ebb--the significance of this term being that the thought flowed to the
end of the octave and ebbed from that point to the close of the sestet.
Commenting on this John Addington Symonds wrote: "The striking
metaphorical symbol drawn from the observation of the swelling and
declining wave can even in some examples be applied to sonnets on the
Shakespearean model; for, as a wave may fall gradually or abruptly, so
the sonnet may sink with stately volume or with precipitate subsidence
to its close."
For a verse-maker to give his sonnet this requisite flow and ebb of
idea, and keep at the same time his rhyme scheme accurate is no easy
matter. And the very difficulty of the form is a strong argument in
favor of its frequent use by novices in versification. If you can write
a sonnet that is technically correct, you need fear none of the
difficulties that any other kind of verse-making will present. The
accuracy and condensation, the concentration of thought, the
straight-forwardness of statement, which are the distinguishing marks of
the well-turned sonnet are the most valuable tools which a verse writer
can have. In writing, as well as he can, one sonnet, the verse-maker
will learn more than he could learn in writing half a dozen ballads or
twenty volumes full of unrhymed free verse.
This book is intended for the guidance not of poets but of verse-makers.
Yet I cannot forbear quoting Watts-Dunton's admirable statement of the
whole content of the sonnet. He writes: "Without being wholly
artificial, like the rondeau, the sestina, the ballade, the villanelle,
and the rest, the sonnet is yet so artistic in structure, its form is so
universally known, recognized, and adopted as being artistic, that the
too fervid spontaneity and reality of the poet's emotion may be in a
certain degree veiled, and the poet can whisper, as from behind a mask,
those deepest secrets of the heart which could otherwise only find
expression in purely dramatic forms."
As I said, the simplest, and in some respects, the most difficult form
of sonnet, has for the rhyme scheme _a, b, b, a, a, b, b, a, c, d, c, d,
c, d_. But there is a tendency to vary the rhyme scheme in the
sestet--the octave usually is unchanged. One common variation is to have
the rhymes of the sestet _c, d, e, c, d, e_, instead of _c, d, c, d, c,
d_. This is the scheme we find followed in the sestet of two of "Three
Sonnets on Oblivion," by a distinguished American poet, Mr. George
Sterling.
THREE SONNETS OF OBLIVION
BY GEORGE STERLING
_Oblivion_
Her eyes have seen the monoliths of kings
Upcast like foam of the effacing tide;
She hath beheld the desert stars deride
The monuments of power's imaginings:
About their base the wind Assyrian flings
The dust that throned the satrap in his pride;
Cambyses and the Memphian pomps abide
As in the flame the moth's presumptuous wings.
There gleams no glory that her hand shall spare,
Nor any sun whose days shall cross her night,
Whose realm enfolds man's empire and its end.
No armour of renown her sword shall dare,
No council of the gods withstand her might--
Stricken at last Time's lonely Titans bend.
_The Night of Gods_
Their mouths have drunken the eternal wine--
The draught that Baal in oblivion sips.
Unseen about their courts the adder slips,
Unheard the sucklings of the leopard whine;
The toad has found a resting-place divine,
And bloats in stupor between Ammon's lips.
O Carthage and the unreturning ships,
The fallen pinnacle, the shifting Sign!
Lo! when I hear from voiceless court and fane
Time's adoration of eternity,--
The cry of kingdoms past and gods undone,--
I stand as one whose feet at noontide gain
A lonely shore; who feels his soul set free,
And hears the blind sea chanting to the sun.
In these two sonnets, you see, Mr. Sterling has in his sestet the rhymes
_c, d, e, c, d, e_, thus having more license than the poet of the sonnet
in four rhymes. He uses the same number of rhymes in the final sonnet of
this trilogy, but varies the order of the rhymes in the sestet, having
for his scheme not _c, d, e, c, d, e_, but _c, d, d, e, c, e_. One
objection to this method is that it produces, as you see, a rhymed
couplet in the midst of the sestet.
_The Dust Dethroned_
Sargon is dust, Semiramis a clod.
In crypts profaned the moon at midnight peers;
The owl upon the Sphinx hoots in her ears,
And scant and dere the desert grasses nod
Where once the armies of Assyria trod,
With younger sunlight splendid on the spears;
The lichens cling the closer with the years,
And seal the eyelids of the weary god.
Where high the tombs of royal Egypt heave,
The vulture shadows with arrested wings
The indecipherable boasts of kings,
Till Arab children hear their mother's cry
And leave in mockery their toy--they leave
The skull of Pharaoh staring at the sky.
It is seldom that we find such a couplet as: "The vulture shadows with
arrested wings, The indecipherable boasts of kings," in the midst of the
sestet. But there are many verse writers who use the couplet, unrelated
in rhyme to the rest of the sestet, to conclude the sonnet. This of
course was Shakespeare's method, but Shakespeare, as we have seen, was
not making Petrarchan sonnets. The great danger is that the final
couplet will give the conclusion of the sonnet too much of a snap, too
much of an epigrammatic flavor. Therefore it is well to avoid this
device, although it cannot be denied that some of the greatest sonnets
in the language end in a couplet. Some years ago I asked a number of
English and American poets and critics to name their favorite brief
poems. Many of them chose sonnets, and one of them, Mr. Edward J.
Wheeler, a critic of experience and discrimination, for many years the
President of the Poetry Society of America, selected a sonnet ending in
a couplet--Blanco White's "Night." It may be remarked that this famous
sonnet is almost the only one of Blanco White's many compositions to
escape oblivion.
NIGHT
BY JOSEPH BLANCO WHITE
Mysterious Night! when our first parent knew
Thee from report divine, and heard thy name,
Did he not tremble for this lovely frame,
This glorious canopy of light and blue?
Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew,
Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame,
Hesperus with the host of heaven came,
And lo! creation widened in man's view.
Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed
Within thy beams, O Sun! or who could find,
Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood revealed,
That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind!
Why do we then shun Death with anxious strife?
If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?
Here is another sonnet ending in a couplet, which I quote for several
reasons. In the first place, the poet, while using the couplet, has
avoided the dangers of the epigram. In the second place, he comes as
close to writing a narrative as the sonneteer may safely do. In the
third place he deviates from the strict rules of the sonnet in one
important particular, which should be at once apparent to every student
of the subject. I do not refer to the false rhyme of "Africa" and
"bar"--the deviation which I mean refers only to the sonnet form, and
has to do with the arrangement of the thought.
BOOKRA
BY CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER
One night I lay asleep in Africa,
In a closed garden by the city gate;
A desert horseman, furious and late,
Came wildly thundering at the massive bar,
"Open in Allah's name! Wake, Mustapha!
Slain is the Sultan,--treason, war, and hate
Rage from Fez to Tetuan! Open straight."
The watchman heard as thunder from afar:
"Go to! in peace this city lies asleep;
To all-knowing Allah 'tis no news you bring";
Then turned in slumber still his watch to keep.
At once a nightingale began to sing,
In oriental calm the garden lay,--
Panic and war postponed another day.
The deviation to which I refer is the lack of absolute distinction
between the octave and the sestet. If the rules of the sonnet were
strictly followed, the line which introduces the watchman would begin
the sestet instead of closing the octave.
The best form of the Petrarchan sonnet for the novice in versification
to use in practice is the form I first described, that in which the
rhyme scheme is _a, b, b, a, a, b, b, a, c, d, c, d, c, d_. But if you
find that this at first presents insurmountable difficulty, use three
rhymes in the sestet instead of two, as in the two poems following. In
these, you will see, the rhyme scheme of the sestet is _c, d, e, c, d,
e_. The first is a deeply introspective study by one of the greatest
women poets of our generation; the second is more true to the
traditional type of sonnet in thought, giving the subject in the octave,
and the lesson drawn therefrom in the sestet. It is the work of a young
American poet whose name is familiar to every reader of American
magazines.
RENOUNCEMENT
BY ALICE MEYNELL
I must not think of thee; and, tired yet strong,
I shun the love that lurks in all delight--
The love of thee--and in the blue heaven's height,
And in the dearest passage of a song.
Oh, just beyond the fairest thoughts that throng
This breast, the thought of thee waits hidden yet bright;
But it must never, never come in sight;
I must stop short of thee the whole day long.
But when sleep comes to close each difficult day,
When night gives pause to the long watch I keep,
And all my bonds I need must lay apart,
Must doff my will as raiment laid away,--
With the first dream that comes with the first sleep
I run, I run, I am gathered to thy heart.
CANDLE-LIGHT
BY THOMAS S. JONES, JR.
As in old days of mellow candle-light,
A little flame of gold beside the pane
Where icy branches blowing in the rain
Seem spectre fingers of a ghostly night;
Yet on the hearth the fire is warm and bright,
The homely kettle steams a soft refrain,
And to one's mind old things rush back again,
Sweet tender things still young in death's despite.
So, when the winter blasts across life's sea
Do beat about my door and shale the walls
Until the house must sink upon the sand,
Then on some magic wind of memory,
Borne swiftly to my heart a whisper falls,--
And on my arm the pressure of your hand!
Here is another famous modern sonnet, in which the three rhymes of the
sestet are arranged in the order _c, d, e, e, c, d_.
THE ODYSSEY
BY ANDREW LANG
As one that for a weary space has lain
Lulled by the song of Circe and her wine
In gardens near the pale of Proserpine,
Where that AEaean isle forgets the main,
And only the low lutes of love complain,
And only shadows of wan lovers pine,--
As such an one were glad to know the brine
Salt on his lips, and the large air again,--
So gladly, from the songs of modern speech
Men turn, and see the stars, feel the free
Shrill wind beyond the close of heavy flowers,
And through the music of the languid hours,
They hear like ocean on a western beach
The surge and thunder of the Odyssey.
This sonnet has been criticized by Professor Brander Matthews, not on
account of its rhyme scheme, but because of its lack of what he calls
tone-color. I will discuss the subject of tone-color later, but it may
be well at this point to explain that this criticism means that the
rhymes of this sonnet are not sufficiently varied--that "lain" does not
differ sufficiently from "wine," and "free" does not differ sufficiently
from "beach" (the first two words being similar in consonantal value,
and the second two in vowel value) to warrant their use--the theory
being that the rhymes used in a sonnet should contrast strongly with
each other--"lain" and "hide," for example, and "free" and "shore," for
example, contrasting more strikingly than the words used. This contrast
in tone-color, to use that phrase, may be noticed in this
strongly-wrought sonnet of William Watson's. How strikingly the sound of
"old," in the octave contrasts with that of "ing," and how strikingly in
the sestet "ove" contrasts with "ire." The poet uses but two rhymes in
the sestet, the arrangement being _c, d, d, c, d, c_.
TO ONE WHO HAD WRITTEN IN DERISION OF THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY
BY WILLIAM WATSON
Dismiss not so, with light hard phrase and cold,
Ev'n if it be but fond imagining,
The hope whereto so passionately cling
The dreaming generations from of old!
Not thus, to luckless men, are tidings told
Of mistress lost, or riches taken wing;
And is eternity a slighter thing,
To have or lose, than kisses or than gold?
Nay, tenderly, if needs thou must, disprove
My loftiest fancy, dash my grand desire
To see this curtain lift, these clouds retire,
And Truth, a boundless dayspring, blaze above
And round me; and to ask of my dead sire
His pardon for a word that wronged his love.
Of course you will find exceptions to the rules I have stated, you will
find poets who have combined the Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnet.
The most usual way of doing this is to end the Petrarchan sonnet with
the couplet typical of the Shakespearean form, as in Blanco White's
"Night." But sometimes we find the octave of the sonnet consisting, as
in the Shakespearean form, of two quatrains, and the sestet approaching
closely to the Petrarchan idea. Such a sonnet is "Letty's Globe," by
Charles Tennyson-Turner, the brother of Alfred Tennyson. In this the
octave is Shakespearean--rhyming _a, b, a, b, c, d, c, d_, but the
sestet rhymes _e, f, f, g, e, g_.
LETTY'S GLOBE
BY CHARLES TENNYSON-TURNER
When Letty had scarce passed her third glad year,
And her young, artless words began to flow,
One day we gave the child a coloured sphere
Of the wide earth, that she might mark and know,
By tint and outline, all its sea and land.
She patted all the world; old empires peeped
Between her baby fingers; her soft hand
Was welcome at all frontiers. How she leaped,
And laughed, and prattled in her world-wide bliss;
But when we turned her sweet unlearned eye
On our own isle, she raised a joyous cry,
"Oh! yes, I see it, Letty's home is there!"
And while she hid all England with a kiss,
Bright over Europe fell her golden hair.
You will find also exceptions to the rule that the thought of the sonnet
shall be sharply differentiated by the pause between the octave and the
sestet, that it shall flow in the octave and ebb in the sestet. John
Milton, for instance, certainly the author of some of the greatest
sonnets in the English tongue, blended the octave of his sonnets with
their sestets, letting, as a critic has said, "octave flow into sestet
without break of music or thought." Thus, says Watts-Dunton, Milton, in
his use of the Petrarchan octave and sestet for the embodiment of
intellectual substance incapable of that partial disintegration which
Petrarch himself always or mostly sought, invented a species of sonnet
which is English in impetus, but Italian, or partly Italian, in
structure. But these innovations are for the Miltons of our literature,
not for the apprentices of the craft. We must know how to write longhand
before we can write shorthand; we must know the axioms before we can
propound original geometric theories. Until he has demonstrated his
ability to write a poem consisting of fourteen iambic pentameters with
the rhyme scheme _a, b, b, a, a, b, b, a, c, d, c, d_, the maker of
verses should not experiment with any variations of the established
form.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON AND HIS POETRY
Gilbert K. Chesterton is an essayist, a novelist, a dramatist, a debater
and a poet. But many people--his brother, Cecil Chesterton, did for
instance--believe that he is first of all a poet. And certainly it is in
his poetry that his characteristic style is most easily recognized and
defined.
Mr. Chesterton and the late Henry James are not very often thought of as
intellectual or spiritual brothers. And yet there is a startlingly
obvious resemblance between these two writers. Both are stylists; both
have thoroughly mastered certain peculiar methods of speech, and both
are, it must be confessed, hampered by their undeviating loyalty to
these methods.
This is not the place to analyze the style of Mr. James. It is
sufficient to recall to the reader's mind the fact that the author of
"The Golden Bowl" was not concerned so much with the presentation of
extraordinary ideas as with the extraordinary presentation of ordinary
ideas. And the extraordinariness of his presentation consisted in its
thoroughness; he was not content to suggest the thing or to show one
aspect of it; he was able, and seemed to feel a certain moral
obligation, to present every aspect of the thing, to give all its
dimensions, characteristics, origins and possibilities. His method may
roughly be indicated by saying that it is the opposite of impressionism.
Gilbert K. Chesterton's method, which is more readily observed and
defined in his poetry than in his prose, also consists chiefly of the
extraordinary presentation of ordinary ideas. But he does not attempt to
give every aspect and shading of an idea. Rather he attempts to present
that aspect of an idea which, while true, is sufficiently unusual to
surprise the reader; the theory being that the attention attracted by
the unusualness will be held by the truth.
This method is admirably suited to the uses of fiction, as "The Ball and
the Cross" and "The Man Who Was Thursday" show. It is effective in
debate, and in controversial essays on matters ethical and political, as
is shown by the writings of Mr. Chesterton himself and of that school of
popular apologetics which he may be said to have founded. In poetry it
is sometimes almost magically effective, and sometimes grotesquely
inappropriate. The perfect, and most lamentable, example of the use of
this method is to be found in a poem called "E. C. B." These initials
evidently are those of Chesterton's friend, Edmund Clerihew Bentley, the
writer of detective stories.
In this serious and, for the most part, beautiful poem, Mr. Chesterton
tells us that because of the virtue of one man he finds something to
love in every man. Bentley is a man, he says, therefore, for Bentley's
sake no man is to be hated. For the sake of Bentley's humanity,
Chesterton says that he loves everyone, the murderer, the hypocrite,
even--and this is the great climax--himself.
I should say, this was to be his great climax. But the method seizes
him, and keeps him from saying anything so strongly simple as "I love
myself." Instead, he says:
I love the man I saw but now
Hanging head downwards in the well.
This is, as I said, the Chestertonian method at its worst. Here you find
the poet absolutely at the mercy of his method, made to say a simple
thing in a complicated manner. But this is, it is only fair to say, an
early poem, and not fairly representative of Chesterton as a poet. For
it is pleasant to see that, unlike Henry James, Chesterton has been
steadily mastering his style, mastering it so thoroughly that he can lay
it aside when it is inappropriate. He lays it aside, for instance, in
some of the passionate and most effective chapters of "The Crimes of
England." And he lays it aside in such of his writings as best deserve
the name of poetry.
Like every poet however original, Chesterton has "played the sedulous
ape to many masters." In his stirring ballads of warfare, such as "The
Battle of Gibson" and "Lepanto" I find echoes of the last of the great
ballad makers, Macaulay, whom Francis Thompson himself did not disdain
to imitate. In his political controversial poems I find strong
suggestions of a poet whose point of view Chesterton is far from
sharing--Rudyard Kipling. I find also a curious suggestion of Elizabeth
Barrett Browning. Mrs. Browning was Evangelical where Chesterton is
Catholic in thought, and she had a fatal knack of taking the wrong point
of view in political matters--Italian affairs, for example. But she was
genuinely a democrat and genuinely religious, and it is strange to see
how often she and Chesterton think alike. There is even a similarity of
phraseology, as when Chesterton writes:
The Christ Child lay on Mary's lap.
His hair was like a crown.
And all the flowers looked up to Him,
And all the stars looked down.
whereas many years before Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her poem "The
Doves" had written of a palm tree:
The tropic flowers looked up to it,
The tropic stars looked down.
Walt Whitman and Gilbert K. Chesterton seem a strange combination. But
Chesterton himself has acknowledged that he found in "Leaves of Grass" a
great and wholesome inspiration. This seems strange to us, for the
American Whitmanite or Whitmaniac is a pale long-haired creature of many
'isms, directly the opposite of a robust Christian like Chesterton. But
in the eighteen-nineties when "science announced nonentity and art
admired decay" Walt Whitman's "barbaric yawp sounding over the roofs of
the world" seemed a healthy sound. So in his dedication to "The Man Who
Was Thursday," Chesterton writes:
Not all unhelped we held the fort, our tiny flags unfurled;
Some giants laboured in that crowd to lift it from the world.
I find again the book we found, I feel the hour that flings
Far out of fish-shaped Paumanok some cry of cleaner things;
And the Green Carnation withered, as in forest fires that pass,
Roared in the wind of all the world ten million leaves of grass;
Or sane and sweet and sudden as a bird sings in the rain--
Truth out of Tusitala, spoke and pleasure out of pain.
Yea, cool and clear and sudden as a bird sings in the grey,
Dunedin to Samoa spoke, and darkness unto day.
But we were young; we lived to see God break the bitter charms,
God and the good Republic come riding back in arms:
We have seen the city of Mansoul, even as it rocked, relieved--
Blessed are they who did not see, but being blind, believed.
For some reason, it is difficult to think of Chesterton in love. We can
readily think of him fighting or praying, but to think of him making
love requires an effort of the imagination. Yet he is happily married,
and while his love poems are few, they are noble in thought and
beautiful in expression. One of the most personal and characteristic of
them is that to which he gives the name "Confessional."
CONFESSIONAL
Now that I kneel at the throne, O Queen,
Pity and pardon me.
Much have I striven to sing the same,
Brother of beast and tree;
Yet when the stars catch me alone
Never a linnet sings--
And the blood of a man is a bitter voice
And cries for foolish things.
Not for me be the vaunt of woe;
Was not I from a boy
Vowed with the helmet and spear and spur
To the blood-red banner of joy?
A man may sing his psalms to a stone,
Pour his blood for a weed,
But the tears of a man are a sudden thing,
And come not of his creed.
Nay, but the earth is kind to me,
Though I cried for a star,
Leaves and grasses, feather and flower,
Cover the foolish scar,
Prophets and saints and seraphim
Lighten the load with song,
And the heart of a man is a heavy load
For a man to bear along.
Many poets are writing of war these days. But they write of war too
self-consciously, they are too sophisticated, too grown-up. They are so
busy getting lessons from the war, describing its moral and social
significance, that they have nothing to say about the actual facts of
battle. But Chesterton's war poems are splendid primitive things, full
of the thunder of crashing arms, of courage and of faith. I think that
his "Lepanto" is without an equal among the war poems of the century. It
begins as follows:
LEPANTO