Sherry Chandler » A curtal sonnet
A curtal sonnet
Peace
WHEN will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite
To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?
O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins, from Poems (London: Humphrey Milford, 1918; Bartleby.com, 1999)
According to Fussell, a curtal or curtailed sonnet is a form invented by Hopkins. It cuts the “octave” to six lines and the “sestet” to 5½. It rhymes abcabc dbcdc. Fussell argues that there is nothing at all to justify calling this a sonnet, primarily because it has no real turn, no “problem” and “solution,” and because the linked rhymes in the two halves join rather than distinguish the two parts of the argument. Hopkins didn’t seem to find the form terribly attractive either. Apparently he only wrote two, two that saw publication anyway, this one and the more well-known “Pied Beauty.”
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