Now, where were we? Oh yeah, sonnets and symmetries, and I promise I won't argue that the broken symmetry of the sonnet is like the broken symmetry that gives rise to us all. But broken it is, and it matters.
The sonnet is a closed form; that is, its structure determines where it ends. One could write free verse, couplets, quatrains, triplets, terza rima, or any line-multiple one chooses till the forests are gone, and nothing in the cascading lines would ever mean stop here. But the sonnet starts one way and then changes, setting up a symmetry and then breaking it to force an ending. Of course one could write sonnet after sonnet, and there are set forms such as the crown of sonnets for groups of sonnets, but we expect each sonnet in such groupings to be able stand on its own, something we don't expect of other broken symmetry patterns like rhyme royal or ottava rima. They're too short, while the sonnet has enough room to reliably say something interesting; in fact, it's too long to just "move things along."
There are at least two major ways of organizing English sonnets, the Italian or Petrarchan and the English or Shakespearean, both starting with quatrains. How they break the quatrain makes the difference. The Italian is older and we'll look at it first. Here's one from A. E. Stalling's Archaic Smile:
Fishing
The two of them stood in the middle water,
The current slipping away, quick and cold,
The sun slow at his zenith, sweating gold,
Once, in some sullen summer of father and daughter.
Maybe he regretted he had brought her—
She'd rather have been elsewhere, her look told—
Perhaps a year ago, but now too old.
Still she remembered lessons he had taught her:
To cast toward shadows, where the sunlight fails
And fishes shelter in the undergrowth.
And when the unseen strikes, how all else pales
Beside the bright-dark struggle, the rainbow wroth,
Life and death weighed in the shining scales,
The invisible line pulled taut that links them both.
See what happens? The pair of linked envelope quatrains at the start set a scene, tell a story, which changes when the rhyme pattern changes, moving from memory of a particular time and place to a rather frightening timelessness which nevertheless evokes the poet's connection with her father. And the rhyme pattern helps that happen, reinforcing the closure of the poem. Two fours and three twos, two balanced parts nearly balancing each other. How go on after that?
Here's an English sonnet (with a slight twist) from Kim Addonizio's The Philosopher's Club:
February 14, 1989
North's lawyer's say he'll claim a cover-up.
In Pakistan, mobs riot, and police
open fire; everywhere in Europe
Gorbachev's perceived as wanting peace,
which has NATO worried. Kabul, in blue
cold, sees the last Red Army soldiers go,
with Najibulla's government the new
target for guerillas. By a row
of houses underneath a freeway, a man
watches the little girl he wants to lift
out of her life skip towards his waiting van.
The earth's not turning, love; it only shifts
direction in its falling through the world.
The roses you brought have opened.
Three quatrains: would three triplets balance them? Four couplets? Eight or nine lines more and the poem is at least 20 lines, and the parts begin to escape from each other. But unlike the envelope quatrains of the Italian sonnet, there are no couplets in the first part of an English sonnet, and so a couplet can and does bring an abrupt reversal of expectations in both form and content. Here we don't get quite a couplet—the last line, forlornly gesturing back to the title, doesn't even finish the pentameter, suggesting, but I think denying, that love may not matter in the world of the poem. The roses have opened.
Could one do the same thing with one or two, or with four or more quatrains? Yes—terza rima of whatever length traditionally ends with a couplet to signal closure. But I doubt that with fewer or more than three quatrains one could reliably get the kind of jolt possible with three: the pattern's just started to firmly establish itself when the rug is pulled out from under it.
12:12:31 AM 
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