"The Thing became a trumpet, whence he blew
Soul-animating strains--alas, too few!"
Besides the eighteen English sonnets in regular form, Milton wrote a
"tailed," or "caudated," sonnet, following an Italian fashion,--"On the
New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament." "He intended it,"
says Masson, "to be what may be called an Anti-Presbyterian and
Pro-Toleration Sonnet; but by going beyond fourteen lines, converted it
into what the Italians called a 'sonnet with a tail.'" (Globe ed., p.
440.) The "tail" rimes _cfffgg_.
Deem not devoid of elegance the sage,
By Fancy's genuine feelings unbeguiled,
Of painful pedantry the poring child,
Who turns, of these proud domes, th' historic page,
Now sunk by Time, and Henry's fiercer rage.
Think'st thou the warbling Muses never smiled
On his lone hours? Ingenuous views engage
His thoughts, on themes, unclassic falsely styled,
Intent. While cloistered Piety displays
Her mouldering roll, the piercing eye explores
New manners, and the pomp of elder days,
Whence culls the pensive bard his pictured stores.
Nor rough nor barren are the winding ways
Of hoar Antiquity, but strown with flowers.
(THOMAS WARTON: _In a Blank Leaf of Dugdale's 'Monasticon.'_ ab. 1775.)
After Milton, the sonnet fell into disuse for a century. "Walsh," says
Mr. Gosse, "is the author of the only sonnet written in English between
Milton's, in 1658, and Warton's, about 1750." (Ward's _English Poets_,
vol. iii. p. 7.) See, however, that of Gray on West, written in 1742,
quoted p. 295, below. To the Warton brothers, pioneers in so many ways
of the romantic revival, chief credit is given for the revival of the
sonnet in the eighteenth century. Other sonneteers of the period were
William Mason, Thomas Edwards, Benjamin Stillingfleet, and Thomas
Russell (see Seccombe's _Age of Johnson_, pp. 254, 255, and Beers's
_English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century_, pp. 160, 161).
O Time! who know'st a lenient hand to lay
Softest on sorrow's wound, and slowly thence
(Lulling to sad repose the weary sense)
The faint pang stealest, unperceived, away;
On thee I rest my only hope at last,
And think when thou hast dried the bitter tear
That flows in vain o'er all my soul held dear,
I may look back on every sorrow past,
And meet life's peaceful evening with a smile.
As some lone bird, at day's departing hour,
Sings in the sunbeam, of the transient shower
Forgetful, though its wings are wet the while:
Yet ah! how much must that poor heart endure
Which hopes from thee, and thee alone, a cure!
(WILLIAM LISLE BOWLES: _To Time_. 1789.)
Bowles (1762-1850) wrote numerous sonnets, and was influential in
carrying on the movement begun by the Wartons. His sonnets were admired,
in particular, by Coleridge and Wordsworth, the former poet dedicating
to him a sonnet beginning:
"My heart has thanked thee, Bowles! for those soft strains
Whose sadness soothes me."
His sonnets were, however, neglectful of the regular Italian structure,
so that under his influence, as Leigh Hunt observed, "the illegitimate
order ... became such a favorite with lovers of easy writing who could
string fourteen lines together, that ... it continued to fill the press
with heaps of bad verses, till the genius of Wordsworth succeeded in
restoring the right system." (_Essay on the Sonnet_, p. 85.) But see the
notes on Wordsworth's sonnets, p. 280, below.
Mary! I want a lyre with other strings,
Such aid from Heaven as some have feigned they drew,
An eloquence scarce given to mortals, new
And undebased by praise of meaner things,
That, ere through age or woe I shed my wings,
I may record thy worth with honor due,
In verse as musical as thou art true,
And that immortalizes whom it sings.
But thou hast little need. There is a book
By Seraphs writ with beams of heavenly light,
On which the eyes of God not rarely look,
A chronicle of actions just and bright:
There all thy deeds, my faithful Mary, shine,
And, since thou own'st that praise, I spare thee mine.
(COWPER: _To Mrs. Unwin_. 1793.)
Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest peak of Furness Fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells.
In truth the prison unto which we doom
Ourselves no prison is; and hence to me,
In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound
Within the sonnet's scanty plot of ground,
Pleased if some souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.
(WORDSWORTH: _The Sonnet_. 1806.)
Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned,
Mindless of its just honors; with this key
Shakspere unlocked his heart; the melody
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound;
A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound;
With it Camoens soothed an exile's grief;
The Sonnet glittered a gay myrtle leaf
Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned
His visionary brow: a glow-worm lamp,
It cheered mild Spenser, called from Faery-land
To struggle through dark ways; and, when a damp
Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand
The Thing became a trumpet, whence he blew
Soul-animating strains--alas, too few!
(WORDSWORTH: _Scorn not the Sonnet_. 1827.)
The World is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours
And are up-gather'd now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for every thing, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,--
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
(WORDSWORTH: _The World is too much with us_. 1806.)
Wordsworth's complaint as to the number of Milton's sonnets ("alas, too
few!") certainly cannot be applied to his own. They number about five
hundred, ranking him as the most prolific English sonneteer. These
include some of the finest sonnets in the language, and very many of
admittedly indifferent quality. Mr. Swinburne regards his sonnets as on
the whole "the best out of sight" in our poetry. In general he followed
the Italian model, but with very great liberty. He not only practised
great variety of rime-arrangement in the sestet, but frequently altered
the scheme of the octave to such forms as _abbaacca_; see, for example,
the specimen beginning "Scorn not the Sonnet." Wordsworth also showed no
regard for the careful division of thought between octave and sestet.
Indeed in a letter to Dyce, in 1833, he said that he regarded the sonnet
not as a piece of architecture, but as "an orbicular body,--a sphere or
a dew-drop." (_Works_, ed. Knight, vol. xi. p. 232.) Its excellence
seemed to him to consist mainly in a "pervading sense of intense unity."
Nevertheless, he admitted that "a sonnet will often be found excellent,
where the beginning, the middle, and the end are distinctly marked, and
also where it is distinctly separated into _two_ parts, to which, as I
before observed, the strict Italian model, as they write it, is
favorable."
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?
(JOSEPH BLANCO WHITE: _To Night_. ab. 1825. In _The Book of the Sonnet_,
i. 258.)
This famous sonnet was called by Coleridge "the best in the English
language." He seems, however, to have been led to this opinion rather by
the thought than the form.
I met a traveler 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.
(SHELLEY: _Ozymandias of Egypt_. 1817.)
Shelley wrote but few sonnets, and all but one (_To the Nile_) are
irregular in structure. The rime-scheme of the present specimen is, of
course, wholly eccentric.
The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead:
That is the Grasshopper's; he takes the lead
In summer luxury; he has never done
With his delights, for, when tired out with fun,
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost
The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.
(KEATS: _The Grasshopper and Cricket_. 1817.)
Keats's sonnets are for the most part regular in both rime-scheme and
bipartite structure; but a number of the posthumous sonnets are in the
English form. The present specimen (which competes with the more
familiar sonnet on _Chapman's Homer_ for the chief place among those of
Keats) is a particularly good example of the bipartite structure and its
organic relation to the thought of the sonnet.
Amazing monster! that, for aught I know,
With the first sight of thee didst make our race
Forever stare! O flat and shocking face,
Grimly divided from the breast below!
Thou that on dry land horribly dost go
With a split body and most ridiculous pace,
Prong after prong, disgracer of all grace,
Long-useless-finned, haired, upright, unwet, slow!
O breather of unbreathable, sword-sharp air,
How canst exist? How bear thyself, thou dry
And dreary sloth! What particle canst thou share
Of the only blessed life, the watery?
I sometimes see of ye an actual _pair_
Go by, linked fin by fin! most odiously.
(LEIGH HUNT: _The Fish to the Man_. 1836.)
If I leave all for thee, wilt thou exchange
And be all to me? Shall I never miss
Home-talk and blessing, and the common kiss
That comes to each in turn, nor count it strange,
When I look up, to drop on a new range
Of walls and floors,--another home than this?
Nay, wilt thou fill that place by me which is
Fill'd by dead eyes, too tender to know change?
That's hardest! If to conquer love, has tried,
To conquer grief tries more, as all things prove:
For grief indeed is love, and grief beside.
Alas, I have grieved so I am hard to love--
Yet love me--wilt thou? Open thine heart wide,
And fold within the wet wings of thy dove.
(ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING: _Sonnets from the Portuguese_, xxxv.
1850.)
The forty-four _Sonnets from the Portuguese_ (the title, of course,
being purely fanciful) constitute one of the chief sonnet-sequences of
the modern period. While true to the Italian rime-structure, Mrs.
Browning cannot be said to have treated the sonnet either as a two-part
poem or as a unit. Only three of the series, says Professor Corson (the
first, fourth, and thirteenth), "can be said to realize with any
distinctness the idea and the peculiar artistic effect of the sonnet
proper." Hence while calling them "the most beautiful love-poems in the
language," he thinks "they cannot be classed as sonnets." (_Primer of
English Verse_, pp. 175, 176.)
A Sonnet is a moment's monument,--
Memorial from the Soul's eternity
To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be,
Whether for lustral rite or dire portent,
Of its own arduous fulness reverent:
Carve it in ivory or in ebony,
As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see
Its flowering crest impearled and orient.
A sonnet is a coin: its face reveals
The soul,--its converse, to what Power 'tis due:--
Whether for tribute to the august appeals
Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue,
It serve; or, 'mid the dark wharf's cavernous breath,
In Charon's palm it pay the toll to Death.
(ROSSETTI: Sonnet preceding _The House of Life_. 1881.)
When do I see thee most, beloved one?
When in the light the spirits of mine eyes
Before thy face, their altar, solemnize
The worship of that Love through thee made known?
Or when in the dusk hours (we two alone),
Close-kissed and eloquent of still replies
Thy twilight-hidden glimmering visage lies,
And my soul only sees thy soul its own?
O love, my love! if I no more should see
Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee,
Nor image of thine eyes in any spring,--
How then should sound upon Life's darkening slope
The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope,
The wind of Death's imperishable wing?
(ROSSETTI: _The House of Life_: Sonnet iv. _Lovesight_. 1870.)
The sonnets of Rossetti are undoubtedly the most perfect representatives
of the Italian form in English poetry of the nineteenth century, and
_The House of Life_ (in 101 sonnets) is probably to be regarded as the
most important sonnet-sequence since the Elizabethan age. The bipartite
character of Rossetti's sonnets is marked, in editions of his poems, by
the printing of the octave and sestet with a space between them.
They rose to where their sovran eagle sails,
They kept their faith, their freedom, on the height,
Chaste, frugal, savage, armed by day and night
Against the Turk; whose inroad nowhere scales
Their headlong passes, but his footstep fails,
And red with blood the Crescent reels from fight
Before their dauntless hundreds, in prone flight
By thousands down the crags and through the vales.
O smallest among peoples! rough rock-throne
Of Freedom! warriors beating back the swarm
Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years,
Great Tsernagora! never since thine own
Black ridges drew the cloud and brake the storm
Has breathed a race of mightier mountaineers.
(TENNYSON: _Montenegro_. 1877.)
It is curious that the two chief representatives of English poetry of
the Victorian period, Tennyson and Browning, should neither of them have
given much attention to the sonnet nor have achieved any notable success
in the form. Among Tennyson's poems there are some seventeen sonnets, of
which the present specimen was considered by the poet to be the best. It
represents a common form of the bipartite structure, where the octave is
a narrative, and the sestet a comment upon what has been narrated. In
the following specimen, from Matthew Arnold, the structure is similar.
Lentzner quotes the _East London_, in his monograph on the English
sonnet, as a case where the octave represents the thought in particular,
the sestet in the abstract; in other cases the order is the reverse.
'Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead
Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green,
And the pale weaver, through his window seen
In Spitalfields, looked thrice dispirited.
I met a preacher there I knew, and said:
'Ill and o'er-worked, how fare you in this scene?'
'Bravely!' said he, 'for I of late have been
Much cheered with thoughts of Christ, the Living Bread!'
O human soul! so long as thou canst so
Set up a mark of everlasting light
Above the howling senses' ebb and flow,
To cheer thee and to right thee if thou roam,
Not with lost toil thou laborest through the night!
Thou mak'st the heaven thou hop'st indeed thy home.
(MATTHEW ARNOLD: _East London_. 1867.)
"Why?" Because all I haply can and do,
All that I am now, all I hope to be,--
Whence comes it save from fortune setting free
Body and soul the purpose to pursue,
God traced for both? If fetters, not a few,
Of prejudice, convention, fall from me,
These shall I bid men--each in his degree
Also God-guided--bear, and gayly too?
But little do or can the best of us:
That little is achieved through Liberty.
Who, then, dares hold, emancipated thus--
His fellow shall continue bound? Not I.
Who live, love, labor freely, nor discuss
A brother's right to freedom. That is "Why."
(BROWNING: _Why I am a Liberal_. 1885.)
Browning's sonnets are few in number, mostly occasional, and none of
them can be considered notable. For a study of them, see the article by
Lentzner in _Anglia_, vol. xi. p. 500. Dr. Lentzner includes nine in his
list, not all of which are included in Browning's collected poems. Three
are so closely connected as practically to form a poem in three stanzas
(appended to _Jochanan Hakkadosh_, 1883).
One saith: the whole world is a Comedy
Played for the mirth of God upon his throne,
Whereof the hidden meanings will be known
When Michael's trumpet thrills through earth and sea.
Fate is the dramaturge; Necessity
Allots the parts; the scenes, by Nature shown,
Embrace each element and every zone,
Ordered with infinite variety.Another
saith: no calm-eyed Sophocles
Indites the tragedy of human doom,
But some cold scornful Aristophanes,
Whose zanies gape and gibber in thick gloom,
While nightingales, shrill 'mid the shivering trees,
Jar on the silence of the neighboring tomb.
(JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS: from _Sonnets on the Thought of Death_. ab.
1880.)
Yon silvery billows breaking on the beach
Fall back in foam beneath the star-shine clear,
The while my rhymes are murmuring in your ear
A restless lore like that the billows teach;
For on these sonnet-waves my soul would reach
From its own depths, and rest within you, dear,
As, through the billowy voices yearning here,
Great Nature strives to find a human speech.
A sonnet is a wave of melody:
From heaving waters of the impassioned soul
A billow of tidal music one and whole
Flows in the octave; then, returning free,
Its ebbing surges in the sestet roll
Back to the deeps of Life's tumultuous sea.
(THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON: _The Sonnet's Voice; a Metrical Lesson by the
Sea-shore_. _Athenæum_, Sept. 17, 1881.)
The "sonnet on the sonnet" has become so familiar in recent times that a
volume of such sonnets has been compiled, and a writer of humorous verse
has satirized the fashion in a "Sonnet on the Sonnet on the Sonnet."
Doubtless the two specimens quoted from Wordsworth lead all others of
the class; but the present specimen is an interesting attempt to
represent the characteristic metrical expressiveness of the form.
Oft have I seen at some cathedral door
A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat,
Lay down his burden, and with reverent feet
Enter, and cross himself, and on the floor
Kneel to repeat his Paternoster o'er;
Far off the noises of the world retreat;
The loud vociferations of the street
Become an undistinguishable roar.
So, as I enter here from day to day,
And leave my burden at this minster gate,
Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray,
The tumult of the time disconsolate
To inarticulate murmurs dies away,
While the eternal ages watch and wait.
(LONGFELLOW: _Sonnets on the Divina Commedia_, i. 1864.)
Caliph, I did thee wrong. I hailed thee late
"Abdul the Damned," and would recall my word.
It merged thee with the unillustrious herd
Who crowd the approaches to the infernal gate--
Spirits gregarious, equal in their state
As is the innumerable ocean bird,
Gannet or gull, whose wandering plaint is heard
On Ailsa or Iona desolate.
For, in a world where cruel deeds abound,
The merely damned are legion: with such souls
Is not each hollow and cranny of Tophet crammed?
Thou with the brightest of Hell's aureoles
Dost shine supreme, incomparably crowned,
Immortally, beyond all mortals, damned.
(WILLIAM WATSON: _To the Sultan_, in _The Year of Shame_. 1897.)
Mr. William Archer says of Mr. Watson's political sonnets, that the form
becomes in his hands "a weapon like the sling of David. In the octave he
whirls it round and round with ever-gathering momentum, and in the
sestet sends his scorn or rebuke singing through the air, arrow-straight
to its mark." (_Poets of the Younger Generation_, p. 503.)