Martin Bidney - Six Beat Sonnet Treats: Intricate, Elegant Gifts for You

Ive been making 400 presents for you during the last fivemonths12/23/19 to 5/24/20and theyre definitely luxury items. The craft level is always high. Vowel harmonies and consonant harmonies are assured because, in addition to the melodious appeal of the intricate end-rhyme patterns, each poem is thorough-rhymed, equipped with ear-pleasuringinternal rhymes throughout.

Every day I write something for youall the days of life are sonnet-worthy. If I have to miss one, I compensate when I get back to work. As with King David, or the Persian Sufipoet Rumi, or the witty mystical German Angelus Silesius, so too for me, writing regularly in a favored form is a way of life.

Unprecedented and amazing about the rhythm format Ichose for this collection is the fact that all the sonnets (meaningfourteen-liners) are in lines with six beats each. The rhythmstructure is iambicit goes la LA, la LA Every la LA isan iamb. We always have the paradigm and ONE, and TWO,and THREE, and FOUR, and FIVE, and SIX. WilliamShakespeare, and his followers for the last four centuries, havemainly sung in five-beat lines. I love those, tooas I provedin Shakespair(2016). But why arent sixes more often employed?Sonnets in this form are startlingly rare in our language.

Meanwhile, the French have triumphed in the mode thatwriters of English have neglected! For a long while thealexandrine, the Gallic analogue to our hexameter, was feltto be the most popular, most effective, most successful type ofsonnet line (see poem 12 below). Ive translated a celebratedexample below, having for decades accustomed myself to readthe French original aloud, relishing the melody-pleasure.

Lets begin with the French, La Beaut, by CharlesBaudelaire (18211867), who published it in his Flowers of Evil(1857); and then Ill immediately add an English renderingIve made.

La Beaut

Je suis belle, mortels, comme un rve de pierre,Et mon sein, o chacun sest meurtri tour tour,Est fait pour inspirer au pote un amourEternel et muet ainsi que la matire.

Je trne dans lazur comme un sphinx incompris;Junis un coeur de neige la blancheur des cygnes;Je hais le movement qui dplace les lignes,Et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris.

Les potes, devant me grandes attitudes,
Que jai lair demprunter aux plus fiers monuments,Consumeront leurs jours en daustres tudes;

Car jai, pour fasciner ces dociles amants,De purs miroirs qui font toutes choses plus belles:Mes yeux, mes larges yeux aux clarts ternelles!

Beauty
by Charles Baudelaire
O mortals! I am lovely as a dream of stone.

My breast, where each one, hurt, may struggle in his turn,
Was made to stimulate in each a love eternal, muter than the merest matter, cold, alone.

In azure throned, I am a riddling sphinx. I keep

My heart snow-cold, my skin more white than any swan.
Mobility, displacing lines, I frown upon
And never do I laugh, and never do I weep.

Before my noble pose, which I may well appearTo borrow from a proud memorial of the brave,Each day the poet will eke out a work austere.

Malleable admirers, look! for you I have

Pure mirrors that will make things beautiful and bright:
My eyeseyes widening, eternally alight.

The highly provocative poem wouldnt let go of me: a few years ago (12/12/17) I wrote a reaction in Baudelairean meter (note that the old word aye in line 4 rhymes with play and means forever):

And never do I laugh, and never do I weepon a line from Beauty by Charles Baudelaire

A dream of stoneself portrait in a single phrase.Her lovers on her breast are hurt, as if twere sharp.The poet glorifies with alexandrine harp
A sphinx unmoved by men, who aye unmoving stays.

Whats wrong with motion? Twould disrupt the magic trance
Whereby she traps admirers with her widened eyes
Where they their image view, untainted, pure, and wise:
Infern-/matern-al, that tyrannical romance.

She naturally cannot laugh, and never cries,For either deed would countervail the raptured gazeThat child-identity will guarantee. She plays

A riddling gamethus will a flatterer be wiseBright glassing of an ego weak with lack of praise,Matern-/etern-al light that blinded will denies.

Can we match the French wordsong makers by creating an oeuvre of comparably thought-provoking power embodied in six-beat sonnet craft? In this book youll find my answer to the question. Not to keep you in suspenseheres a quicksummary of what Ill be suggesting:

Rhododactyl
And can you not perceive the radicality

Of means whereby the novel song would greet the dawn?
The antic, bacchic, mantic mood will not be gone:
The tune-drive, come alive, has grabbed the heart of me.

Arose in Russia, Poland, France, and GermanyThe alexandrine strophe, and it marches onAs will the wakened sun ray to illume the lawn,Responding the robins in their prophecy.

The hexametric sonnetrare in Vestal now.Petrarchan music, though a boon, you may allow,Is likewise an endangered species of the art

Which I to you, today, would joyfully impart.Behold the sparkling ocean and the golden bough:Voice welcome to the life-tide, melody well start!

Each poem satisfies my daily music drive, and it is equallya discipline of mindfulness. It makes me newly mindful of the One Deep Miracle, namely, that there should be anything at all, instead of nothing whatevernot a zero, but a wor(l)d.

I want to point out, in addition, the special pleasures of senior poetry. You have a lifetime to use for your poemsno need to follow the daily papers or podcasts. Composition datesbelow the sonnets in the present book refer to the latest,revised versions: Ive done many makeovers after havingwritten sonnets, on and off, for the last 16 years, the time of my retoolment. Now Id like, more intensively, to help retool the entire heritage of metric tradition in English as I prioritizethe hexameter. Long ago I retooled the notion of self tomaximize time travel as it happens in the mind, in the fluent and fluid memory. From page to page, you cant tell which of my past or present selves may appear.
Occasionally, too, I play with hybrid forms where a threesyllable foot or rhythm unit (LA-la-la is my favorite here, calleda dactyl) substitutes for the expected two-syllable one (la-LA, or the iamb). A couple of times Ive hybridized the six-beatsonnet with the six-beat dactylic couplet of ancient Greeceand Rome. The poets in those cultures didnt employ regular rhyme patterns; in my mixed forms I may write blank verse the way they did (poem 169), but I also like to use rhymes (poem 194)a delightful modern discovery (by modern Imean beginning with the Middle Ages).

Im a troubadour, a lover of beauty. Every line I write can be sung; try inventing melodies for them, if you want, andyoull find the tunes come readily. Be sure to read all thepoems aloud, or the rhythmic melody experience wont happento you. I love seeing people move their lips while they read verse, but you may quickly get to the point where you hear the voice entirely in your head. My poetry is always violinningor melodious vocalizing by other means.