Sonnets

“ The immortal poet pours his mortal sorrows into our breasts, and a tear falls from his sightless orbs on the friendly hand he presses. The Sonnets are a kind of pensive record of past achievements, loves, and friendships, and a noble exhortation to himself to bear up with cheerful hope and confidence to the last. Some of them are of a more quaint and humorous character; but I speak of those only which are intended to be serious and pathetical.—I do not know indeed but they may be said to be almost the first effusions of this sort of natural and personal sentiment in the language. ”

“ As has been said before, the Sonnets obviously have a common theme. They celebrate his friend, his beauty, his winning and lovable qualities, leading the poet to forgive and to continue to love, even when his friend has supplanted him in the favors of his mistress. They are replete with compliment and adulation. Little side views or perspectives are introduced with a marvellous facility of invention; and yet in them all, even in the invocation to marry, in the jealousy of another poet, in the railing to or of his false mistress, is the face or thought of his friend, apparently his patron. ”

“ Well then, replied he, we will say that this sonnet would confuse clearer heads than thine; it is all the better for that. Sonnets, odes, in short, all compositions which partake of the sublime, are of course the reverse of the simple and natural; they are enveloped in clouds, and their darkness constitutes their grandeur. Let the poet only fancy that he understands himself, no matter whether his readers understand him or not. ”

“ We noticed recently in a periodical paper a Sonnet introduced by the following paragraph:
“We have an utter, relentless, unmitigated dislike, aversion, horror, for those fourteen-lined effusions, called Sonnets. They remind us of a child struggling to walk in swaddling clothes. They are puny ideas on stilts. They have a central thought, which, like the centre of gravity, is never seen. The poor thing flounders about like a man running tied up in a sack. It is a puzzle for children of a larger growth. Like a glass thread, one wonders how it is spun, or how the apple got into the dumplings!” ”

“ The whole beauty of “the passion” dies out before the supposition. We cannot read the Sonnets as hackneyed imitations of past fashions. They have all the verve of a fresh impulse, all the ideal transport of newly discovered power, all the original treatment of newly acquired music. ”

“ The Sonnets, as a whole, are spiritual; their passion is transmuted into discipline. Their love, which, whatever its nominal object, is hardly anything but love of beauty and youth in general, is made to triumph over time by a metaphysical transformation of the object into something eternal. At first this is the beauty of the race renewing itself by generation, then it is the description of beauty in the poet's verse, and finally it is the immortal soul enriched by the contemplation of that beauty. ”

“ He felt, as indeed I think we all must feel, that the Sonnets are addressed to an individual, to a particular young man whose personality for some reason seems to have filled the soul of Shakespeare with terrible joy and no less terrible despair. ”

“ It needs no argument to establish that this concurrence of statements made in different groups of Sonnets and doubtless at different times has much more than four times the persuasive force of one such statement. And in like ratio do the other Sonnets indicating the reflections and conditions of age, increase the weight of the statements in these four Sonnets. Taking them all together they seem to present the statements, conditions, and reflections of a man certainly past the noon of life,—past forty years of age, and so older than was Shakespeare at the time of their composition. ”

“ To look upon him as simply the object of certain love-poems is to miss the whole meaning of the poems: for the art of which Shakespeare talks in the Sonnets is not the art of the Sonnets themselves, which indeed were to him but slight and secret things—it is the art of the dramatist to which he is always alluding ”

“ He asks if his failure to marry is because he might wet a widow's eye, and then in successive Sonnets cries shame on his friend for being so improvident. He tells him that when he shall wane, change toward age, he should have a child to perpetuate his youth; and the thought again brings to the poet the vision of winter, summer's green borne on winter's bier, and he urges him that he should prepare against his coming end, by transmitting his semblance to another; that he should not let so fair a house fall to decay, but should uphold it against the stormy blasts of winter by begetting a son ”

“ These one hundred and fifty-two Sonnets I will now insist have a common theme. Most of them may be placed in groups which seem to be connected and somewhat interdependent. Those groups may perhaps, in some cases, be placed in different orders, without seriously affecting the whole. ”

“ I would next call attention to portions of these Sonnets which I do not present as of themselves having any clearly determinate weight as to the age of the poet, but which do have great significance from their correspondence in tone and effect with what has been already quoted. The poet repeatedly falls into meditations or fancies which seem more natural to a person on the descending than on the ascending side of life. ”

“ This note on the structure of the Sonnet would fail in its purpose if it distracted the reader from the spirit behind the form;—for the spirit is the life,—and few who read these Sonnets will deny that the spirit of Nizamat Jung is that of the true poet, ever striving to look beyond ephemeral sorrows up to the Eternal Beauty—now hidden behind a veil, but some day to be revealed in all its splendour and completeness. ”

“ If the friend to whom the Sonnets were addressed was Shakespeare, and if the author of the Sonnets and of the accredited Shakespearean plays was some "pale, wasted," and unknown student who sold his labors and his genius to another, we may perhaps see how they would have had frequent interviews and hours of labor, and how Shakespeare might have had all the relations to the poet, which the Sonnets imply of the poet's friend. ”

“ However we may try to distinguish between what is conventional and what is felt in the Sonnets, they apparently refer to real persons and real situations. Sonnets I-XVII urge marriage on the beautiful young patron and friend: his beauties and virtues must live in his children as well as in verse. Sonnets XXXIII-XXXVI hint at some measure of estrangement, some wrong done to the poet by the friend. ”

“ The Sonnets deserve to be generally known.”—Clerical Journal.
“Chaste, sweet, and musical are these poems. There is a spirit of natural poetry in every throb of her muse, and one can hardly rise from a perusal of this little volume without having imbibed pleasure and instruction.”—Critic. ”

“ Even the Sonnet upon Sonnets, so perfect in the details, is not perfect as a whole.
However, I am not so fastidious as some persons about the dress of a thought. These sonnets are so replete with sweetness and spirit, that we can excuse their want of symmetry; and probably should not feel it, except from comparison with more highly-finished works of the same kind. One more let me extract, which should be laid to heart:
“Desponding father! ”

“ The ideal is to combine deep and exalted feeling with perfect expression, and produce a whole which goes to the heart like a beautiful piece of music, and satisfies the mind—like one of those ancient Greek gems which, in a small space, presents engraved images symbolic of sublime ideas vast as the universe.
The Nawab Nizamat Jung has written in English several sonnets which we should admire even if English were his native language. ”

“ And there are none of the Sonnets, however they may read standing alone, that do not fit the mode and movement of those with which [Pg 18] they stand connected. There is, I submit, no more reason for sundering Sonnets of that class from the others, than there is for taking the soliloquy of Hamlet from the play that bears his name.
This statement of the theme and the connected character of the Sonnets is not essential to the views I shall present. ”

“ Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest Sonnet 4 – Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend Sonnet 5 – Those hours, that with gentle work did frame Sonnet 6 – Then let not winter's ragged hand deface Sonnet 7 – Lo, in the orient when the gracious light Sonnet 8 – Music to hear, why hear'st thou music sadly? Sonnet 9 – Is it for fear to wet a widow's eye Sonnet 10 – For shame deny that thou bear'st love to any Sonnets 11–20 Sonnet 11 – As fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou grow'st Sonnet 12 – When I do count the clock that tells the time Sonnet 13 – O that you were yourself! ”

“ Sonnets, I should like to send them to you to read. They are not to be got now: and I have entreated Spedding to republish them with Macmillan, with such a preface of his own—congenial Critic and Poet—as would discover these Violets now modestly hidden under the rank Vegetation of Browning, Swinburne, and Co. Some of these Sonnets have a Shakespeare fancy in them:—some rather puerile—but the greater part of them, pure, delicate, beautiful, and quite original. [151b] I told Mr. Norton (America) to get them published over the water if no one will do so here. ”

“ As, however, while the Great War lasts, few of us have leisure for literary experiments, it will perhaps be best to read these Sonnets primarily for their soul and spirit. In melody and expression they are of varying degrees of merit and completeness, but in the inspiring ideal they consistently embody they rise to heights which have been scaled only by the noblest. ”

“ Of all the most famous writers of Sonnets, it is Michelangelo whose words come back most vividly to memory as we read the Nawab's expressions of faith.
"Love wakes the soul and gives it wings to fly."
"All beauty that to human sight is given Is but the shadow, if we rightly see, Of Him from Whom man's spirit issueth."
"As heat from fire, my love from the ideal Is parted never." ”

“ The poet, asserting that his verse is immortal, says to his friend, the immortality it confers is yours; "your name from hence immortal life shall have," but I shall have no share in that fame; "in me each part will be forgotten," and "earth can yield me but a common grave." Though the Sonnet is in the highest degree poetic, as a bare statement of fact it is perfectly apt and appropriate to that which was the obvious purpose of this group of Sonnets.
It is sometimes claimed that the author of the Shakespearean plays was a lawyer. ”

“ Leigh Hunt says: "Drummond's sonnets, for the most part, are not only of the legitimate order, but they are the earliest in the language that breathe what may be called the habit of mind observable in the best Italian writers of sonnets; that is to say, a mixture of tenderness, elegance, love of country, seclusion, and conscious sweetness of verse." (Essay on the Sonnet, in The Book of the Sonnet, vol. i. pp. 78, 79.)
[Pg 275]
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death ”

“ Our readers will remember that one of the chief points in the enigma of the sonnets is the dedication, and it runs thus: "To the onlie begetter of these ensuing Sonnets, Mr. W. H., all happiness and that eternitie promised by our ever-living poet wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth. ”

“ With such aid as may be had from considering the age of his friend, we come to the more important inquiry: What was the age of the author of these Sonnets,—what was the age of the poet of the Shakespearean plays? ”

“ SONNETS BY THE NAWAB NIZAMAT JUNG BAHADUR "Love is not discoverable by the eye, but only by the soul. Its elements are indeed innate in our mortal constitution, and we give it the names of Joy and Aphrodite; but in its highest nature no mortal hath fully comprehended it."
EMPEDOCLES. "Every one choose the object of his affections according to his character.... The Divine is beauty, wisdom, goodness, and by these the wings of the soul are nourished." ”

“ But if Shakespeare, then well advanced both to fame and fortune, was the poet it is very difficult to imagine any one person who could have borne to him all the relations which the Sonnets indicate—patron or benefactor and familiar associate and companion; a rival and successor in the favors of his mistress, and a loved or at least cherished friend. ”

“ Hence the Sonnets of Bowles derive their marked superiority over all
other Sonnets; hence they domesticate with the heart, and become, as it
were, a part of our identity.
Respecting the metre of a Sonnet, the Writer should consult his own 40
convenience.—Rhymes, many or few, or no rhymes at all—whatever the
chastity of his ear may prefer, whatever the rapid expression of his
feelings [1140] will permit;—all these things are left at his own disposal. ”

“ The sonnets are like those he has previously written—equally unfinished as sonnets, equally full of meaning as poems. If it be the case with all his poems, that scarcely one forms a perfect whole by itself, but is valuable as a leaf out of his mind, it is peculiarly so with his sonnets. I presume he only makes use of this difficult mode of writing because it is a concise one for the expression of a single thought or a single mood. ”

“ Can we imagine a man of thirty, in the full glow of a vigorous and successful life, saying to a friend of twenty-one,—you should marry now, because when you are forty years old (about twice your present age and ten years above my own) your beauty will have faded and your blood be cold?
We should not so slander the author of the Shakespearean plays.
The language of the Sonnets implies a familiarity and equality of intercourse not consistent with the theory that they were addressed [Pg 84] to a peer of England by a person in Shakespeare's position. ”