I found this passage particularly interesting:

Try speaking the following two sentences as naturally as you can, stressing in each the four syllables marked:

There’s a néw mánager at the wórks todáy
There’s a néw bóss thére nów.

Although the first has eleven syllables, and the second only six, you will find that the two sentences take about the same time to speak. The reason for this is not hard to see: a speaker of English tries to space the stressed syllables evenly, so that both sentences contain four time-units. … This characteristic of the English language plays a part in the rhythm of English poetry, since a sequence of stressed syllables makes the verse move slowly, whereas a sequence of unstressed syllables makes it move fast.

This is an elementary point, but one I found revelatory in that it clearly articulated something I had only understood on instinct before. The book also points out that many languages other than English space all syllables evenly. In our case, however, we have a built-in mechanism for the equivalent of musical rubato.

This is what enabled Gerard Manley Hopkins to cluster stressed and unstressed syllables into a metrical invention he called sprung rhythm, and what allowed the beats to mimic the syncopation of jazz.

At the end of The Bourgeois Gentleman, the main character is surprised and delighted to discover he has been speaking prose all his life. Call me bourgeois, but I, too, am in fact delighted to have discovered this simple, mechanical understanding of the meter-making elements of the language in which I have been inventing, both poetry and prose, ever since my first uttered word.

“Go forth: amidst our chaffinch flock display
Thy plumage of far wonder and heavenward flight!”

Reading “Poems 1876-89″ in The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Fourth Edition), it struck me how much of his verse was not necessarily much more technically interesting than other poets of the Nineteenth century. What remains remarkable are his most famous poems, which seem to typify and embody what he strove toward in other works. Most of his poems employ what he calls “sprung rhythm,” which is simply a dense clustering of stressed or non-stressed syllables in a way that was not typical at a time when two- and three-syllable feet, and especially iambs and trochees, ruled the day. Yet this particular break from convention is not interesting in itself. Hopkins’s work gets most interesting when he focuses so intently on the music of the poem as to push the literal meaning aside, and further compounds, enhances, and transcends any such meaning with revelatory line breaks.

Consider one of my favorite poems:

The Windhover:
To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
  dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn falcon, in his riding
  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
  As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,–the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
  Buckle! And the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

This poem is a variant on the Italian sonnet form with only four rhyming groups spread across the fourteen lines. Yet the dense internal rhythms, rhymes, and alliterations subsume the musical nature of the form, bending it to an even more musical purpose. Much of this happens through the line breaks. Consider the opening, “I caught this morning morning’s minion, king- / dom of daylight’s dauphin.” Here we are set up with a huge expectation of repetition right from the beginning with “morning morning’s minion.” Next we see the word “king” hung on a line, next to the word “minion,” which makes its own kind of initial meaning since the words are opposites. Then it is revealed to be only half of the word “kingdom”–of “daylight’s dauphin” no less, continuing the alliteration, the theme of master/servant, and the theme of morning. So many elements are tightly woven together in only the first eleven lines!

Hopkins uses line breaks like this one as a kind of revelation. He also often employs the colon to similar effect as well as, though to a lesser degree than Dickinson, the hyphen. The point is that the poem itself becomes a revelation, as the meaning of previous lines alters by the time we have read the next line. One of the most exquisite moments of revelation in the poem comes with “the hurl and gliding / Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding / Stirred for a bird,” which, having become so delightfully disoriented by previous lines, we might read as, “the hurl and gliding rebuffed” and then “the big wind: my heart.” The revelation of the speaker’s own heart comes after an immense build-up, and changes meaning before our very eyes. The ending lines speak for themselves, as the crescendo of list-making reaches a dizzying pitch, beyond the realm of conventional meaning, in a kind of bird-Christ rapture.

Strangely enough, for all his metrical genius, Hopkins is a kind of forebearer to free verse, in that he focuses on the same kinds of poetic elements that excited our poetic grandparents like Stevens and Williams. Yet unlike our great-grandparent, Whitman, Hopkins arrived in this territory not by slackening and expanding his lines to make a kind of breathless natural speech, but by compressing them intensely, pushing the boundary in the opposite direction. In doing so, he extracts essential, non-literal aspects of poetry that remain a vital influence.

Yet some have done it surprisingly well. Of the poems I liked best toward the latter half of this anthology, there seemed to be three general types of poems that employed either dense music to drown out the form; an “absurd” subject matter juxtaposed against the intricate, labyrinthine turns of the form; or a very faint adherence to the form, giving a vague echo or nod to the tradition while also breaking free.

An excellent and very early example of “dense music” can be heard in the sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I mention him in the context of contemporary poets (though he falls chronologically in the middle of the book) because his associative leaps are as bold as any Wallace Stevens poem and his strange sprung rhythms are characteristically his own. The musicality in such classic poems as “God’s Grandeur” or “The Windhover” completely subsumes the sonnet form, making each poem uniquely Hopkins.

Another, more modern example of dense music drowning out the all-too-familiar cadences of the sonnet are poems by Seamus Heaney. His lugubrious, rich, full relationship to language, darkly overshadowed by his Irish accent, drown out the ending rhymes such that we focus more on the dense internal rhymes and lush linguistic rhythms. To a lesser, and different extent, Paul Muldoon’s sonnets are likewise dense with internal music, although they are not as tightly controlled or as obsessed with the sounds and rhythms of words. Muldoon peppers his sonnets with idea-surprises (consider “October 1950″) that go equally as far as music in distracting us from, and transcending, the form.

Besides drowning out the form, another option is to succumb to it–but with a subject so iconoclastic to the witty volta that it adds energy through tension. An excellent example of this approach are the poems from Marilyn Hacker’s Cancer Winter that are included in this anthology. The intense experience of a full single mastectomy and resulting physical and psychological recovery are pitted against the quip-like chiming of a the classic Italian sonnet form. The Italian form reveals its “device” even more than the English form, since the kissing rhyme places rhymed lines right next to each other–something that sounds more contrived in English than it does in Italian, where rhyme-able word combinations abound. The intense disparity between form and subject reflect the speaker’s dissociative experience of loss.

Equally awkward and compelling are J.D. McClatchy’s series of poems about his male mammogram, discovery of excess estrogen in his body, and resulting musing about his androgyny. Again, by pitting an embarrassingly personal and awkward, intimate situation with the rigid sonnet form, he draws out the difference between the glib, hyper-professional medical staff and the uncomfortably intimate subjects they probe and examine. But “absurd” subjects need not be deeply personal–our world is rife with examples of the ironic and surreal.

In Charles Martin’s “Easter Sunday, 1985″ the absurdity of Guatemala’s president confronting the notion that desaparecidos (political dissidents who disappeared under his totalitarian regime) could resurrect is carefully explored in the first two stanzas. Then, in the volta of the last two stanzas, he compares this kind of resurrection to the resurrection of Christ, ending on the compelling image of Jesus “Broken and killed, flung into some ravine / With his arms safely wired up behind him.” Martin resists abstraction and rhetoric and, by taking the absurd seriously and pouring it into a modified Italian sonnet form, he renders a compelling disparity between totalitarian rhetoric and its underlying brutality.

A third option for contemporary sonneteer-ing I have identified through this text is to exhibit only a faint adherence to the form. I was surprised to see a poem by Louise Glück in the collection, adhering to her characteristic form and clearly “breaking” the rules of classic sonnets. On further examination, the turns involved in this (and many) of her poems exhibit a kind of faint adherence to the spirit of the sonnet’s volta. Another example of muting some of the more intractable difficulties of the sonnet form by only vaguely adhering to the tradition is Dana Gioia’s “Sunday Night In Santa Rosa.” Gioia uses subtle, slant rhyme and refuses to rhyme the ending couplet–instead relying on a compelling image of a clown peeling away his face as a kind of comparable “ta-da” to the traditional couplet.

Another example of faint adherence to sonnet form is Henri Cole’s series “Chiffon Morning.” Here Cole pursues the somewhat awkward and personal subject of his mother’s final days but, rather than creating dissonance by employing a strict Italian form, Cole employs the English form and mutes the flourishes of this form using slant rhyme and strange, disorienting associations within the lines. This represents a kind of amalgam of the above techniques of taking liberties, exploring a compelling theme, and drowning the form out with other interesting intellectual and musical goings-on within the middles of lines.

These three tactics of dense music, absurd subject and faint adherence represent my own taxonomy derived from reading selections of the Penguin anthology. Obviously, there are other techniques I have not spotted, and clearly the three I have outlined interweave and interplay with each other as contemporary poets continue to attempted to mitigate the difficulties and capitalize on the assets of this timeless form.