The Volta: Not a Bridge, but a Turn

This morning, I wrote this on Twitter and Facebook:

Let me say it again: The volta is not a bridge; it is a turn.

Almost immediately, I heard from Molly Gaudry, who wrote:

I asked a bunch of poets once about the turn and nobody gave me a satisfactory answer.

Molly, here's my attempt at an answer for you. I don't know if it'll be satisfactory, but I'll try.

Typically, we associate the volta with the sonnet, and we think about it as the turning point of poem. And typically, that turn happens in line nine: either at the beginning of the sestet of a Petrarchan sonnet or at the beginning of the third quatrain of a Shakespearean one.

As a first example, here's Shelley's "Ozymandias."

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

It's in line nine, with the introduction of the pedestal's inscription, that the poem turns toward its powerful and ironic conclusion. The inscription doesn't connect the "lone and level sands" of the poem's last line to the image of the statue from the poem's beginning; instead, it gives us a different perspective from which to understand that image.

Zachary Schomburg wrote about the volta this way in a prompt he offered over at Read Write Poem:

Almost all sonnets have some kind of volta, some turn of logic about three-quarters of the way through the poem (depending on whether it is Petrarchian or Shakespearean) that puts the poem’s last lines in emotional, narrative, conceptual contrast with what preceded them. It is where the poem gets turned on its head never to return to its original uprightness; it is where the poem hinges. I believe that without some sort of volta, a poem falls flat and is one-dimensional because it has nothing to butt up against.

Although we usually associate the volta with the sonnet (and especially with line nine of the sonnet), I think he's right in saying that all poems need this turn, what he calls a hinge here. Even if a poem has momentum, if it lacks the turn, it will often seem predictable, narrative, or (in its most extreme) trite.

There's a John Darnielle lyric that describes "a stomach-churning shift / In the way the land lies," and I often think of the volta in those terms.

As another example, consider Dickinson's "Success is counted sweetest."

Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of Victory

As he defeated -- dying --
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!

Although clearly not a sonnet, this poem does include a turn in line nine. It's not until that moment ("As he defeated -- dying --") that we really understand what the poem's getting at when it makes its initial claim about success. This line moves the eye of the poem from the field of victory to that of defeat and death, and it is in its focus on the dying man who hears the sounds of the victorious celebrations of his enemy that the poem's claim about success becomes clear.

Dickinson's volta here doesn't connect or reconcile the image of defeat in the last stanza to anything earlier in the poem so much as it turns the poem's eye to another place, a different perspective--a "stomach churning shift," if you will--from which we can look back at the poem's first stanza and know something more of what is really meant by "sorest need." In other words, if we think about the path of a poem as more or less linear, the volta turns the path of this poem so that we can look back and see the poem's opening from a different perspective, from a slant.

Or, as a more contemporary example, consider Mark Doty's poem "A Display of Mackerel." It's in the tenth and eleventh stanzas that we find the turn:

Suppose we could iridesce,

like these, and lose ourselves
entirely in the universe
of shimmer...

Before this moment, the poem is simply about mackerel. Beautifully written, yes, but just fish. But the turn here is toward the self, toward the question of individuality:

...would you want

to be yourself only,
unduplicatable, doomed
to be lost?

Without the turn inward, away from fish and toward the imagining of humans as fish, the poem's conclusion, which sees the fish as "together, selfless, / which is the price of gleaming" would mean little. With that turn, however, the poem has great power, because we have left the line of thinking of fish and turned toward ourselves, and when we see the fish again, we see them from this different place, a place in which we try to insert ourselves in their position.

In this sense, the volta is not a bridge between the beginning and end of the poem. It is not a way of reconciling where we end up with where we begin.

Rather, it is a turn that forces us to reconsider the place from which we came. Our understanding of the poem before the turn is changed by the turn, not because of a logical connecting of the things, but because of the construction of a different perspective. We turn, and from this new direction, we are able to see the place from which we came with new eyes.