The Volta

The Leap That Turns

The Volta

Consider what the courts of Europe saw in the sixteenth century when the musicians called for la volta. A man and a woman moved into the center of the room. He took her in a close hold, one hand pressed against the busk of her bodice, the other firm above her hip. She set one hand at his shoulder and gathered her skirts with the other. The music shifted into three beats to the measure. He lifted her into the air. As she rose, she turned. For a single beat she hung above the floor, weightless and revolving, before the music returned her to the dance. They did it again on the next phrase, and again on the next, the dance becoming a series of leaps and turns. La volta was the dance that turned. It was the dance most criticized for indecency at the European courts, and the dance most loved. It survived in fashion for nearly two hundred years.

The Italian word volta means turn. Cousin to revolt and revolution, to evolve and involve, the word names the moment in which something changes direction. The dancers knew the volta as the lift and the spin. The poets meant something quieter but no less structural. In the sonnet, the volta is the place where the poem turns. Everything in the form is built around it. Without the volta, the fourteen lines are just walking. With it, the sonnet leaps.

A Very Brief History

The sonnet was invented in Sicily in the thirteenth century. At the cosmopolitan court of Frederick II at Palermo, a notary named Giacomo da Lentini devised a fourteen-line lyric that borrowed from the canzone and from popular song. He gave it the Italian name sonetto, little song. He fixed its parts at eight lines and six, two stanzas joined together. From the very beginning, before anyone called the join a volta, the sonnet had a turn built into its bones.

The form passed through the Tuscan poets and reached Francesco Petrarch, who fell in love with a woman named Laura in 1327 and spent the rest of his life writing about it. The Canzoniere, his lifework, gathers three hundred and sixty-six poems, most of them sonnets, into a sequence that traces a soul across decades. Petrarch did not invent the form. He inherited it. What he did was take the structural seam between octave and sestet and make it bear the entire weight of the lyric self. Before Petrarch, the join was a join. After Petrarch, the join had become a turn of thought and a turn of heart, the structural moment at which the speaker could become someone slightly different than the speaker who began. He liked it enough to use it more than three hundred times. He made the volta the engine.

Two centuries later, the form crossed into England. Sir Thomas Wyatt, a diplomat in Henry VIII’s service, translated Petrarch into English and brought the sonnet home from his Italian travels. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, took the form further. The English ear preferred fewer rhyme sounds, and Surrey reorganized the fourteen lines into three quatrains and a closing couplet: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. The turn migrated with the rhymes: Where Petrarch had placed the volta after the octave, Surrey’s new English form pushed it almost to the end, two lines from the close.

Shakespeare did not invent that form. He inherited it, but he used it so consummately that we now call it Shakespearean. By 1609, when the quarto of his sonnets was printed, two voltas had taken up residence in the European imagination: one Italian and one English, one rhetorical and one epigrammatic.

The Octave and the Sestet

Read a Petrarchan sonnet aloud and you can hear the shape with your throat. The octave wants to keep going. Its rhyme scheme is closed and emphatic, ABBAABBA, the same two sounds returning across eight lines until the ear is saturated with them. The octave gathers and builds. By the eighth line, the reader has been held inside a single breath for so long that something has to give.

That something is the volta. The sestet enters in new rhymes (CDECDE, or sometimes CDCDCD), and the change of sound is itself a change of stance. The accumulated pressure of the octave releases into a different motion. The octave proposed a situation, asked a question, lodged a complaint, or set a scene. The sestet answers, reverses, resolves, or reframes. The octave is one sustained gesture; the sestet is the response.

The proportions matter. Eight lines of setup against six lines of response is uneven, weighted toward the question. The sestet has to work harder because it has less room and more freight. This is why the Petrarchan sonnet feels meditative rather than epigrammatic. The sestet does not rush its answer. It develops and inhabits the new posture line by line.

Consider William Wordsworth’s sonnet, published in 1807:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

The octave is one continuous indictment, gathering grievance line by line until the final declaration that we are out of tune with the natural world we were given. Then, at the head of line 9, comes the volta. Four short words do the work: “It moves us not.” The sentence breaks. The diagnosis closes. What follows is not more complaint but a wild alternative, a willingness to be pagan rather than numb if pagan is what it takes to feel the sea again. The poem does not merely change subject. It changes posture. The reader can hear the speaker turn around.

Notice what Wordsworth gains from the early turn. The sestet has six lines to inhabit the new stance. He does not have to economize. The sestet has room enough to elaborate the pagan vision and to summon Proteus and Triton from the deep without rushing to a close. The Petrarchan volta gives the second movement room to breathe.

The Quatrains and the Couplet

The English sonnet is a different animal. Surrey’s rhyme scheme, ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, breaks the poem into four discrete sections rather than two. Three quatrains, each with its own rhyme pair, are followed by a final couplet that locks the whole into closure. The structural turn no longer divides the poem cleanly into proposition and response. The poem accumulates by quatrains, with each quatrain offering a variation on a theme, and then the couplet turns.

The deferral changes what the turn can do. With only two lines remaining, the Shakespearean volta cannot elaborate. It must clinch, undercut, reverse, or seal. The turn becomes epigrammatic, sometimes aphoristic, often surprising. The couplet’s rhyme reinforces the closure, the two rhyming lines snapping shut behind the quatrains like a clasp.

Shakespeare seems to have loved the form for exactly this reason. He thought in compressions. He wrote a hundred and fifty-four sonnets, and the best of them are constructed so that the closing couplet feels both inevitable and unexpected, like the punchline of a joke whose setup was a meditation on time.

Consider Sonnet 73:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

For twelve lines, Shakespeare offers figures of late season, each more compressed than the last. The autumn quatrain still holds yellow leaves on boughs that shake against the cold. By the third quatrain, the figure has narrowed to a fire already lying on the ashes of its youth, expiring on the death-bed of the fuel that once fed it. The poem moves toward extinction.

And then the couplet turns. After twelve lines of mortality, two lines say something different. The dying body is not pitiful but precious. The beloved who perceives the dying loves more strongly, because what is dying must be left. The couplet does not retract the imagery of the quatrains. It revalues it. The volta in Sonnet 73 is not a reversal of subject but a reversal of meaning. The same dying that grieved becomes the same dying that intensifies love.

Why the Volta Is the Engine

Take the volta out of either form and what remains is no longer a sonnet. Fourteen lines without a turn might still be skillful verse, but the sonnet asks for the bend the volta provides. The form’s authority depends on the architecture of pressure and release that the volta produces. Petrarch built his octave to be answered. Shakespeare built his quatrains to be turned. Neither poet was decorating with rhyme schemes. Each was engineering a structural moment in which thought has to bend.

The difference between the Italian and English voltas is finally a difference between two theories of how meaning moves. The Petrarchan poet trusts the second movement to develop and inhabit the new stance. The Shakespearean poet trusts the closing couplet to compress and crystallize the whole. The first form gives the turn a room. The second form gives the turn a doorway.

But the engine in both is the volta. Without the turn, the form has nowhere to go. With it, fourteen lines can hold the entire arc of an emotion, an argument, an insight, or a confession. The sonnet’s longevity, across nearly eight centuries, rests on the simple architectural fact that the volta gives the form a working heart.

And the dance? La volta in the ballroom survived in fashion for two hundred years before the courts moved on. The volta in the sonnet has survived for nearly eight hundred. The leap is harder to choreograph in language than in feet, but once you can do it, you can do it for as long as the form is loved. The poem, like the dance, depends on the turn.

Next week: ENJAMBMENT, the line that will not stop. How a sentence outruns the line that holds it, why the most expressive moment in a poem is often the line break itself, and what a poet can do in the gap between where the line ends and the breath continues.

Tamarah & Ben

Bainbridge Island Press