Watson, one of the most thoughtful and discerning critics of Hopkins's sonnets, offers an illuminating reading of the
curtal sonnets in The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Penguin, 1989), pp.
within-field will root to a spectrum of leaf masses, their outer
curtalFor example, I doubt that the stanza-form of 'Our eunuch dreams' derives from Hopkins's '
curtal sonnets' (as that of 'There was a saviour' patently does from Milton's Nativity Hymn) or that the parody of Thomas which Selby amiably offers on p.
Perhaps the most interesting part of Forbes-Macphail's analysis is her careful and fascinating demonstration that Hopkins's own "factorizing" of poetic structures such as regular and
curtal sonnets can apply also to larger structures such as The Wreck.
They will bring along an array of instruments played in Tudor times - bagpipes, crumhorns,
curtal, fiddle, gittern, harp, hurdy gurdy, lute, percussion, pipes, rebec, recorders, renaissance violin, sackbut, shawms, tabors and trumpets.
Indeed, as in `Pied Beauty', we want not the whole of the old form and not exactly a new form, but an old form broken: a
curtal sonnet; not merely a veil, and a temple, but the veil of the temple rent.
Being of tenor range, it might have been expected to be in C (like the tenor
curtal, tenor recorder and the nicolo and basset shawms), or in extremis in B[flat] like some flutes.
Moreover there is the question of proportion: whereas "The Wreck" and the early poems occupy about half of Easson's analysis, for example, "God's Grandeur" gets only one paragraph and "Pied Beauty" only two sentences, with no information on such an important topic as the
curtal sonnet.
Joining the ensemble will be lutenist Elizabeth Pallett, Keith MacGowan playing
curtal, shawm, pipes and percussion, and singer Natalie Clifton-Griffith, who last performed in Warwick in December with Ex Cathedra.
Like the later "
curtal" sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins,
They will play music by composers such as Praetorius, Gervaise and Morley, on the crumhorn, viols and a
curtal.
One might best see Soothsay as Rossetti's homage to The Rubaiyat, its fourteen eight syllable
curtal and disturbed rhyme royal stanzas (Rossetti's aabbcca rather than the standard ababbcc rhyme pattern) as distinct poems analogous to FitzGerald/Khayyam's collection of 75 discontinuous four-line stanzas.
They almost consume the first six lines of the
curtal sonnet "Peace":
"Glory be to God for dappled things" Hopkins exclaims in his
curtal sonnet "Pied Beauty." After describing "skies of couple-colour," stippled trout, chestnuts, and finches' wings, he pictures "Landscape plotted and pieced" and "all trades, their gear and tackle and trim." The poet then generalizes his theme:
