ShmoopTube

00:03

Here's your shmoop du jour, brought to you by the letter O. In poems, it magically becomes a word....

00:21

The form of this poem can BEST be described as... what?

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And here are the potential answers...

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Nothing to do here but rely on our extensive knowledge of poem types.

00:37

The only one we really can rule out if we didn't know would be D -- a series of quatrains.

00:43

"Quat" indicates 4... and there are neither 4 lines in each stanza, nor 4 stanzas... so

00:53

we can pretty sure that one's not the droid we're looking for...

00:57

A villanelle is always exactly nineteen lines... which means we're one short. We can scratch

01:05

A.

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Is it a sonnet? Hm... certainly feels like a sonnet. The lovey-dovey subject matter is

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definitely sonnet-esque.

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But unfortunately, we have the same problem here as we did with the villanelle... a sonnet

01:17

must be 14 lines. B is out. There's no way it's blank verse, because blank

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verse doesn't rhyme, and this... does.

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So then... it's gotta be C, right? A series of sestets?

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You betcha. A sestet is a six-line stanza... and we've got three stanzas.

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Sorry to make you mix your literature and your arithmetic, but... advanced calculus

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tells us that 3 times 6 is 18.

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So our answer is C.

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O happy day.

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