The curtal sonnet is a form invented by
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins (28 July 1844 – 8 June 1889) was an English poet and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame placed him among leading Victorian poets. His prosody – notably his concept of sprung rhythm – established him as an innova ...
, and used in three of his poems.
It is an eleven-line (or, more accurately, ten-and-a-half-line)
sonnet
A sonnet is a poetic form that originated in the poetry composed at the Court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the Sicilian city of Palermo. The 13th-century poet and notary Giacomo da Lentini is credited with the sonnet's inventio ...
, 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.
[Pitchford, "The Curtal Sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins". ''Modern Language Notes'', Vol. 67, No. 3. (Mar., 1952), pp. 165–169.] The
octave
In music, an octave ( la, octavus: eighth) or perfect octave (sometimes called the diapason) is the interval between one musical pitch and another with double its frequency. The octave relationship is a natural phenomenon that has been refer ...
of a sonnet becomes a
sestet and the sestet a
quatrain
A quatrain is a type of stanza, or a complete poem, consisting of four lines.
Existing in a variety of forms, the quatrain appears in poems from the poetic traditions of various ancient civilizations including Persia, Ancient India, Ancient Gree ...
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
Sprung rhythm is a poetic rhythm designed to imitate the rhythm of natural speech. It is constructed from feet in which the first syllable is stressed and may be followed by a variable number of unstressed syllables. The British poet Gerard Manle ...
lines. In the preface to his ''Poems'' (1876–89), Hopkins describes the relationship between the Petrarchan and curtal sonnets mathematically; if the Petrarchan sonnet can be described by the equation 8+6=14 then, he says, the curtal sonnet would be:
:
.
Hopkins's only examples of the form are "
Pied Beauty", "Peace", and "Ash Boughs". "Pied Beauty" reads as follows, showing the proportional relation to the Petrarchan sonnet (not included in the original: the only indication of the form is in the preface). Accents indicate stressed syllables:
Hopkins's account of the form comes from the preface to his ''Poems'' (1876–89).
Critics are generally in agreement that the curtal sonnet does not so much constitute a new form as an interpretation of sonnet form as Hopkins believed it to be; as Elisabeth Schneider argues, the curtal sonnet reveals Hopkins's intense interest in the mathematical proportions of all sonnets. Lois Pitchford examines all three poems in detail in relation to the form as Hopkins imagined it.
The form has been used occasionally since, but often as a novelty, in contrast to Hopkins's quite serious use. Poets
Lucy Newlyn
Lucy Newlyn (born 1956) is a poet and academic. She is Emeritus Fellow in English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, having retired as professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford in 2016.
Newlyn is a specialist in eighteenth ...
and
R. H. W. Dillard have written examples that serve as explications of the form.
See also
*
Caudate sonnet
References
{{reflist
Sonnet studies
ja:ソネット#カータル・ソネット