the last six” (281). They differentiate the English and Italian sonnets, noting how “the Italian form appears to insist more strongly than the Shakespearian on a division between octave and sestet, which is why Italian readers coined the term ‘volta’ (‘turn’) to refer to this shift which the introduction of new rhyme sounds appears to signal after line eight” (281-2). They add: “In the Shakespearian sonnet each quatrain introduces new rhyme sounds, and the major formal break appears to be the shift from the three alternately rhymed quatrains to the final rhymed couplet, which is why some textbooks define the ‘turn’ in an English sonnet as occurring after line twelve” (282).

What’s beautiful about all of this, of course, is the focus on the turn, a focus that only increases in the next section, “Finding the Volta: Form and Meaning.” This section begins, “If things were this simple, we could end this chapter here. Needless to say, they are not” (282). The authors note that the volta is more than “just a matter of a shift in the rhyme pattern,” recognizing the shift between octave and sestet “corresponds to a turn in the syntax or grammar, a change in the argument or subject matter” (282). They refer back to the turn in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, then note that “Such a turn is very common in sonnets of all types,” and observe that the terminology used for Italian sonnets also can and should be used as well for English sonnets as “it can refer not just to sonnets’ rhyme scheme, but also to the conventionalized structure of their arguments” (282).

The authors then turn to discuss Shakespeare’s sonnets 130 (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”) and 29 (“When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”). As I’ve already discussed in a previous post the incredibly interesting discussion of the strange volta in Sonnet 130, I’ll leap to their discussion of Sonnet 29, where the authors’ commentary is perhaps a bit less idiosyncratic but at least as effusive about the power of the turn. For them, the sestet “overturns” the octave at the location of the volta, the poem’s “major shift”–and they add, as well, that “Certainly, the final couplet also stands apart in some ways by presenting a final resolution of the argument, identifying–for the first time–the ‘love’ which explains and motivates the turn, justifies the compliment, and finally reveals that this sonnet is some kind of love poem” (284).

Though Furniss and Bath note that other readings of this sonnet are possible–including one focused less on love and more on the patronage behind the sonnet (284-5)–they reemphasize that their point holds about the “clear way” the poem’s “formal and argumentative structures” relate  (285). They make clear, as well, that Sonnet 29 “is by no means exceptional, for that accommodation of meaning to form–or form to meaning–is crucial to the sonnet as a genre” (285). They continue: “Learning how to recognize and analyze this interplay of form and meaning is the fundamental skill required of any competent reader of sonnets. As with any genre convention, it is a matter of programming your expectations as a reader…” (285). 

However, after this, Furniss and Bath really do settle again into focusing for the most part on form rather than the structural volta. After a brief examination of the topic of “Identifying a Speaker,” Furniss and Bath then move in a section called “Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnets’: A Hybrid Form?” to a close consideration of one of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, “At the round earth’s imagin’d corners, blow.” Of course, the authors note that “This sonnet turns very decisively on the ‘But’ of line 9” (286). How could they not?! This is one of the most shocking voltas in the sonnet tradition! However, after noting how “the volta at the octave-sestet division stages a dramatic swing in the mood and tone of the poem,” the authors themselves turn to discuss form, making the case that this sonnet’s structure “combines elements of the ‘English’ and the ‘Italian’ sonnet”: “The structure…appears to consist of an Italian octave followed by an English sestet, and the turn in the syntax or argument at the beginning of line 9 coincides with the way the third quatrain breaks away from the tight, infolded rhymes of the octave” (286; 287). Though they have moved back to discussing form, the authors still do the good work of reminding readers that “This hybrid form of sonnet suggests that the rules of this genre were never as rigid as some modern textbooks, with their clear distinction between the ‘Petrarchan’ and ‘Shakespearian’ forms, would have us believe. Indeed, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers did not distinguish between the two types of sonnet, or use our names for them….Whether they staged a turn in the syntax or argument of the sonnet at the beginning of line 9 was an option that always remained open to them, whatever the rhyme pattern used” (287). Also, at least it seems, no matter what, that a sonnet needs a turn.

In the next section, “Expectation and Variation,” Furniss and Bath continue this focus mainly on formal elements. In this section, the authors make the case that “The sonnet is a more protean form (always changing its shape) than our normative description allows” mainly by pointing to other forms, including the Spenserian sonnet and even the 18-line sonnets in Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia (287-8). Consideration of the variations with, say, the placement of the volta, does not enter in the discussions of this section. And this remains largely the case for the rest of the chapter, which moves on to give an overview of the progress of the sonnet. The remaining sections include: “A History of the Genre: Petrarchan Conventions”; “Constructing Voices: An Example from Sir Philip Sidney”; “The English Sonnet Tradition: John Milton”; “The Second Coming of the English Sonnet”; “Finding a Voice: Wordsworth and Milton”; “Romantic Sonnets: John Keats”; and “The Modern Sonnet.”

However, it also is the case that the authors’ keen attention to the volta never fully goes away. How could it? Not only have Furniss and Bath revealed their great interest in the volta, many of the sonnets discussed in the remainder of the chapter have some thrilling turns in them–they cry out to be commented on! These sonnets include Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella 1 (“Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show”); Milton’s “When I consider how my light is spent”; Charlotte Smith’s “Sonnet: Composed during a Walk on the Downs, in November 1787”; and Gwendolyn Brooks’s “the rites for Cousin Vit.” Additionally, Furniss and Bath really have strong interest in the volta. So, they make note of Sidney’s inventiveness with the placement of his ultimate volta (291-2). They also perform an almost Dantean analysis of the structural shifts in Milton’s sonnet, noting that “A useful kind of exercise with this and sonnets like it might be to break down the sense units in order to see how they correspond with or override the conventional divisions of the verse structure” (293). However, they go further to investigate the strange placement of the volta in Milton’s sonnet–“at a strong caesura in the middle of line 8”–and then speculate about a reason for that placement, stating, “One reason for this premature appearance of the volta, we might suggest, is that this is a sonnet about patience and frustration. The volta is perhaps anticipated because it is acting out the very manner in which ‘Patience’ (8) intervenes to ‘prevent / That murmur’. ‘Patience’ is the sestet’s answer to the octave’s question, and patience here is impatient” (295).

I love this reading! It really jibes with my work on “Strange Voltas.” In fact, I wish I’d encountered Reading Poetry prior to writing that brief essay. Furniss and Bath would have provided me with some fine material for that work, including this excellent summation of the powerfully (mis-)placed volta: “Whether or not a sonnet’s rhyme scheme corresponds with, or runs counter to, that semantic shift is always likely to be of interest, for the point about sonnets is that their conventional verse pattern traditionally relates to the organization of meaning in ways which are more direct than is the case with almost any other poetic genre” (282).

I’m happy to report, though, that I also think I could have brought something to Furniss and Bath’s reading of Brooks’s sonnet. Furniss and Bath are right, I think, to see the Brooks’s volta as occurring early in her sonnet–they suggest it occurs “in line 5, where the speaker imagines the corpse’s liberation from confinement in the coffin” (301)–and I think they’re pretty much right about that. However, the authors still feel compelled to recognize something happening between the octave and the sestet, so they speculate, asking, “Would it be true to say that there is more approval or celebration of [Cousin Vit’s] vitality in the octave, but more criticism and disapproval implied in the sestet?” (301-2). Perhaps, but there’s no need to fish for something there. As I argue in “Strange Voltas,” what’s beautiful about this sonnet is the way that Cousin Vit is so vital she not only breaks out of caskets and through death, but she also breaks the sonnet structure.

But that is a quibble. Furniss and Bath do great work, in my estimation, with honoring and thinking about the volta significance to the sonnet. 

Next step: an introduction to poetry–besides John Ciardi’s How Does a Poem Mean?, from 1959 (!)–that is as interested and invested in the turn for all of the poems under discussion–not just the sonnets!


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Categories : Pedagogy, poetic turn, structure-form distinction, volta

Strange Voltas

2 10 2020

Structurally, the sonnet is largely a field of expectation. At one level, every sonnet is a concrete poem that represents a sonnet. When you look at a block of text, you can gather pretty quickly that it’s a sonnet, or at least a near-sonnet. But that’s not all. At another level, if one were to make a heat map of where the dynamic action of sonnets takes place, we all know where the white heat would be: at the volta. Numerous recent conversations about the sonnet understand the volta as being crucial to the sonnet’s identity and its power. Phillis Levin’s introduction to The Penguin Book of the Sonnet calls the volta “the seat of [the sonnet’s] soul.” Additionally, some recent essays, including Monica Youn’s “Petrarch’s Hangover: An Argument in Five Sonnets” and Adam O’Riordan’s “The Sonnet as a Silver Marrow Spoon,” speak to the volta’s centrality to, and vitality within, the sonnet tradition.

And yet, for all its dynamic power, the volta often is thought to be nestled in the sonnet in some fairly predictable ways: if mapping the energy of a sonnet in the Petrarchan tradition, our heat map would glow at the turn from octave to sestet, or else, when mapping a Shakespearean sonnet, at the turn into the final couplet. However, commentators are slowly but surely coming to realize the fact that—as its large-scale shift from Italian to English position indicates—the location of the volta in fact has long been not something settled but rather another source for poetic experimentation. In “On Sonnet Thought,” Christina Pugh states, “Whether it occurs before the closing couplet in the Shakespearean sonnet, before the sestet in the Petrarchan scheme, or elsewhere in a sonnet, the volta’s often breathtakingly indefinable pivot remains a vital component of the governing structure.”

Here, I wish to consider voltas that occur not at somewhat predictable Petrarchan or Shakespearean points but rather “elsewhere” in sonnets in order to suggest that the volta’s location has long been a site of poetic experimentation and to offer new ways to appreciate some more recent American sonnets. I will demonstrate that, while sonnets always ask readers to expect the unexpected, readers need to be alert to the shifting location of the volta as such shifts not only amplify surprise but also contribute greatly to a sonnet’s signification by underscoring or undercutting—enacting or effacing—meaning.

Here, very quickly, are three established, canonical sonnets that will help us get a sense of the versatility of voltaic location. Consider:

  • The seventy-first sonnet of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (“Who will in fairest book of nature know”). Here, Astrophil, the comedically lovelorn speaker of this sonnet sequence, tries to explain how his beloved Stella can be so beautiful that, instead of her hotness bothering anyone (especially Astrophil), her beauty can turn that attraction virtuous. The argument nearly works–the poem gets by all major turning points!–only to be undercut at the last moment by the monosyllabic rumblings of still-unsated Desire. With this genius last line, this sonnet skillfully enacts the return of the repressed.
  • George Herbert’s “Prayer (I).” Herbert’s sonnet mainly is a list, an effort to enumerate the many things that prayer is, to account for its many aspects. It is not precisely clear where it is going–indeed, the poem seems lost in its own inventiveness, a sense underscored by the fact that no big turn has yet occurred–until a mere two words from the end, when suddenly–much as in another Herbert poem, “The Collar”–there’s a quieting miracle, the echo of a prayer’s finally submissive so be it, Amen.
  • William Wordsworth’s “Surprised by joy.” This sonnet contains one of the earliest major turns in a sonnet: after having had a Wordsworthian epiphanic moment–as the poet would put it in another of his poems, his heart leapt up–the speaker turns to share his joy with a loved one (in this case, the poet’s daughter Catherine) only to remember at the second line’s “Oh!” that she is not there, that she has died. After this powerful turn from the physical act of turning, the rest of the poem–the vast majority of it–is largely merely an awful reckoning with the mind’s ability to recuperate from–and even take sublime pleasure after–such loss. In this way, the sonnet enacts its own chastening.

So while, especially for a symposium focused on “Sonnets from the American,” I’d like to be able to say that, in a way similar to Shakespeare’s remixing of Petrarchan form and structure, Americans took the English sonnet and made it our own by experimenting in vastly new ways with the placement of the volta, I can’t. But I can say that, even if not exactly pioneers when it comes to resettling, or perhaps unsettling, the volta, American sonneteers (I’m guessing very much like sonneteers of other nationalities) continue the experiment, toying with where the volta occurs, pushing it around, playing with the sonnet’s pattern of expectation to create new, special effects.

Here are just a few examples:

  • Along with Wordsworth’s “Surprised by joy,” Gwendolyn Brooks’s “the rites for Cousin Vit” contains one of the earliest major voltas in a sonnet: it occurs at the “But,” about half-way through the second line. “the rites for Cousin Vit” is a poem celebrating the life of the deceased Cousin Vit, a figure of vitality, and this sonnet honors Cousin Vit not only by saying that Vit’s liveliness cannot be contained but also by enacting it: Vit is so powerful, she doesn’t only break out of her casket and into the energy of her former life, she also breaks the sonnet structure, forcing the sonnet to turn almost immediately from death to resurrection.
  • Even without its great turn, which comes after line 14, Bernadette Mayer’s “[Sonnet] You jerk you didn’t call me up” has terrific torquing energy. In it, the speaker lambasts her (potentially soon-to-be former) lover for his inattentiveness, complaining that even other imperfect lovers such as Catullus–who may have both odi’ed et amo’ed but at least still amo’ed–at least were drawn into the drama of passion, unlike her sophomoric dude-bro. The speaker uses this argument to try to get the lover to “Wake up!” and then challenges him: either make love to me, she says, or settle in for another night of masturbation–though Cobra Commander is G.I. Joe’s enemy, that final image also can be read as petit morting in hand-to-hand combat with the king of snakes. This sonnet already is sassy and hilarious, but then it gets even better. As in a poem like John Donne’s “The Flea,” there’s drama here around the words. After the sonnet is complete, the speaker waits for an actual choice to be made. Nothing happens. Fed up, then, there’s a final turn: if the dude-bro doesn’t understand passion, perhaps he’ll understand the language of a child’s choose-your-own-adventure story. But of course, there’s likely really no longer a choice–the speaker is through wasting time on who she is, after the silence following the passionate decision offered in the volta, clearly greater than, and, so, over with.
  • In her introduction to The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Phillis Levin notes that “[t]hough a poet will sometimes seem to ignore the volta, its absence can take on meaning, as well–that is, if the poem already feels like a sonnet.” No poem that I know of typifies this more than Ron Padgett’s “Nothing in That Drawer,” a sonnet that repeats the phrase “Nothing in that drawer” fourteen times. This poem only stays interesting for as long as it does because its nullity intrigues in the sonnet’s field of expectation. Each turn from line to line allows us to hope for something new to break the monotony, and beyond that, we may wish for a structural, voltaic turn at octave’s end or turning into the couplet–or anywhere else, for that matter!–but it doesn’t come. Padgett’s nothingness is thus greatly amplified by being played on the instrument of the sonnet.

Much more work needs to be done to explore the dynamics of structural turning in sonnets. How else do poets use the sonnet’s patterned expectations to deliver their own singular surprises? How do poets orchestrate major and minor voltas in sonnets? Given the sonnet’s brevity, and the tendency to see–wherever they occur–one or two (or maybe three) big turns in any one sonnet, is it possible, as Terrance Hayes suggests in his “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin” which begins “The song must be cultural, confessional, clear” and which reads as a kind of ars poetica for Hayes’s sonnet sequence, for a new kind of sonnet to contain “a clamor / Of voltas”?

When it comes to thinking about the place of the volta in the sonnet, the poets are well in front of the commentators. We need to catch up. But this is fine; it presents opportunities. Here’s one:

In The Making of a Sonnet, editors Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland include a section called “The Sonnet Goes to Different Lengths” in order to highlight the sonnet’s formal variety. There should, however, also be a selection of sonnets called “Strange Voltas,” which gathers sonnets that experiment with the sonnet’s structural components, with how and where sonnets turn. Hopefully, an increased awareness of this aspect of sonnet construction can lead to even more alert reading and understanding, and perhaps even to further, grander and/or subtler experiments.


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Categories : poetic turn, Uncategorized, volta