From Tuskane came my Ladies worthy race:
Faire Florence was sometyme her auncient seate:
The Western yle, whose pleasaunt shore dothe face
Wilde Cambers clifs, did geve her lively heate:
Fostered she was with milke of Irishe brest:
Her sire, an Erle; her dame, of princes blood.
From tender yeres, in Britain she doth rest,
With kinges childe, where she tasteth costly food.
Honsdon did first present her to mine yien:
Bright is her hewe, and Geraldine she hight.
Hampton me taught to wishe her first for mine:
And Windsor, alas, dothe chase me from her sight.
Her beauty of kind, her vertues from above.
Happy is he that can obtaine her love.
(EARL OF SURREY: _Description and praise of his love Geraldine_. In
Tottel's _Songs and Sonnets_, p. 9. Pub. 1557.)
Surrey experimented with the Italian sonnet as it had been introduced
into England by his master Wyatt, but soon devised a variation from the
Italian form, and wrote a majority of his sonnets in the new English
form (nine out of the sixteen which are printed in Tottel's Miscellany).
This new form is divided, not into octave and sestet, but into three
quatrains, with alternate rime, and a couplet. It produces, therefore,
an effect quite different from that of the legitimate Italian sonnet,
the couplet at the end giving it a more epigrammatic structure.
Surrey's form seems more consonant with common English taste for
simplicity of rime-structure, and, besides being honored by its adoption
by Shakspere, has remained a favorite side by side with the more
"correct" original.[37]
Come, Sleep! O Sleep, the certain knot of peace,
The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release,
The indifferent judge between the high and low;
With shield of proof shield me from out the press
Of those fierce darts Despair at me doth throw.
O make me in those civil wars to cease;
I will good tribute pay, if thou do so.
Take thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed,
A chamber deaf of noise and blind of light,
A rosy garland and a weary head:
And if these things, as being thine in right,
Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me,
Livelier than elsewhere, Stella's image see.
(SIDNEY: _Astrophel and Stella_, xxxix. ab. 1580.)
Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night,
Brother to Death, in silent darkness born,
Relieve my languish, and restore the light;
With dark forgetting of my care return.
And let the day be time enough to mourn
The shipwreck of my ill-adventured youth:
Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn,
Without the torment of the night's untruth.
Cease, dreams, the images of day-desires,
To model forth the passions of to-morrow;
Never let rising Sun approve you liars,
To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow:
Still let me sleep, embracing clouds in vain,
And never wake to feel the day's disdain.
(SAMUEL DANIEL: _Care-charmer Sleep_. 1592.)
Daniel was one of the most skilful of the Elizabethans in the use of the
English form of the sonnet. The greater number of his _Sonnets to Delia_
are of this type. The subject of the present sonnet was a fashionable
one in the sixteenth century (compare Sidney's, quoted above).
Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part,--
Nay I have done, you get no more of me;
And I am glad, yea, glad with all my heart,
That thus so cleanly I myself can free;
Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows,
And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain.
Now at the last gasp of love's latest breath,
When, his pulse failing, passion speechless lies,
When faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And innocence is closing up his eyes,
--Now if thou would'st, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou might'st him yet recover!
(DRAYTON: _Love's Farewell_. 1594.)
Rossetti called this sonnet "perhaps the best in the language."
Drayton's sonnet-sequence, the _Idea_, follows the Shaksperian form; and
the present specimen illustrates how the important division of this type
of sonnet is between the quatrains and the final couplet.
One day I wrote her name upon the strand;
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide and made my pains his prey.
Vain man! said she, that dost in vain essay
A mortal thing so to immortalize;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise.
Not so (quoth I); let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame;
My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name,--
Where, whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.
(SPENSER: _Amoretti_, lxxv. 1595.)
The sonnets in Spenser's collected poems number 177, of which fifty-six
are in the common English (Surrey) form, the remainder--like the present
specimen--riming _ababbcbccdcdee_. This order of rimes reminds us of
that in the Spenserian stanza, and must have been devised by Spenser at
about the same time. It has never been adopted by other poets.
When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate;
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possest,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee--and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
(SHAKSPERE: _Sonnet_ xxix. 1609.)
That time of year thou may'st in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang:
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest:
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by:
--This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
(SHAKSPERE: _Sonnet_ lxxiii. 1609.)
These two specimens, perhaps the favorites of as many readers as any
which could be chosen, must serve to represent the sonnets of Shakspere.
The whole number of these is 154, and all are in the English form.
Slight irregularities in the rime-scheme will be found in about fifteen.
Number 99 has fifteen lines and 126 (sometimes called the Epilogue to
the first part of the series) has only twelve. Number 20 is wholly based
on feminine rimes.[38]
Lord, with what care hast Thou begirt us round!
Parents first season us; then schoolmasters
Deliver us to laws; they send us bound
To rules of reason, holy messengers,
Pulpits and Sundays, sorrow dogging sin,
Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes,
Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in,
Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,
Blessings beforehand, ties of gratefulness,
The sound of glory ringing in our ears;
Without, our shame; within, our consciences;
Angels and grace, eternal hopes and fears.
Yet all these fences and their whole array
One cunning bosom-sin blows quite away.
(GEORGE HERBERT: _Sin_. 1631.)
In vain to me the smiling mornings shine,
And reddening Ph[oe]bus lifts his golden fire;
The birds in vain their amorous descant join,
Or cheerful fields resume their green attire.
These ears, alas! for other notes repine,
A different object do these eyes require;
My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine,
And in my breast the imperfect joys expire.
Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer,
And new-born pleasure brings to happier men;
The fields to all their wonted tribute bear;
To warm their little loves the birds complain;
I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear,
And weep the more because I weep in vain.
(GRAY: _On the Death of Richard West_. 1742.)
On the place of this sonnet in the eighteenth century, see p. 277,
above.
Oh it is pleasant, with a heart at ease,
Just after sunset, or by moonlight skies,
To make the shifting clouds be what you please,
Or let the easily-persuaded eyes
Own each quaint likeness issuing from the mould
Of a friend's fancy; or, with head bent low
And cheek aslant, see rivers flow of gold
'Twixt crimson bank; and then, a traveler, go
From mount to mount through Cloudland, gorgeous land!
Or listening to the tide, with closed sight,
Be that blind bard who, on the Chian strand
By those deep sounds possessed with inward light,
Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssee
Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea.
(COLERIDGE: _Fancy in Nubibus_. 1819.)
The sonnets of Coleridge, as has already been noted, were written under
the influence of those of Bowles, and are not of the Italian type. He
defined the sonnet as "a short poem in which some lonely feeling is
developed," thus emphasizing, like Wordsworth, the idea of unity rather
than of progressive structure.
Darkly, as by some gloomed mirror glassed,
Herein at times the brooding eye beholds
The great scarred visage of the pompous Past,
But oftener only the embroidered folds
And soiled regality of his rent robe,
Whose tattered skirts are ruined dynasties
And cumber with their trailing pride the globe,
And sweep the dusty ages in our eyes;
Till the world seems a world of husks and bones
Where sightless Seers and Immortals dead,
Kings that remember not their awful thrones,
Invincible armies long since vanquished,
And powerless potentates and foolish sages
Lie 'mid the crumbling of the mossy ages.
(WILLIAM WATSON: _History_.)