Despite the physically damaging effects of white flour and powdered sugar, the narrator's tone is playful and self-deprecating, a tone that stands in stark contrast to the
sestet that follows.
However, while the language of the
sestet serves to underscore the idea of God's creations in the world, in fact, it also calls attention to the poet's role in the creation of the poem.
Again, the sonnet is Petrarchan, with the realities of the waronly coming in at the last
sestet. Farquhar immediately aligns her witha "saint," a "high" and "holy""Good Samaritan." Ironically, Nightingale's aviddesire to leave her repressive family and obtain an occupation (seeCassandra) is here read as obeisance to Jesus's "greatcommand." With more poetical finesse than Arnold, Farquhar hereenjambs the line "Going about like Jesus doing Good" withthe beginning of the
sestet, "among the sick and dying."This only intensifies the discord between Nightingale's saintlypersona and the gruesome realities of war.
Often Cole uses (like Phillips in "Fascination") the juxtaposition of two images or scenes, allowing the expectations inherent in the Petrarchan octave /
sestet structure to replace explicit, discursive argument.
"We are excited to join forces with INK International and Spartanics to manufacture and service the NW 140 for our European customers," says Reinhard Zimmermann, managing director of
Sestet. "Sometimes it takes a group of experts in individual fields combining, resources to produce a system that exceeds market requirements and We are glad to be part of this successful cooperation."
This form consists of an octet (8 lines) and a
sestet (6 lines).
Such a reader might look, for instance, more closely at the uneasy disjuncture between the language of the octave and that of the
sestet in the same poem, precisely because: "Rabbinic strategies do not try to smooth over or explain away incongruity; they treat it as potentially productive of an unexpected, additional interpretive turn" (107).
12 --Va pian, amor, un poco, ch'i' sconocchio: s'e' fosser buon tu li avresti piu cari; va col malanno; e' fuor di Capocchio!-- The change between narrative and dramatic mode is adroitly constructed by introducing part of the dialogue as an indirect account, and then shifting to direct speech right at the transition between octave and
sestet in v.
In the octave, the rhymes are the strictest possible-abbaacca-so that the first rhyme-word, "retinue," matches the last, "new." The first four lines of the
sestet repeat this pattern-xyyx-and this means that the overt break in sense between octave and
sestet is subtly undermined by a repetition of rhyme-structure.
To this end, the earliest extant drafts of "Leda and the Swan" focus primarily on Zeus, with some attention to Leda in the
sestet, detailing the transformation of his divine form (the classical) into an animal form (the grotesque) and Leda's consequent violation.
For a final example, let's turn to poetry; not just any poetry, but the sonnet form, which is specifically structured to effect a transformation between the octave (its first eight lines) and the
sestet (its last six lines).
