Sidney's Rhyme Scheme -or- "There it is, Suck-ahs!"

Maybe it was the cold medicine I took before class that caused me to yell, "There it is, suck-ahs!" at my students yesterday. We were discussing "Sonnet I" by Sir Philip Sidney (see post below), and I was lecturing on how poetic form typically mirrors the content of the poem. In this case, Sidney claims he's having trouble writing anything original for his lady and that the poetic tradition gets in the way of his originality. My students were able to determine all this from a close reading of the text, but I wanted them to understand that Sidney was using the very structure of the poem itself to reinforce his theme.

We broke down his rhyme scheme and discovered that, while he evokes the typical English sonnet with a rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg, he actually writes abab abab caca dd. Additionally, he doesn't use a standard iambic pentameter (metrical line length), but instead uses a weird combination of what seems to be trochaic hexameter. "Why?" I asked my students. "Why would he do this?" And as they called out, "To be original" and "To show poetry is hard to write," I found myself slamming my chalk into the blackboard and yelling, "Yes! There it is, Suck-ahs!" as I pointed to the caca in the middle of the rhyme scheme. My students glanced at each other and giggled, but I think they got the point: every syllable, every rhythm, every comma, and every rhyme are intentionally crafted and placed by poets as they try to make their language demonstrate their ideas. There it is, suck-ahs.