Ode to St. Hubert
Saturday morning struggle with rhyme
Look up sonnet accosted by math
Can numbers help me wax poetic
An octave has eight lines, but here I’m
Writing six to stay on curtailed path
Then divide by two quite frenetic
But wait, there’s another knot to fray
The final quatrain adds aesthetic
Instead of four lines it starts to stray
Adding a half to earn my wrath
with arithmetic
NaPoWriMo Prompt – Now for our prompt (optional, as always). Today’s prompt comes to us from Vince Gotera, who wrote his “family member” poem for Day 20 in the form of a curtal sonnet. As Vince explains, the curtal sonnet is shorter than the normal, fourteen line sonnet. Instead it has a first stanza of six lines, followed by a second stanza of four, and then closes with a half-line. The form was invented in the 1800s by Gerard Manley Hopkins, who used it in his famous poem “Pied Beauty”. So for today, I challenge you to give the curtal sonnet a whirl. It doesn’t need to rhyme — though it can if you like — and feel free to branch out beyond iambic pentameter. Happy writing!
I hope everyone read the prompt. I did not; the link for Pied Beauty caught my eye, and I clicked on it. I think it was too early in the morning, because I couldn’t grasp the rhyme scheme so I googled curtal sonnet. Let me tell you, it was definitely too early for THIS. I was an English major NOT a mathematician. However, math has been a subject of note in this house of late. My oldest will be a junior in high school next semester. Because of her excellent grades, her school will pay for her to take four college courses each semester next year. She wants to earn her AS with her high school diploma, but to do that she first had to place into MAT 151. Upon retaking the placement test at the college, she scored a 56. Well above the needed score for MAT 151 and apparently it’s become a competition to beat her score. One of her classmates looked up the patron saint of mathematics for those interested in the title of my poem. Praying to the saint wasn’t helpful. He only scored a 53. Yes, he got above the needed score for the course he’ll be taking, but it didn’t beat my daughter’s score.
However none of this matters because after I figured out the rhyme scheme for the curtal sonnet, I read the rest of the prompt – It doesn’t need to rhyme. Serves me right to get distracted by pretty, shiny links. 😉
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This is really engaging! I very much enjoyed it.
Thank you, Sandi. It was too early on a Saturday morning to see a math equation explaining poetry. 😉
Thanks for explaining this form, new to me. I love your sonnet and the rhyme in it. You’re so clever with words, Veronica. And congratulations to your daughter on her excellent grades and the high score in the placement test! 🙂
Thank you, Irina. We’re very proud of her hard work.
Enjoyed. It was good to see you doing the longer challenge. So proud for your daughter and I wish her well. She seems a worker anyway.
This one is very engaging and it looks like you cleverly solved a tricky math problem. Bonus points for mentioning a quatrain within the poem, that was inspired, along with poetic, frenetic and aesthetic – a one, two, three sucker punch that works very well.