These strange objects were hanging in the trees and swaying in the breeze, along a river pathway in Hastings, Minnesota. As they are approached from a distance, you can't tell what they are. I approached with curiosity and a touch of fear, as to what they might be. It's only as you get closer, you see they are handmade wicker art pieces.

This poem is a Curtal Sonnet, written in the more ancient format of the form.
There is a bit of controversy about the format as to its true structure, its pedigree, and even if it can be called a sonnet. Most sources (including Wikipedia, Poetry Soup, The Poet's Garret, Sonnet Central, and even Webster's dictionary) identify it as a "curtailed" sonnet, and identify the creator of the form as Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1877 using his radical "sprung rhythm." His format has 10.5 lines that are arranged in two stanzas. The first stanza has rhyme scheme abcabc, and the second is either dbcdc or dcbdc. The very last line is indented and shorter. It is, depending on what expert say about the curtal sonnet, either described as a half-line or a single spondee. Hopkins described it as the former, but usually executed it as the latter. It should have a pivot between the sestet and quintet.
However, a site called Poetry Through the Ages, described it this way. "The 10-line, two-stanza Curtal Sonnet actually pre-dated the Petrarchan form, but was only used by the more masterful structural poets. A good example is embedded within the 29 movements of Dante's, La Vita Nuova."
Dante's Curtal Sonnet predates Hopkins by 400 years. It had a rhyme scheme of aabbba cddc, in a more typical meter. So I consider Hopkin's format, with its weird meter, nonsense. I post here with the Dante format as my true example.

This photograph was taken by the author himself on March 8, 2016.

You need to login or register to write reviews. It's quick! We only ask four questions to new members.