It should be noted that Edmund Spenser often used modifiers at the end of his lines for the sake of meter – but this is a Shakespearean sonnet not a Spenserian sonnet.
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A sonnet crafted with the goal of imitating not only a Shakespearean sonnet, but a sonnet written by Shakespeare: where it succeeds – where it fails.
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Catastrophe has strongly negative connotations in modern English; however, in the original Greek, it simply meant “overturning.”
J.R.R. Tolkien invented this term (he was a linguist after all) combining the prefix eu- (Greek for “good”) and catastrophe (“overturning”) to refer to an event which is sort of like deus ex machina, except the situation must be possible within the story’s universe, and the end result must be good. If the unexpected rescue of a character comes from nowhere in a story it is deus ex machina – however if the possibility of something is established prior to the unexpected rescue it is eucatastrophe.
This was Tolkien’s response to people calling the end of Lord of the Rings a deus ex machina (SPOILERS):
Frodo and Sam are on Mount Doom and everything is going to hell. They’ve won but will surely die. Then, Gandalf and the great Eagles fly in and rescue our two little hobbits. The Eagles have precedence in the story: they are proud creatures who do not transport people willy-nilly and must decide for their own to fight against Sauron. They agree to save Frodo and Sam in this case because the little hobbits just saved Middle-Earth.
An aside:
“Why didn’t the Eagles fly them to Mordor in the first place?” –Insanely overasked question
Answer: Because they’re not steeds and can only fly so far. All of this is in the book. FALSE PLOT HOLE.
The ending of Lord of the Rings is therefore eucatastrophe instead of deus ex machina.
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A Latin term meaning “god from the machine” — so named because in ancient Greek drama a literal machine delivered actors portraying gods onto the stage to intervene in a play’s climactic moments.
Likewise, a machine simply means parts working together here — so in literature deus ex machina refers to an event which has no precedence in the story (or even the story’s universe) coming out of nowhere and solving all the problems in “the machine” (a story is a machine in a way).
E.g. If a character is in a car rushing towards the end of a cliff and the door won’t open and the entire story has been non-speculative (i.e. there are no unnatural elements) until this point — dues ex machina would be if the character was suddenly teleported out of the car. Where did the teleportation come from? The writer — god to the world he is creating.
While this is generally frowned upon (more so in literature than in film), see also eucatastrophe.
One famous example of a character being taken away by a deus ex machina device is from Euripedes' play Medea. After murdering the children she had had with the faithless Jason, Medea is borne away by a chariot of the gods, never to be seen again.
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