A hidden sonnet - Richard Hayden - Those Winter Sundays

Playing around with form.

Hidden sonnets

Have a look at this sonnet. Richard Hayden - Those Winter Sundays. It has 3 stanzas, a 5 line, then a 4 line, then a 5 line. The last 2 lines are different, a summing up and development. I love the way sonnets are wrangled about to look entirely different, yet when I count lines, as I always like to do, there they are. So often they are not labelled as such. Hidden sonnets.

Indentation

On a forum I am on, I suggested that someone try putting in breaks to emphasise the stanzas of a sonnet. The writer decided to indent the second 4 lines, then revert back to left justification for the next 4 lines. In fact the last 2 lines got the chop too, but it was 14 lines long before this new version. I have never seen, or noticed, that before. Very neat.

List, Busy, Your, Said - my new titles

Now I have filled my 'What the Hell!?' notebook I am experimenting with using titles with 4 letter words. Simple ones, not necessarily swear words. It feels different, more considered and calm.

My inspiration for this came from the short words in Beowulf, for example: road, gear, sand, hand...The basic parts of the world seem to come in these one syllable packets in English.

I don't have the same sense of urgency to write now I am using this framework. That could be because the notebook is upstairs and I am down here. Having it with me might change things.

Ravensbrück and my new form

Ravensbrück

Paulette Gouache

But she survived

I made good friends

So don't leave any bread

They spoke in their old bedroom

It's a bit cryptic. I do increasing numbers of words per line. Each line is somewhat unrelated to the next. Same topic though. It's about thinking about a topic from various different viewpoints.

In this case:
the name of the prison camp,
the name of my great aunt,
the phrase I use immediately after saying that she was taken there,
a phrase she said to me about her time there,
my father's instruction before we had lunch with her and my great uncle in Paris when we were 8 or 9,
and a note about my own grandmother's memory of the days and nights they spent together talking about what she had gone through after she got back to their family flat in Paris in 1945 and were able to just be together at home.

Is this a well-known form or one I made up myself?

The first line both is and isn't the title. I like that slight confusion about the status of the first word. Of course the first word is the starting point for all the rest. So the form and content are one. I write these in order of line length, asking my mind for the next number of words.