Whatso Nature Has Made Poem by Aniruddha Pathak

If a full moon looks stunningly handsome,
So be the new, if only in mind's sphere,
So be the crescent, all phases that come,
All Nature's made has a beauty so rare.
Sun sure is what with light healing my heart,
Yet, sunset hailing night casts its own spell
To contemplating minds that inner dwell,
Whatso has He made marvel be of art.

Repulsive fails to light up mental hall,
Man's innate pursuit might be for the good,
Trite and trivial still be his port of call,
A strange unseen shaping his attitude,
Everything has beauty,
But not all can it see.
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A couple is enjoying a quiet evening together under Nature. Wife says: human pursuit is for the visible and beautiful. The husband agrees but has his own take on the subject. In the end they arrive at a common ground: Everything has beauty, but not all can it see.

This sonnet is not set in the usual octave plus sestet (8+6 lines) . The last two lines are short with 6+6 syllables (together making an equivalent of one line of the usual iambic pentameter) . In other words, the sestet effectively is of 5 lines, and the sonnet of 8+5 lines, not of 14. But there is reason for this deviation.

Let us look into the enigma of sestet, and the logic of a form arranged harmonically*. Excluding the last couplet, there are 12 lines. The octave is of 8 lines, and the sestet of 6. Thus,6: 8: 12 are harmonic in their relationship. Yet the sonnet has 14 lines, not 12. So the logic of harmonic relationship is a bit ad hoc.

But there is another theory of proportionality that offers an ideal ratio proposed by Pythagoras. Let
AC= whole sonnet of 14 lines
AB= octave, BC= sestet.
Now, BC: AB= AB: AC.
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A B C
1 8 13

Here, the illustration does not show clearly, but A to B -s 8; B to C is 5; and A to C is 13.

The logic is: the smaller is to the bigger, what the larger is to the whole. Yet, to be mathematically more precise, the ratio has to be eight to five, not eight to six in order to have a Golden Mean*. Six is preferred for symmetry. After all a poet has more latitude than a mathematician, or even a musician! Six also happens to be the first perfect number, the sum of all its divisors (6= 1+2+3) . But so what, I would say.

Now, we can have 8+5 lines for a perfect sonnet and still retain symmetry. Five and eight are two consecutive integers in the infinitive series: 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21, … (Fibonacci Series: the subsequent number is the sum of the preceding two) . With 5,8, and 13 the ratios are more perfect.

*THE PENGUIN BOOK OF THE SONNET
Edited by PHILLIS LEVIN
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Sonnets | 11.12.2017 |
Topic: poem, sonnet, nature