Is “the folly of being comforted” by Yeats a sonnet?
That depends on what you mean by a sonnet. Strictly speaking, it’s not. The rhyme scheme is wrong and it has an extra half line. The traditional sonnet has the octet first, then the sestet. (The English form often divides further into 3 quatrains and a final couplet).Yeats puts the sestet first, then the octet, but keeps the concluding couplet. However, it was poets who made the rules about sonnets in the first place and Yeats was a good enough poet so that he gets some say in what those rules should be. I’d call it a non-traditional sonnet and leave it at that.
