Sonnet

“ What Rossetti’s idea was of the mission of the sonnet, as associated with life, and exhibiting a similitude of it, may best be learned from his prefatory sonnet:—
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 ”

“ So unconstrainedly do the poetic language and imagery arrange their metrical feet in the beautiful order of the Sonnet,—while the one luminous idea, like electricity, runs through the whole,—that the mind which can perceive, sees only the radiant thought, yet feels that a harmonious chain is its conductor. ”

“ Three centuries have brought to the development of lyric passion no higher form than that of the sonnet cycle. The sonnet has been likened to an exquisite crystal goblet that holds one sublimely inspired thought so perfectly that not another drop can be added without overflow. ”

“ Keats included the sonnet in his 1817 volume. Leigh Hunt's sonnet will be found in the Notes and Illustrations.
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 ”

“ We have no doubt in the world that, if the other forms of art had been equally despised, they would have been equally despicable. If people had spoken of 'sonnets' with the same accent with which they speak of 'music-hall songs,' a sonnet would have been a thing so fearful and wonderful that we almost regret we cannot have a specimen; a rowdy sonnet is a thing to dream about. ”

“ The sonnet, artificial in weaker hands, becomes swift with feeling, red with a “veined humanity,” the chosen vehicle of a royal woman’s vows. Graces, felicities, vigor, glory of speech, here are so crowded as to tread each upon the other’s sceptred pall. The first sonnet, equal to any in our tongue, is an overture containing the motive of the canticle ”

“ Charles Cowden Clarke, to whom Keats showed the sonnet, writes in his recollections: 'This I feel to be the first proof I had received of his having committed himself in verse; and how clearly do I recollect the conscious look and hesitation with which he offered it! There are some momentary glances by beloved friends that fade only with life.' The sonnet was printed in the 1817 volume. ”

“ My theory of the sonnet is exactly expressed in the sonnet on the sonnet. It is that, in the octave, the emotion flows out in a rhythmic billow: that the solidarity of this billow is maintained by knitting the two quatrains together by means of two rhyme sounds only: that in the [115] sestet the billow ebbs back to “Life’s tumultuous sea” and that like the ebb of an ocean-billow it moves backward, not solidly, but broken up into wavelets. ”

“ 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!” ”

“ Staying the furious main, delight has cast
O'er my rapt spirit, and my thrilling heart,
Dear as the softer joys green vales impart.
[Pg 98]
SONNET XCVI. The breathing freshness of the shining Morn,
Whose beams glance yellow on the distant fields,
A sweet, unutterable pleasure yields
To my dejected sense, that turns with scorn
From the light joys of Dissipation born. ”

“ The sonnet endures. Mr. Horace Hutchinson wrote somewhere: “When you have read a sonnet, you feel that though there does not seem to be much of it, you have done a good p. 3deal, as when you have eaten a cold hard-boiled egg.” Still people keep on writing sonnets, because the sonnet is wholly serious. In an English sonnet you cannot easily be flippant of pen. ”

“ Be used in heaven, when God shall feast the just.
The sonnet may be addressed to any person or thing and is the direct personal expression of the author’s feeling. It is like the ode, and also partakes of the general nature of the elegy, but it differs from both in the rigidity of the rules of form that govern it. Sonnets originated in Italy, and the genuine Italian sonnet is very exacting in form. It must consist of exactly fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. These lines are divided into two groups, one of which consists of eight lines or two quatrains, the whole known as the octave. ”

“ The sonnet of Petrarch, commonly called the Italian sonnet, is a poem of fourteen lines divided into two parts of eight and six lines, the octave and the sestet. The octave was written abbaabba, while the sestet could have two or three rhymes, arranged in no fixed order save that the last two lines should not rhyme together. In the octave a thought, an emotion, a picture is completely presented and the verse sentence, so to speak, comes to an end. ”

“ The thought of the sonnet is, that, while he smiles at himself for weeping over dreams and fables of his own invention, he may remember that every thing that he fears and hopes is equally fictitious,—that all is false, his existence a delirium, and his whole life a dream;—and it ends with a prayer that he may awaken and find repose in the bosom of truth. ”

“ SONNET XIV. Ingratitude, how deadly is thy smart
Proceeding from the Form we fondly love!
How light, compared, all other sorrows prove!
Thou shed'st a Night of Woe, from whence depart
The gentle beams of Patience, that the heart
'Mid lesser ills, illume.—Thy Victims rove
Unquiet as the Ghost that haunts the Grove
Where Murder spilt the life-blood.—O! thy dart
Kills more than Life,—e'en all that makes Life dear ”

“ 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. ”

“ The sonnet he composed that night was the first of a love-cycle of fifty sonnets which was completed within two months. He had the “Love-sonnets from the Portuguese” in mind as he wrote, and he wrote under the best conditions for great work, at a climacteric of living, in the throes of his own sweet love-madness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nor is the Sonnet such an effort to the poet, as the machine poetaster or mechanical reader may suppose. All will allow that love utters itself through the most natural forms of expression. Petrach’s love for Laura gave birth to the Sonnet: it was not the invention of mechanical genius; but a living creation, that owes its being to the strong emotions of hopeless passion. ”

“ A few great poets have written immortal sonnets—among them are Milton, Wordsworth, and Keats. Thus the sonnet is a thing which every poet thinks it worth while to try at; like Felix Arvers, he may be made immortal by a single sonnet. Even I have written one too many! Every anthologist wants to anthologise it (The Odyssey) ; it never was a favourite of my own, though it had the honour to be kindly spoken of by Mr. Matthew Arnold.
On the other hand, no man since François Villon has been immortalised by a single ballade—Mais où sont les neiges d’antan? ”

“ A good ballade is almost as rare as a good sonnet, but a middling ballade is almost as easily written as the majority of sonnets. Either form readily becomes mechanical, cheap and facile. I have heard Mr. George Meredith improvise a sonnet, a Petrarchian sonnet, obedient to the rules, without pen and paper. He spoke ‘and the numbers came’; he sonneted as easily as a living poet, in his Eton days, improvised Latin elegiacs and Greek hexameters. ”

“ This sonnet expresses the poet's creed, to which his practice was confirmed. This fact imparts unusual simplicity to his verse—a simplicity that strikes us all the more at the present time, when an over-refinement of thought and expression is in vogue.]
[Footnote 13: This sonnet, on the commonest of all poetic themes, treats of love in a deep, serious way. It is removed as far as possible from the sentimental.] ”

“ The 'deep chasm' of this sonnet is identical with the 'passage cleft through the wilderness' of Sonnet XIV. It lies between the Pen on the left hand, and Wallabarrow Crag on the right. As to the niche, which forms the subject of the sonnet, it cannot now be identified. There are, of course, plenty of such niches in the crags which tower above the Duddon just here, but none more striking than the rest. From the fact that it was 'free from shrubs and mosses grey,' one may perhaps infer that it was a place in the cliff from which a mass of rock had recently fallen. ”

“ The species of verse which, originally Italian or French, have now so abundantly and so admirably been practised in England that we can no longer think of them as exotic, having found so many exponents in the Victorian period that they are pre-eminently characteristic of it. “Scorn not the Sonnet,” said Wordsworth to his contemporaries; but the lesson has not been needed in the second half of the century. The sonnet is the most solid and unsingable of the sections of lyrical poetry; it is difficult to think of it as chanted to a musical accompaniment. ”

“ 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 ”

“ A sonnet, entitled Nuptial Sleep, is quoted and abused at page 338 of the Review, and is there dwelt upon as a “whole poem,” describing “merely animal sensations.” It is no more a whole poem in reality than is any single stanza of any poem throughout the book. The poem, written chiefly in sonnets, and of which this is one sonnet-stanza, is entitled The House of Life ”

“ In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind."
A BRIEF HISTORY AND DESCRIPTION OF THE SONNET The sonnet form was introduced into English poetry by Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey. Their experiments in the sonnet were published in Tottel's Miscellany in 1557, and were prompted by an admiration of Petrarch and other Italian models. Italy was almost certainly the original home of the sonnet (sonnet=Ital. sonetto, a little sound, or short strain, from suono, sound) , and there it has been assiduously cultivated since the thirteenth century. ”

“ For all such as cried out against pursuits originating in what Keats had christened “the infant chamber of sensation,” and for all such as demanded that everything we do should be done to “strengthen God among men,” the story provided this answer: “When at any time hath He cried unto thee, saying, ‘My son, lend me thy shoulder, for I fall’?” The sonnet sent, and spoken of as having just been written (the letter bears post-mark February 1880) , was the sonnet on the sonnet. It is throughout beautiful and in two of its lines (those depicting the dark wharf and the black Styx) truly magnificent. ”

“ But all men live in holy Brotherhood?
[61]
REMARKS ON THE NATURE AND HISTORY OF THE SONNET.
In the judgment of some of the greatest poets and literary men the Sonnet is a form of poetry of very high value; in its structure a precious gem. It is of Italian origin and was invented by Petrarch in the 14th century. In his retreat at Vaucluse near Avignon he wrote the greater part of his sonnets, all devoted to the idolatry of woman—to the praise of Laura: 227 of them were written while she was living ”

“ Bringing each day, at morn, at noon, at eve,
His mild illuminations.—Nymph, no more
Is thine to mourn beneath the scanty shade
Of half-blown foliage, shivering to deplore
Thy garlands immature, thy rites unpaid;
Meads dropt with [1] gold again to thee belong,
Soft gales, luxuriant bowers, and wood-land song.
1: Kingcups. [Pg 46]
SONNET XLIV. Rapt Contemplation, bring thy waking dreams
To this umbrageous vale at noon-tide hour,
While full of thee seems every bending flower,
Whose petals tremble o'er the shadow'd streams! ”