I took this photograph of the dome of the Cathedral of St. Paul, in St. Paul, Minnesota, one foggy morning in 2012. In seeking an inspiration for a poem, I came across this image once again. As I sought to see the cross mounted above it through mist, I was inspired to write this poem.

This poem is a Curtal Sonnet.
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, cdddc, 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. He described it as a contraction of the Petrarchan sonnet, whereby the 8 line octave becomes 6, while the sestet is reduced to 5. 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 pentameter. Hopkin's format used a weird meter he called "sprung rhythm." From what I can tell he paid no attention to meter at all. In his poem"Pied Beauty", the meter was variable and the syllable counts were: 9,12,12,10,11,10,10,11,14,10,2. The Poet's Garret described it as follows:
"Sprung rhythm; that has 1-to-4-syllable feet, each starting with a stressed syllable (sometimes a foot by itself), where the Spondee replaces the iamb as the dominant measure, and rests and multiple non-stressed syllables discounted in scansion."
Personally, I think it was undisciplined nonsense. However, to be as true as possible to the format, I wrote this one in variable Spondee.
Spondee is a beat in a poetic line which consists of two consecutive (or more) accented syllables (stressed/stressed) or DUM-DUM stress pattern. It is a poetic device that is not very common, as other metrical feet like iamb and trochee. We rarely find poems written in Spondee alone; however, poets use Spondee by combining with other metrical feet, as I have done here.

This photograph was taken by the author himself in October 2012.

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