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English 252: Introduction to Poetry Quotations on the Sonnet Alfred J. Drake. Hours: Cyber Cafe M/W 10-11 | ajdrake@ajdrake.com I. The Italian vs. the English Sonnet Partly the absence of the Italian plethora of similar endings, and partly something else, made the earliest English practitioners select an arrangement with final rhymed couplet, the twelve remaining lines being usually arranged in rhymed, but not rhyme-linked quatrains: and this form, immortalized by Shakespeare, is probably the best suited to English. It is, at any rate, absolutely genuine and orthodox there. But Milton, Wordsworth, and especially Dante and Christina Rossetti, have given examples of sonnets ... divided mostly into octave and sestet ... arranged in inter-twisted rhymes. This form is susceptible of great beauty, but it has no prerogative, still less any primogeniture, in our poetry. (George Saintsbury, Historical Manual of English Prosody, p. 293.) But the greater flexibility in rhyming is not the main difference between the English and Italian form. More important is the difference of effect in the proportions eight to six and twelve to two, particularly in the ending of the sonnet, where the couplet makes the English sonnet seem particularly summary or epigrammatic. (John Fuller, The Sonnet, p. 15.) Often a poem didn't live until the last line cleared the lungs. That's untrue of Shakespeare's Sonnets, but it's true of many. True of most of Milton's. The last line shapes to complete the motion. Shakespeare, I feel, wrote the couplets to his sonnets in a single reckless afternoon. Following his inevitable music, a clang. (Robert Lowell, Collected Prose, p. 271.) Although the basic action of both Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets is similar, it is the proportioning that makes the immense difference between them. Both present and then "solve" problems, the Petrarchan form in its octave and sestet, the Shakespearean in its comparatively hypertrophied initial twelve lines and then in its couplet. In the Petrarchan sonnet the problem is often solved by reasoned perception or by a relatively expansive and formal meditative process, for the sestet allows enough room for the enacting of reasonable kinds of resolutions. But in the Shakespearean sonnet, because resolution must take place within the tiny compass of a twenty-syllable couplet, the "solution: is much more likely to be the fruit of wit, or paradox, or even a quick shaft of sophistry, logical cleverness, or outright comedy. The very disproportion of the two Parts of the Shakespearean sonnet, the gross imbalance between the twelve-line problem and the twoline solution, has about it something vaguely risible and even straight-faced farcical: it invites images of balloons and pins. (Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, p. 127-8.) I think most of the stanzas and individual verse forms (like the sonnet) are made out of combinations of the two rhymed forms that seem the most natural in English--the quatrain (abab) and the couplet (aa). Forms based on three-line units, like Italian terza rima or simplified variations of it, seem more difficult to handle in English. Shakespeare's sonnets, which are probably the greatest sonnets in the English language, consist, in fact, of three quatrains, abab, cdcd, efef, followed by a clinching couplet, gg. I find myself, and I think this is a common experience of lovers of poetry, that I have many of the first quatrains of Shakespeare's sonnets by heart, but not the second or third quatrains, and that, re-reading the sonnets, I often find the clinching couplet trite and disappointing. The proper Italian sonnet rhymes abbaabba with only two rhymes in the octave (or eight-line first part) and with a variation of two or three other rhymes in the sestet (six-line part), arranged variously, but never so that the last two lines rhyme unless they rhyme with the first line of the sestet. There should be a break in the sense between the octave and the sestet, though Milton, one of our greatest sonnet writers, did not always observe this. But Milton's and Wordsworth's sonnets have more formal complex unity than Shakespeare's, and if one has any part of by heart them by heart, one probably has them by heart as wholes. The octave tends to have an asserting and advancing, the sestet a receding and conceding movement, rather like wave motions on the shore. Hopkins is the fourth notable English whom one would mention, but one feels that his sonnets are often great poems rather than great sonnets. (G.S. Fraser, Meter, Rhyme, and Free Verse, p. 67-68.) Normally, too, a definite pause is made in thought development at the end of the eighth verse, serving to increase the independent unity of an octave that has already progressed with the greatest economy in rhyme sounds. Certainly it would be difficult to conceive a more artistically compact and phonologically effective pattern. The sestet, in turn, leads out of the octave and, if the closing couplet is avoided, assures a commendable variety within the uniformity to the poem as a whole. The Spenserian and Shakespearian patterns, on the other hand, offer some relief to the difficulty of rhyming in English and invite a division of thought into three quatrains and a closing or summarizing couplet; and even though such arbitrary divisions are frequently ignored by the poet, the more open rhyme schemes tend to impress the fourfold structure on the reader's ear and to suggest a stepped progression toward the closing couplet. Such matters of relationship between form and content are, however, susceptible of considerable control in the hands of a skilled poet, and the ultimate artistic effect in any given instance may override theoretical considerations in achievement of integrity. (The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry, p. 781-2.) II. The Sonnet: Cognitive Persona vs. Body of Metaphor [The sonnet] is the first lyric form since the fall of the Roman Empire intended not for music or performance but for silent reading. As such, it is the first lyric of self-consciousness, or the self in conflict ... the new form was quickly understood as a new way of thinking about mankind, Emotional problems, especially love problems, needed no longer merely be expressed or performed: they might actually be resolved, or provisionally resolved, through the logic of a form that turned expression inward. (Paul Oppenheimer, The Birth of the Modern Mind, p. 3.) In the lyric, with its concentration of first person pronouns and deictics that together gesture toward a moment and source of the utterance, the element the reader fictionalizes most powerfully is generally the poetic persona, the voice of the text. Presenting itself variously--more or less distant, sincere, questioning, meditative--this image of a lyric self serves to organize, even to ground with apparent authority, the other images of the poem. (Sandra L. Bermann, The Sonnet Over Time, p. 5. But, despite its uniqueness, the individual sonnet is indebted to more than the sequence for its meaning; it is indebted also to the Petrarchan convention that is largely formative of them all and of their innumerable fellows written by Shakespeare's predecessors and contemporaries. Indeed, that mirror-window image which I find so central is itself drawn from this convention and from the Courtly Love convention of which it rests. The problems are almost insurmountable for the Petrarchan sonneteer who comes along as late as Shakespeare and who wants to be more than conventional. From verse form to conceits and even attitudes and judgements, there seems to be almost too much that is dictated by convention for the uniqueness of individual talent and individual intention to be given free enough play to create really new poems. (Murray Krieger, A Window to Criticism, p. 75.) III. The Sonnet in the Twentieth Century [Ian Hamilton:] Williams would never write a sonnet. [Robert Lowell: ] Nor would Eliot or Pound. Both had boldness, modernity, and formal imagination. (Robert Lowell, Selected Prose) The time is now propitious, as he guesses The meal is ended, she is bored and tired, Endeavors to engage her in caresses Which still are unreproved, if undesired Flushed and decided, he assaults at once Exploring hands encounter no defence; His vanity requires no response, And makes a welcome of indifference. (And I Tiresias have foresuffered all Enacted on this same divan or bed; I who have sat by Thebes below the wall And walked among the lowest of the dead. Bestows one final patronizing kiss, And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit. (T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land lines 235-249) Never in the world did I expect to praise a living writer because of his sonnets, but these have been a revelation to me. For years I have been stating that the sonnet form is impossible to us, but Moore, by destroying the rigidities of the old form and rescuing the form itself intact ... has succeeded in completely altering my opinion. The sonnet, I see now, is not incident upon a certain turn of the mind. It is the extremely familiar dialogue unit which all dramatic writing is founded: a statement, then a rejoinder of a sort, perhaps a direct reply, perhaps a variant of the original--but a comeback of one sort or another--which Dante and his contemporaries had formalized for their day and language. (William Carlos Williams, "Merrill Moore's Sonnets," an afterward to M) Historically the sonnet, the "little tune," had already in Guido's day become a danger to composition. It marks an ending or at least a decline of metrical invention. It marks the beginning of the divorce of words and music. Sonnets will good musical setting are rare. The spur to music is slight. The monotony of the 14 even lines as compared to the constantly varying strophes of a Ventadour or of Arnaut; the vocal heaviness of the hendecasyllable unrelieved by a shorter turn are all blanketing impediments for the music ... the grand bogey of technical mastery. (Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, p. 170.)
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