Prompt: Volta

It is said that a young Japanese poet once asked a Chinese poet how to compose a Chinese poem. “The usual Chinese poem is four lines," he was told. "The first line contains the initial phrase. The second line is the continuation of that phrase. The third line turns from this subject and begins a new one. But the fourth line brings the first three lines together."

A popular Japanese song illustrates this:

Two daughters of a silk merchant live in Kyoto.
The elder is twenty, the younger, eighteen.
A soldier may kill with his sword,
But these girls slay men with their eyes.

Many well-known four-line Chinese poems, particularly those in the jueju (or quatrain) form, masterfully incorporate a "turn" or a shift in perspective, mood, or subject matter in the third line, before the concluding fourth line brings the poem to a close.

Poems from all cultures often have a turn. That turn is known as the "volta" which comes from Italian, meaning “turn.” It traces back to the Latin verb volvere, which means “to roll” or “to turn." In poetry, it metaphorically represents a shift in thought, emotion, or argument. 

Petrarch, the 14th-century Italian poet, popularized the sonnet form that includes a volta between the octave (8 lines) and the sestet (6 lines). In his sonnets, the octave presents a problem or situation, and the sestet offers a resolution or counterpoint.  Later, Shakespearean sonnets adopted a different placement for the turn. It often appears before the final rhymed couplet.

Two examples of turns in longer English poems: In Shakespeare’s "Sonnet 18," the turn comes at line 9: “But thy eternal summer shall not fade…” —shifting from admiring nature to praising the beloved’s lasting beauty. In Elizabeth Bishop’s "The Moose," the turn moves from a mundane bus ride to a mystical encounter with a moose and transforms the poem’s tone and meaning.

"Question And Answer On The Mountain" by Li Po:

You ask for what reason I stay on the green mountain,
I smile, but do not answer, my heart is at leisure.
Peach blossom is carried far off by flowing water.
Apart, I have heaven and earth in the human world.

 For our September issue, we are interested in the shorter jueju form popular during the Tang Dynasty where the turn occurs in line 3 of the 4-line poem. Not unlike haiku, this structure allows for a "finale" and invites reflection. 

"On Returning Home," by He Zhizhang, is a double jueju, so there are two turns. 

When young, I left home, now old, I return.
My hometown accent is still the same.
Children don't know who I am.
Smiling, they point at the strange man.

I dismount my horse at the gate of my house.
I ask after the old friends I knew.
Where are the peach and plum trees, now gone with the spring wind?
The old man who lives there is no longer me.

A turn is a shift in a poem’s tone or mood. It could indicate a turn from sorrow to hope. It could also indicate a turn in perspective or speaker, or mark a turn in an argument, or imagery.

The turn (or turns, in poems of multiple stanzas) in a poem can add several things. It can add depth by introducing complexity and surprise. In a longer poem, it adds movement, keeping the poem dynamic. Near the end of a poem, it can present a resolution to earlier ideas, or even intensify rather than resolve them.

Your poem can be as short as those 4-line Chinese poems, or you can have multiple stanzas, BUT then each stanza must be 4 lines and each contain a turn. 

Submission Deadline: August 31, 2025, for our September issue.

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The Sonnets

I like this edition's cover image showing hands trimming
the tip of a quill pen, ready to set down a new sonnet.

Shakespeare's sonnets were first published in 1609. They were probably published without Shakespeare's permission in a time when copyright didn't exist as we know it.

The book contained 154 sonnets and all but two of them had never been published before. So, this was new material for readers. Shakespeare (or perhaps the publisher Thomas Thorpe) dedicated the collection to "Mr. W.H." whose identity has never been known with any certainty.

The poems are about love, sex, politics, youth, and the mysterious "Dark Lady." Scholars have written about them for hundreds of years. They have been material for lovers and teachers, and for hopeless and hopeful romantics.

Untitled but for numbers, many of them are known for their first line or one phrase in the poem.

For example, "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun," and W"hen, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state."

Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, a
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimm'd:
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade,
Nor loose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time though grow'st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Stories in Verse

Marilyn Nelson has an impressive body of children’s and adult poetry and other books. I had read her book of poems The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems  but I more recently found her book, How I Discovered Poetry which is written for a younger audience.

How I Discovered Poetry is not a book about poetry or a how-to about discovering poetry as the title might suggest. It a fictionalized memoir in verse. The book includes line-and-shade illustrations and Nelson’s family photos.

Nelson says that the "I' in the book is not her, but it is certainly based on her experiences from ages 4 to 14 as her family moved and lived on numerous military base homes in the 1950s.

She calls it the “portrait of an artist as a young American Negro girl.” It is comprised of fifty autobiographically-inspired sonnets without rhyme which are are part research, part life experience, and part imagination.

The book's title comes from a poem near the end of the book and is perhaps not the warm story we might expect about discovering poetry.


Nelson may be better known for her book A Wreath for Emmett Till.  Back in 1955, it was news that Emmett Louis Till, a fourteen-year-old African American boy, was lynched for supposedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi.

It was a brutal murder. His mother had an open-casket funeral to let the world see what had happened to him.

The acquittal of the men tried for the crime was a big media story at that time.

His story became one of the triggering events in the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and 1960s. Nelson writes that "I was nine years old when Emmett Till was lynched in 1955. His name and history have been a part of most of my life."

In this book, meant for a high school reader, Nelson uses another heroic crown of sonnets. This is a sequence in which the last line of one poem becomes the first line of the next. She says that she used this form because it " became a kind of insulation, a way of protecting myself from the intense pain of the subject matter." 

                     

The Poetry of Michelangelo

The Statue of David, completed by Michelangelo in 1504,
is one of the most renowned works of the Renaissance.

In writing a post about Michelangelo and his paintings for the Sistine Chapel for another blog, I came across a part of his life I had never known.Almost everyone knows his paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and we know some of his sculpture, such as the David and Pietà.  I don't think many people know about his poetry.


I think that my first real encounter with the life of Michelangelo was watching the film The Agony and the Ecstasy back in the mid-1960s. (I didn't read the best-selling biographical novel by Irving Stone that it was based on.)  I was impressed by the story of those four years he spent completing the paintings that decorate the ceiling of the chapel.

I wrote a poem on my daily poem site this past week and realized later that I had used the same title and a very similar experience for an earlier poem this year. Later, I discovered an even earlier version of the idea in a notebook from 6 years ago. My aging memory and its lapses made me read more about the later years of Michelangelo's life and it was news to me that he turned to writing poetry.
His sexuality is somewhat in question but it is clearly a part of his poetry. He wrote over three hundred sonnets and madrigals.

The longest sequence were written to Tommaso dei Cavalieri. He met Tommasso when he was 57 and Tommasso was 23 years old. The Tommasso poems are the first large sequence of poems in any modern tongue addressed by one man to another. It's a bit surprising to me to realize that Shakespeare's sonnets to the "fair youth" were written only 50 years after Michelangelo's sonnets.

This led me to find a copy of The Complete Poems of Michelangelo at the library.

In a poem to Cavalieri, he writes:

Nay, things that suffer death, quench not the fire
Of deathless spirits; nor eternity
Serves sordid Time, that withers all things rare.

And Cavalieri replied in a letter: "I swear to return your love. Never have I loved a man more than I love you, never have I wished for a friendship more than I wish for yours."

The young nobleman was exceptionally handsome, and his appearance seems to have fit the artist's notions of ideal masculine beauty.  Michelangelo described him as "light of our century, paragon of all the world."

They remained lifelong friends, and Cavalieri was present at the artist's death. Scholars still dispute whether this was a homosexual or paternal relationship.

My lover stole my heart, just over there
– so gently! – and stole much more, my life as well.
And there, all promise, first his fine eyes fell
on me, and there his turnabout meant no.
He manacled me there; there let me go;
There I bemoaned my luck; with anguished eye
watched, from this very rock, his last goodbye
as he took myself from me, bound who knows where.

His homoerotic poetry was something that later generations were uncomfortable with and it never really came into popular books and films about his life. Michelangelo's grandnephew, Michelangelo the Younger, published the poems in 1623 with the gender of pronouns changed to be feminine. The gender was restored to male in John Addington Symonds' translation into English in 1893. in 1547.

    Why should I seek to ease intense desire
    With still more tears and windy words of grief?
    If only chains and bands can make me blest,
    No marvel if alone and naked I go
    An armed Cavaliere's captive and slave confessed.

"Cavaliere" or "cavalry man" is also a play on Cavalieri.

Michelangelo, Self-Portrait

Michelangelo never married and it is unclear whether he had any longterm physical relationship with anyone.  He did have a great love for the poet and noble widow Vittoria Colonna, whom he met in Rome in 1536 or 1538. She was in her late forties and he was in her early 60s at the time.

Colonna's poetry and her zealous religious beliefs greatly influenced Michelangelo and led to his devout interest in Church reform. Although Colonna was apparently physically unattractive, she was the subject of many of Michelangelo's love poems, and she appears to have been the only woman with whom the reclusive artist ever had a serious relationship. They wrote sonnets for each other and their friendship remained important to Michelangelo until her death. When Colonna died suddenly in 1547 at the age of fifty-seven, Michelangelo was heartbroken, and her death ended the period of his greatest love poetry.

ON THE BRINK OF DEATH


Now hath my life across a stormy sea
Like a frail bark reached that wide port where all
Are bidden, ere the final reckoning fall
Of good and evil for eternity.
Now know I well how that fond phantasy
Which made my soul the worshiper and thrall
Of earthly art, is vain; how criminal
Is that which all men seek unwillingly.
Those amorous thoughts which were so lightly dressed,
What are they when the double death is nigh?
The one I know for sure, the other dread.
Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest
My soul that turns to His great love on high,
Whose arms to clasp us on the cross were spread.

Following a brief illness, Michelangelo died on February 18, 1564—just weeks before his 89th birthday—at his home in Rome. A nephew bore his body back to Florence, where he was revered by the public as the "father and master of all the arts," and was laid to rest at the Basilica di Santa Croce—his chosen place of burial.