Literature
Sestet
A sestet is a six-line stanza in poetry, often found in sonnets. It is a common form used in Italian and English sonnets, where it typically follows the octave. The sestet allows poets to develop and conclude their ideas, often serving as a resolution or a shift in tone from the preceding octave.
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5 Key excerpts on "Sestet"
eBook - ePubPetrarch the Poet (Routledge Revivals)
An Introduction to the 'Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta'
- Peter Hainsworth(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
The imbalance between the two parts is redressed by weighting the Sestet in various ways. The octet commonly flows with a more even rhythm. Its internal sense-breaks, usually much less pronounced than the one at the end of line 8, occur at the end of the first quatrain, and, still less marked and often ignored altogether, at the end of the couplets (i.e. lines 2 and 6). There are normally no strong sense-breaks within the lines, and there may be strong enjambement within the quatrains, particularly between odd and even lines. Thus there is a tendency, though it is not usually quite carried through in Petrarch (as the model RVF 1 shows), for the rhyme-scheme and the sense-breaks to make interlocking antithetical movements –ABBA against ABAB – unobtrusively reconciling the flow of enjambement and the regularity which is created by end-stopping. The Sestet is also broken into two equal parts, normally with a lesser sense-break between them, corresponding to the break between the quatrains. But the evenness is disrupted; the rhythms are more uneven within lines and more varied between them; there are commonly pauses within the line; and there is a strong final line, a sententia which seems to be the culmination and conclusion of the poem both for its sense and for the force and beauty of its expression. (For these features see the discussion of poem 1 in section 2 above.) It is a dynamic structure which emphasises closure. The sonnet on this model is an in-turned form, the octet looking forward, the Sestet looking back, neither complete without the other but the whole needing nothing but itself. In it all that is floating, indeterminate, disordered, fragmented or meaningless in Petrarch’s poetry finds a place, whilst not being denied for what it is and only within the individual sonnet
eBook - ePubHow to Craft a Great Story
Teach Yourself Creating Perfect Plot and Structure
- Chris Sykes(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Teach Yourself(Publisher)
resolution, provide the solution. The structure of the poem is that the first eight lines set up the argument or debate and the final six lines answer it. The rhyme scheme for the octave is a b b a / a b b a and for the Sestet c d e / c d e.Here is an example of a Petrarchan sonnet written with a slight and permitted variation to the usual rhyme pattern in the last six lines, the Sestet. Instead of the traditional c d e / c d e this poem rhymes c d c / d c d:CANDLE Nature knows no worry and knows no ease, (a) and neither does it know to live outside (b) all it is; seems both to show and to hide, (b) and lives within its generosities. (a) Whether alive in sounds quiet as these, (a) whether quiet as wood with sap inside (b) or at the summit of typhoon sea-tides (b) its perfect method is to start and cease. (a) To cease and start; that’s something we aren’t slow (c) to see or dream about and fear. But face (d) cessation, like water in a weir, go (c) and come, like snowfalls, ice or rain? In space (d) we stand with one small candle-flame we know. (c) It is a vast, glittering dwelling place. (d) The proposition is set up in the first eight lines; the proposition is that nature is neither happy nor unhappy. It does not have consciousness and therefore does ‘not know to live outside all it is’. It has a ‘perfect method’ which is to ‘start and cease’. After the proposition the poem needs to move into the resolution. How does it do this?In a typical Petrarchan sonnet, the ninth line signals a volta
No longer available |Learn more- Sonja Fielitz(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Universitätsverlag Winter(Publisher)
Added to the obligatory requirements, there is of course a range of optional devices governed by the poets’ aesthetic or personal preferences. It was fairly easy for an educated reader to scan and appreciate the visual effect of such elocutionary devices, because such short forms function like well-defined, patterned wholes or planes to be surveyed in its entirety more or less at once. In fact, the practice of marking the structural and thematic divisions of a sonnet visually is a salient trait of several of Petrarch’s sonnets, 38 a particularly full example being Il Canzoniere 140, “Amor, che nel penser mio vive e regna” (“Love, who lives and reigns in my thought”). The sonnet displays clear verbal linkages between the first lines of the octave and the first and last line of the Sestet. 39 The relations thus established between the main phases in a sonnet’s argument became an integral part of sonneteering. In Il Canzoniere 5 “Quando io movo i sospiri a chiamar voi,” a sonnet in which Petrarch skilfully combines the two types of conventions. The fourteen rhymed verses display the common division into two quatrains and two tercets, each unit having a separate rhyme scheme, and the conventional shift of focus from earthly love to its rejection or substitution by divine love after the octave. 40 In addition to this Petrarch introduces the optional, but not unusual pattern of chiastic inversions so as to link the beginning of the first quatrain to the beginning of the first tercet, a device often deployed to mark the reversal ( volta ) of the argument.
eBook - PDFGreen Thoughts, Green Shades
Essays by Contemporary Poets on the Early Modern Lyric
- Jonathan F.S. Post(Author)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- University of California Press(Publisher)
4 2 a n t h o n y h e c h t lover in his stony sestina. The repeated words, inexorable in their order, seem designed to convey a state of obsession, and of gloomy obsession especially. But what Puttenham calls “the makers cunning” may refuse to yield to that mood of solitary and redundant woe or may at the very least wish to vary it through the “cunning” of art. “To make the dittie sensible” is presumably to put those redundancies in a meaningful and effective order; but it may also mean “to create something that is acutely felt; markedly painful or pleasurable.” And a number of poets have taken up the challenge of composing sestinas that defy the mood of desolation seemingly imposed by the rigid monotony of terminal repetition. One such poem is Pound’s bravura “Sestina: Altaforte,” which gleefully rejoices in violence and sanguinary enthusiasm; another is Ashbery’s comic “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape.” Such poems specifically re-pudiate the more familiar and lugubrious music of most sestinas. Of Sidney’s two remaining sestinas in the Arcadia, the one beginning “Farewell O ˆ Sunn, Arcadia ’s clearest light” departs from canonical form by employing rhymes, its first stanza’s terminal words deployed in this order: light, treasure, might, pleasure, direction, affection. The subsequent stanzas redeploy these words according to the canonical system of sestinas, and the poem, in keeping with tradition, is mournful and valedictory throughout. T. S. Eliot, too, wrote a rhymed sestina, although his rhyming links, unlike Sidney’s, did not occur within the limits of a single stanza. In “The Dry Salvages,” third of the Four Quartets, Eliot rhymes all the first lines of his six stanzas with one another, and proceeds to do the same with the terminal words of the five remaining lines.
eBook - PDF- Nigel McLoughlin(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Red Globe Press(Publisher)
Choose six of your personal photographs that you have on display in some way – in a wallet, a frame, on your phone. 2. Lay them out on the desk in front of you in no particular order. 3. Look at each one in turn and identify the punctum – the emotional connection to it – and write it down. 4. Write two tercets on each picture, linking them together to make a 12-stanza terza rima. 5. Make the punctum of each image your starting point, but resist mak-ing the writing ‘over-wrought’ – leave metaphor and sub-text to do their work. 6. Hand over responsibility of narrative order to rhyme. 7. Make use of the devices such as repetition, enjambment and caesura where they serve your purpose. 8. Feel free to use slant/half-rhymes. Bibliography Barthes, Roland (1980) Camera Lucida (London: Vintage Classics) Szirtes, George (2004) Reel (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books) 19 3 The Villanelle Siobhan Campbell What is it? The villanelle is a poem of 19 lines made up of five 3-line stanzas and a 4-line stanza (quatrain) at the end. It has two repeated refrain lines and just two rhymes. The tercets rhyme a-b-a and the concluding quatrain rhymes a-b-a-a, with the sixth, twelfth and eighteenth lines repeating the first line, and the ninth, fifteenth and nineteenth lines repeating the third line. A tercet is a group of three lines of verse that rhyme with each other or with another group of three and it is partly the break between this 3-line stanza form and the final 4-line stanza that energizes the vil-lanelle. The challenge for a poet is to establish two refrain lines that have equal power. These lines are kept apart from the beginning where they form the first and third lines of stanza one and though they relate to each other throughout the work, they do not appear as the couplet they really are until the end when they should come together in an unexpectedly satisfying way.
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