The literary form of 'sonnet' is a foreign importation in English literature. The sonnet, as a literary form, in fact, appeared in England as one of the distinct and immediate effects of the Renaissance. A sonnet is a fixed poetic form that originated in Italy in the 13th century. The word sonnet comes from the Italian sonetto, meaning “a little song.” Traditionally, a sonnet consists of 14 lines written in iambic pentameter and follows a strict rhyme scheme. Despite its brevity, the sonnet is capable of expressing deep emotions, complex ideas, and philosophical reflections.
The Meaning of the Sonnet:
The term Sonnet has come from the Italian Sonetto ('suono', a sound, a song). It originated in Italy, and in the masterful hands of Petrarch, Cavalcanti, and Dante, it attained its pinnacle of perfection there. The sonnet was, however, first written in about 1230 or 1240 by a Sicilian lawyer, Lentino.
The sonnet, in a general sense,
means a short poem. It is a poem of
fourteen lines, with a special arrangement for rhymes and it treats generally
one thought or emotion. Sonnets usually revolve around a single central
theme, such as love, beauty, time, death, morality, or art. A key feature
of a sonnet is the volta (or turn), a moment where the poem shifts in
tone, argument, or emotional direction.
The Origin and History of the Sonnet
Sir Thomas Wyatt a Pioneer in Sonnet-Writing in England
Wyatt himself did not write any memorable sonnets; but he was a pioneer who opened up a new path for the writing of poetry. His imitations of Petrarch brought new and bold images into English. For instance, he speaks of love who
Into my face presseth with bold
pretence,
And there campeth displaying his
banner,
And says that, upon rejection,
to heart's forest he fleeth,
Leaving his enterprise with pain
and cry.
Such impassioned language became
current and normal five years later, but before Wyatt it was entirely unknown.
The same literary historian goes on to say that Wyatt's sighs and entreaties in
his sonnets are also Petrarchan, though in some of his sonnets he shows some
strength and tells his mistress some hard truths. For instance:
Farewell, Love, and all thy laws
for ever;
Thy baited hooks shall tangle me
no more:
Senec and Plato call me from thy
lore
To perfect wealth, my wit for to
endeavour
The names of Wyatt and Surrey are
permanently linked in literary history. Born fourteen years after Wyatt, Surrey
seems to have been the disciple of the older man. Much more dominated than
Wyatt by the Petrarchan convention, Surrey sang in sonnets his entirely
imaginative love for Geraldine or Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald. The elegiac tone
is natural to him. His special note is that of love for Nature, and with happy
effect he mingles descriptions of Nature with his plaints of love. But it is
perhaps in some impersonal sonnets that his merit as a poet shows itself best.
There may· be a satirical allusion to a contemporary personage in his sonnet on
Sardanapalus, but it should be perused for its absolute value, its dignified swing,
its structural force, and its effort to condensed thought: "Thassyrian king
in peace, with foul desire ...... ". A similar grandeur distinguishes the sonnet, which praises Sir Thomas Wyatt for his translation of some of the Psalms of
David.
Surrey's Modification of the Sonnet on the Italian Model
Less directly influenced by the Italians than Wyatt, the Earl of Surrey had a perfectly just sense of what befitted the poetry of his nation. For the sonnet on the Italian model cultivated by his friend-two quatrains followed by two tercets-he substituted the less elaborate and easier English form which Shakespeare afterwards adopted. This form consisted of three quatrains with different rhymes, followed by a couplet. But Surrey's chief claim to glory is that he introduced blank verse into English. His blank verse is simply the decasyllabic or heroic metre shorn of its rhymes.
Another
Literary Historian's Account: The Word "Sonnet"
The word "sonnet" is an
abbreviation of the Italian "sonetto" (meaning a little sound), and
was a short poem recited originally to a musical accompaniment. Like the lyric,
it was a single emotion or idea expressed in rhythmic melody; and it differed
from the ordinary lyric less in conception than in form, as we can see by
comparing one of Shakespeare's sonnets on love with one of his songs (in his
dramas) on love. In the sonnet, the lilt and abandonment of the lyric were
replaced by a more deliberate manner and a more austere treatment. There might
be the same intensity of feeling and an equal scope for fancy; but the
difference is fairly perceptible.
The
Italian Sonneteers: Petrarch and Dante
The sonnet proper began to take
shape as a special metrical form in the hands of an Italian poet in the
thirteenth century. While this poet perfected the mechanism of the sonnet, two
others, much greater, Italian poets, namely Dante and Petrarch, crowned it with
beauty and power. Eventually, the sweetness of the music of the sonnet began to
attract the early English poets of the Renaissance, but they did not have the
skill to impart the same music to it. Then came Sir Philip Sidney with his
soothing sweetness, and he showed what could be done to produce those magical
effects which the Italians had produced; and from his time onwards, the
sonnet-form rapidly passed from a metrical experiment into genuine poetry.
Subsequently, there was hardly any English poet who did not try his hand at
sonnet-writing, the greatest among them being John Milton, William Wordsworth,
John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, not to speak
of the later Victorians and the poets of the twentieth century.
The
Development of the English Sonnet: Drayton
and Daniel
The English sonneteers did not
strictly follow the Italian form of the sonnet. They introduced changes, though
they did not alter the sonnet's length which was traditionally described as
fourteen lines. The formal modifications in the sonnet-form, which characterize
Shakespeare's sonnets, were first of all introduced by Michael Drayton and
Samuel Daniel.
Drayton's sonnet, A Parting,
is a magnificent piece of verse, sure in its handling, at once strong and
restrained in its expression of passion. Daniel's work, though less
distinguished, is always skilful and pleasing, occasionally touching great
heights. Daniel, as much as Drayton, paved the way for the much greater sonnets
written by Shakespeare, just as Marlowe's handling of the blank verse had paved
the way for Shakespeare's much higher achievement in that sphere. These poets
had shown the way to sonnet-writing, while Shakespeare's genius attained the
peaks.
Sir
Philip Sidney as a Writer of Sonnets: "Astrophel and Stella"
Two greater names than those of
Wyatt, Surrey, Drayton, and Daniel deserve to be mentioned in connection with
sonnet-writing before we come to the master, namely Shakespeare. They are Sir
Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. Sidney wrote a sonnet-sequence called
Astrophel and Stella (first published in 1591 and in a complete and authorized
edition in 1598). It is believed to be a largely autobiographical work, and
written in the heat of Sidney's passion for a girl of nineteen who, however,
was married to another suitor. These sonnets possess a magical quality which is
born of their union of hot-blooded passion with super-sensual idealism. The
woman for whom Sidney yearned has, in these sonnets, been transfigured and
irradiated. Virtue itself takes the shape of his beloved Stella. In Stella's
face Sidney reads what love and beauty are. In fact, Sidney's splendid passion
draws everything, great or small, into its flaming orbit in these sonnets which
have something of the sweep and cathartic effect of tragedy.
Spenser
as a Writer of Sonnets: "The Amoretti"
Spenser imparted distinction to
the sonnet-form of poetry by his sonnet- sequence called The Amoretti
consisting of 88 sonnets, published in 1595. These sonnets are also
autobiographical love-poems which describe Spenser's wooing of a woman by the
name of Elizabeth Boyle to whom he subsequently got married. The sonnets in
this sequence are permeated by an undertone of melancholy which is blended with
a frank and sensitive delight in the beauty and splendour of things.
The
Culmination of the Sonnet-Form in Shakespeare's Hands
The culmination of the
Elizabethan sonnets comes with Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, addressed largely to
a young friend and partly to a mistress who has come to be known as the dark
lady h's form, Shakespeare created a series of poems comparable only to those
of Petrarch. All that goes between fades into insignificance. "These two
writers transfused their inner life into the sonnet. It is only by means of
such a comparison that we can see how much the sonnet-form needed a new
imaginative impulse, and how Shakespeare was able to give it.
Structure
of the sonnets in English:
The Italian sonnet which was imported and
imitated in English by Sir Thomas Wyatt has no simple unity. Its structure,
largely established in the sonnet sequence the Rime or Canzoniere by the
Italian master Francesco Petrarch (Petrarca), comprises two unequal parts.
There is, first, an eight-line section (called the octave) and then there is a
six-line section (the sestet). Such a division has given the Italian sonnet its
structure. This is symmetrical, and very often there is a turning point at the
beginning of the ninth line, implying a new section.
The innovators of sonnets in the
English language-Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (better
known simply as Wyatt and Surrey)-followed initially the Petrarchan structure.
But, as Italian and English were different languages, some changes or
deviations from the original Italian form were inevitable. Both Wyatt and Earl
of Surrey made certain structural variations, particularly in the organisation
of the sestet.
It is, however, the
organisational change in the sestet, made by Surrey, that may well be taken as
the primary source of the Shakespearean sonnet-structure. In Surrey, the final
two lines are found to serve not as the conclusion to the sestet, but as a separate
entity, a rhyming couplet, summing up the sonnet as a wholc. The typical
Petrarchan form has thus a change from the proportion of eight lines to six, to
that of twelve lines (divided into eight lines and four) to two in the hand of
Surrey. The use of the final couplet is a specific feature in this respect.
The Shakespearcan sonnet form is
the result of the process of development in sonnet-writing in English, set up
by Wyatt and Surrey. It is a more sophisticated and developed literary mode,
capable of immense flexibility, despite its apparently rigid structure.
The form used in the
Shakespearean sonnet is found inherited from Surrey. Instead of the typical
Petrarchan division of the sonnet into two unequal parts, this has four parts,
There are three quatrains and a concluding couplet. This is also virtually the
norm of the sonnets of Surrey and his followers, as the following observation
by George Gascoigne indicates-"Then you have sonnets .... which are of
fourteen lines, every line containing ten syllables. The first twelve do rhyme
in staves of four lines by cross metre, and the last two lines rhyming together
do conclude the whole."
Thus, in Shakespeare, the
fourteen lines of the sonnet are divided into three quatrains, covering twelve
lines, and a concluding couplet. The structural division here is not two, as in
the typical Petrarchan sonnet, but four. The quatrains are symmetrically
arranged, and the couplet concludes the theme outlined in the quatrains.
The organization of the
Shakespearean sonnet is not at all simple, yet it is quite methodical and
orderly. Each quatrain is used by the poet to state his argument of contention
or develop his subject or theme. There is also a pause after each quatrain to
maintain the symmetry in the process of his statement or in the development of
his subject or theme. The concluding couplet serves to complete the process and
concludes.
Lines 1-4: 1st quatrain
Pause
Lines 5-8: 2nd quatrain
Pause
Lines 9-12: 3rd quatrain
Pause
Lines 13-14: Concluding
Couplet
This structural organisation of
the Shakespearean sonnet may be illustrated by referring to some specific
sonnets.
First, the sonnet Shall I compare
thee (No. 18) may be taken. The first quatrain here states the friend's beauty
by referring to the decay of natural objects. He is lovelier and more temperate
than 'summer's day. 'Rough winds' 'shake the darling buds of May' and 'summer's
lease hath all too short a date'.
The second quatrain continues and
develops the theme of deca in the natural world further. 'The eye of heaven
(sun) shines 'sometimes too hot' and often is his gold complexion dimmed.
'Every fair from fair sometimes declines' 'by nature's changing course.'
There is a pause between the
first quatrain and the second, and this shows the orderly process of
development.
The third quatrain emphasizes the
friend's beauty and its perpetuation in the poet's lines. His 'eternal summer
shall not fade,' 'Nor shall Death brag' of possessing him. He will grow 'to
time' in the poet's 'eternal lines'. The poet's argument in this quatrain
develops from his statements in the first two quatrains. There is a pause also
between the second quatrain and the third.
The concluding couplet sums up
the chain of the poet's arguments in the optimistic assertion-
"So long as men can breathe
or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this
gives life to thee."
Next, the sonnet That time of
year .... (No. 73) may be taken. It contains the poet's plaintive anticipation
of the decay of his physical vigor and of his death and expresses his faith in
the restorative power of his friend's love to rouse his drooped spirit.
The three quatrains of the sonnet
are employed to indicate the decay that is setting on the poet. He draws a
vivid image in each quatrain to substantiate his contention. Each image is
complete in itself and forms a symmetrical design in the enlargement of the
poet's statement of his own decay.
The first quatrain presents the
decadent state of nature under the grip of a dreadful winter to indicate the
poet's failing health. The second quatrain has the analogy of the fading light
of the sun 'in the west' and the coming of the 'black night'.
The third quatrain depicts the
imagery of the dying hearth to emphasize the poet's physical decay. There is a
pause after each quatrain. The concluding couplet leads to the poet's consolation,
even amid his gloomy state, that his growing physical infirmity 'makes' his
friend's 'love more strong'.
In both the sonnets (64 and 65),
the effects of mutability, caused by time, are represented. In the first two
quatrains, the poet traces the ruinous power of time to decay and change all.
'The lofty towers' and the work of 'brass' are 'razed' by time, while 'the
hungry ocean' and the 'firm soil' are made to increase 'store with loss, and
loss with store' (sonnet No. 64). Again, 'sad mortality' oversways 'brass',
'stone', 'earth' and 'boundless sea', just as 'rocks impregnable' and 'gates of
steel' decay under the impact of time (sonnet No. 64). The third quatrain of
the sonnets develops further the statement of the earlier quatrains. The 'interchange
of state' and the state of 'decay' lead the poet 'to ruminate' that 'Time will
come' and 'take' his 'love away'. (sonnet No. 64) The poet is haunted with the
fearful meditation that no 'strong hand' can hold 'the swift foot' of time
back, and none can forbid 'the spoil of beauty' by time.
The concluding couplet of each
sonnet serves to sum up its entire argument. In the sonnet (No. 64) the poet
admits sadly the power of time and 'cannot choose but weep to have that which
it fears to lose'. In the other sonnet, there is the same admission of the
inviolable power of time with a reliance on the miracle of his verse-
"That in black ink my. love
may still shine bright."
The sonnet 'Let me not to the
marriage of true minds' (NO. 116) may be taken as the last example. The theme
of this sonnet is the celebration of the lofty idealism of love. Different
quatrains serve well here as the links of the chain of this theme.
The first quatrain speaks of the
constancy of true love. True love admits no 'impediment' and does not alter,
'when it alteration finds.' This is definitely an idealistic statement on love.
The second quatrain, after a
pause, follows the argument of the preceding quatrain and characterizes true
love as 'an ever-fixed mark' 'that looks on tempests and is never shaken.' The
poet even calls this 'the star to every wandering bark.'
There is a pause after the second
quatrain to continue and expand the poet's argument in the third quatrain that
goes further and shows the superiority of true love to time. The poet asserts
here that 'love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks within his
bending sickle's compass come', and declares finally the triumph of love over
time-
"Love alters not with his
brief hours and weeks
But bears it out even to the edge
of doom."
The concluding couplet of the
sonnet is the poet's final and positive assertion of his contention made in the
quatrains.
"If this be error and upon
me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever
loved."
There is, thus, a structural
order in the organisation of Shakespearean sonnets. This is, no doubt, somewhat
rigid, but the pattern is perfectly suited and properly applied to the development
of the poet's subject-matter, theme, or statement.
This orderly structural pattern
is supported by an equally orderly rhyme-scheme, followed by Shakespeare.
Instead of the conventional five rhymes of the Petrarchan sonnet, the
Shakespearean sonnet has seven rhymes. In each quatrain, alternate lines rhyme
rather rigidly. The last two lines form, as noted, a couplét.
The
following poem illustrates the Italian pattern and begins his new line of
thought early in line eight:
Octave
When I consider how my light is
spent a
Ere half my days, in this dark
world and wide, b
And that one Talent which is
death to hide, b
Lodged with me useless, though my Soul
more bent
a
To serve therewith my Maker, and
present
a
My true account, lest he
returning chide;
b
“Doth God exact day-labour, light
denied?”
b
I fondly ask; But patience to
prevent
a
Sestet
That murmur, soon replies, God
doth not need
c
Either man's work or his own
gifts; who best
d
Bear his mild yoke, they serve
him best, his state e
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
c
And post o'er Land and Ocean
without rest:
d
They also serve who only stand
and wait.”
e
(John Milton: On His
Blindness)
1st quatrain
When to the sessions of sweet
silent thought a
I summon up remembrance of things
past, b
I sigh the lack of many a thing I
sought, a
And with old woes new wail my
dear time's waste. b
2nd quatrain
Then can I drown an eye, unus'd
to flow, c
For precious friends hid in
death's dateless night, d
And weep afresh love's long since
cancell'd woe, c
And moan the expense of many a
vanish'd sight d
3rd quatrain
Then can I grieve at grievances
foregone, e
And heavily from woe to woe tell
o'er f
The sad account of fore-bemoaned
moan e
Which I new pay as if not paid
before. f
Concluding couplets
But if the while I think on thee,
dear friend, g
All losses are restor'd and
sorrows end. g
1st quatrain
That time of year thou mayst in
me behold a
When yellow leaves, or none, or
few, do hang b
Upon those bouhs which shake
against the cold, a
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late
the sweet birds sang. b
2nd quatrain
In me thou see’st the twilight of
such day c
As after sunset fadeth in the
west,
d
Which by and by black night doth
take away, c
Death’s second self, that seals
up in all rest. d
3rd quatrain
In me thou see’st the glowing of
such fire e
That on the ashes of his youth
doth lie,
f
As the death-bed whereon it must
expire, e
Consum’d with that which it was
nourish’d by. f
Concluding couplets
This thou perceiv’st , which
makes thy love more strong, g
To love that well which thou must
leave ere long. g
(William Shakespeare: Sonnet
73)
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