The
sonnet is a poetic form of fourteen lines -- everything else about it has been experimented with.
1.
Wilfred Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth:
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles'
rapid rattle
Can
patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,--
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And
bugles calling for them from sad
shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their
pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
2. W. B. Yeats'
Leda and the Swan:
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her
nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And
Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
