'Scorn Not the Sonnet'

...Could T. S. Eliot have found scope for his complex images and ideas in 14 lines...

...In addition to providing samples of Sapphics, rhyme royal, terza rima, etc...

...Although the editor has appended very good notes glossing some obscurities in the poems, the absence of information about the authors creates a certain puzzlement...

...While Smith, Williams, and their sister poets were long overlooked by the anthologists, two of the greatest sonneteers never fell out of favor...

...Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop...

...The most effective Italian sestets in English usually build up to a climax, although W. B. Yeats used the device to create an anticlimax in his description of the rape of Leda by Zeus in the form of a swan: A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead...

...Bones built in me...

...Were sonnets the only kind of poetry, they would eventually pall...

...To demonstrate the full effect of the ending, it is necessary to quote the whole sestet, which varies the meter but not the rhyme scheme: But ideas can be true although men die...

...After reading Fuller's absorbing collection, though, I wonder if the poetry of our own time might not benefit from their discipline...

...In any case, their musical play of ideas will continue to delight readers for centuries to come...

...Addressed to God, this poem prays, in language reminiscent of The Book of Revelation, that these martyrdoms may witness to true religion: Their moans The Vales redoubled to the hills, and they To heav'n...

...Many others, however, have made effective use ofthat same closure...

...Or: This thouperceiv st, which makes thy love more strong To love that well which thou must leave ere long...

...American readers will be at a particular disadvantage: Many of the most recent inclusions are British poets well-known to the readers of periodicals there, but largely unheard of on this side of the Atlantic...

...Three quatrains neatly fitting limb to joint, Their lines cut with the sharpness of a prism, Flash out in colors as they make their point In what logicians call a syllogism— (If A, unci B, then C)—and so it goes, Unless the final quatrain starts out "But " Or "Nevertheless," these groups of line dispose Themselves in reasoned sections, tightly shut...

...now gently defying Its opening tone, the sestet then recalls Old rhythms and old thoughts, enjambed, half-heard As verses in themselves...

...Smith is a perceptive observer of nature's glories, but unlike some male Romantics, she never forgets that its laws are harsh and indifferent, sacrificing the vulnerable...

...Their martyred blood and ashes sow ?'er all th 'Italian fields where still doth sway The triple tyrant, that from these may grow A hundredfold, who having learnt thy way Early mayfly the Babylonian woe...

...Here is Hollander's take on what developed: Milton and Wordsworth made the sonnet sound Again in a new way...

...Nonetheless, since this Italian verse configuration made its way across the English Channel to the court of Henry VIII, a number of equally gifted poets have performed wonders with its music...

...However, many literary schools in the last century were so hostile to form that sometimes the milk spilled freely with no carton to contain it...

...Yet the poem abruptly bumps back to earth as the divine bird spends itself, then drops its prey...

...butworse...

...Selfyeast of spirit aduli dough sours...

...Certainly Wordsworth himself helped revive the form's reputation, as John Fuller observes in his Introduction to The Oxford Book of Sonnets (Oxford, 362 pp., $22.00...

...kiss her lips and lie next at her heart...

...In addition, the inclusion of so many talented women from the late 18th and early 19th centuries will provoke questions about their contemporary reputations, not to mention curiosity about their other work...

...Smith possessed a graceful lyric gift coupled with skillful control...

...The final couplet's tight and terse and tends To sum up nicely how the sonnet ends...

...with this key/Shakespeare unlocked his heart...

...Samuel Taylor Coleridge summed up his depression over his loveless marriage and hopeless passion for Wordsworth's sister-in-law: Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve...

...The Victorian age produced Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose Sonnets from the Portuguese has remained on poetry shelves without end, and Christina Rossetti, the supreme artist of lyric forms...

...He goes on to describe how: The sonnet glittered a gay myrtle leaf Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned His visionary brow...

...Similarly, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, Anna Seward, and Mary Robinson can stand beside Keats or Wordsworth...

...It was there that I discovered Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) was once considered a major poet and novelist...

...Two hundred years later, the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins also employed the sestet for religious purposes, but not to pray...

...He salaciously details the way the liquid would...

...And chase the vulture Care—that feeds upon the heart...

...As Hollander suggests, this greater illusion of naturalness permitted the sonnet to escape the strictures of Renaissance verse, the better to adapt itself to Romanticism's philosophy...

...Thus: The kind of sonnet form that Shakespeare wrote —A poem of Love, or Time, in fourteen lines Rhymed the way these are, clear, easy to quote— Channels strongfeeling into deep designs...

...Rather, he tried to express the anguish of a soul unable to communicate with God any longer, because he feels condemned by the loathsomeness of his own nature, sunk in Original Sin: I am gall, I am heartburn...

...This sudden falling-off creates a kind of postcoital emptiness, or postrape sense of shock...

...flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse...

...Trying to shake off discouragement, Charlotte Smith begged: Bid syren Hope resume her long-lost part...

...Yet this can be said of many favorite authors who, despite a lack of range, do one thing very well...

...Fuller's selection shows the wide versatility of these and other variations, including the Spenserian, the iterating sonnet, and even a "Sonnet Reversed" by Rupert Brooke that begins with the couplet and ends with the octave...

...Sir Philip Sydney, describing a blocked poet trying to find the right metaphor to convince his beloved of his devotion, finishes: Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite, Tool,' said my Muse to me...

...In the 20th century, Edna St...

...Bold and confident, she demonstrates the full versatility of the somiet...

...Run through her veins and pass by pleasure spart...

...Tlie octave's over...

...In "Scorn Not the Sonnet" Wordsworth detailed some of the more celebrated sonneteers...

...the advance and retreat of the tide...

...When Sir William Wyatt popularized the form forthe court of Henry VIII, he recognized that in our language endings are less conducive to easy rhymes than in Italian...

...not with the sighs Of witty passion, where fierce reason lies Entombed in end-stopped lines, or tightly bound In chains of quatrain: more like something found Tlian built—a smooth stone on a sandy rise, A drop of dew secreted from the sky's Altitude, unpartitioned, whole and round...

...Certain eras of poetry have concentrated too much on complex verse forms...

...Fuller justly gives Rosetti pride of place by including her "Monna Innominata," subtitled "A Sonnet of Sonnets" (i.e., a cycle of 14 sonnets...

...Fuller remarks that its beauty "has been ascribed to its similarities to Platonic or Pythagorean musical ratios that were also incorporated into classical architecture, and it is frequently described as a natural organic structure, like an acorn in its cup or...

...The sonnet's formal underpinnings require planning and intellectual content, not a mere spontaneous rush of emotion...

...It is particularly fascinating to study the relative strengths of the two main types of endings...

...Closer to our own time, during World War II, W. H. Auden made effective use of the couplet in a subtle poem...

...Hollander not only captures the requirements of rhyme and meter (most, though not all, sonnets fall into iambic pentameter), but also the way Renaissance practitioners of the English variation tended to use imagery...

...the melody/Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound;/A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound...

...A curious anomaly the collection underlines is that in this venue Charles Tennyson Turner holds his own with his more famous brother, Alfred Lord Tennyson...

...Probably not...

...Consequently, the scheme Shakespeare andmost of his contemporaries preferred came to prevail...

...There are poets one cannot imagine having the patience to work out the tightly controlled pattern: Neither Whitman nor Emily Dickinson fooled with octaves and sestets...

...Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds...

...from familiar anthology pieces, Hollander also couches his explanations in representative poems...

...Smith knows the odds favor a bird or some other disaster overtaking it long before it can find a landing place to spin its web...

...Fuller amply justifies his contention that women have been among the most creative sonneteers, often outshining male poets...

...In common with other Oxford anthologies, Fuller's collection lacks biographies of the poets...

...Fuller, by contrast, has restored genuinely neglected poets of distinction to their rightful place...

...He begins with a graphic description of the killings, then builds toward a thunderous denunciation of papal tyranny and oppression...

...For those who really want to know, I recommend the recent British Women Poets of the Romantic Era (Johns Hopkins), edited by Paula R. Feldman—an eyeopening anthology with extensive biographical sketches of each writer...

...Many great poets considered its conventions a mechanical exercise that stilled free expression...

...God's most deep decree Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me...

...Married to a man who squandered her substantial dowry, she supported him and her many children by her literary output...

...Here the act of forcing the woman prophesies the coming horrors of the Trojan War, fought over one of twin daughters, Helen, conceived by this rape...

...Five lines away from what it rhymes with, falls Off into silence, like an echo dying...

...She saw a pervasive melancholy in nature, matching the thwarted aspirations humans experience...

...Along withher contemporary, Helen Maria Williams, she strongly influenced Wordsworth's conception of the sonnet's possible effects...

...The inclusion of these remarkably gifted women, largely forgotten by 20th-century anthologists, makes Fuller's selection particularly notable...

...But gradually, poets began fiddling with both the subject and the pattern of sonnets...

...Shakespeare became the undisputed master of the English couplet ending, which has an aphoristic quality that leaves something to resonate in the reader's mind after the poem concludes: For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds...

...And we can watch a thousand faces Made active by one lie: And maps can really point to places Where life is evil now: Nanking, Dachau...

...I see The lost are like this, and their scourge to be As I am mine, their sweating selves...

...It is true that of late anthologies have bent over backward to include more women, but too many of them are as forgettable as lesser male entries...

...and when a damp Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand Tlie thing became a trumpet...

...Vincent Millay again showed how well the form adapted to new times...

...For a quick refresher on the nature of sonnets (the name derives from the Italian sonata, or "little song") I quote two explanatory examples from John Hollander's delightful Rhyme s Reason, first published in 1981 and still the best handbook on English prosody available...

...The Puritan poet wrote "On the Late Massacre in Piedmont" to commemorate the Catholic slaughter of an Alpine Protestant colony...

...Milton was capable of making those six lines crescendo into formidable rhetorical power...

...The final word...

...Her sister, Clytemnestra, will murder her husband Agamemnon on his victorious return...

...and so forth...

...To the Insect of the Gossamer" follows a tiny spider lighted by a sunbeam as it sets off on its airborne voyage...

...A fervent reader of Milton, she proved an ingenious innovator of sonnet variations...

...whence he blew Soul-animating sti-ains—alas, too few...

...It cheered mild Spenser, called from Faery-land To struggle through dark ways...

...According to Auden's definition of major and minor poets, she falls in the latter category, since her work, extensive as it may be, maintains a sameness of tone and theme...

...Such peril inevitably recalls the fragility of all life and ambitions, especially artistic ones: Thus on the golden web that Fancy weaves Buoyant, as Hope's illusive flattery breathes, The young and visionary poet leaves Life's dull realities, while sevenfold wreaths Of rainbow-light around his head revolve...

...And hope without an object cannot live...

...Soon at Sorrow's touch the radiant dreams dissolve...

...Prayer is one of the traditional subjects of the sonnet...

...a glow-worm lamp...

...look in thy heart and write.' The jocund Barnabe Barnes (a contemporary of John Donne) turns the couplet to a bawdy end by wishing he could be the wine his mistress sips...

...The four heavy beats of the final line toll like a passing bell...

...If the couplet provides a memorable summing up, the interwoven lines of the Italian sestet allow the poet to achieve a more expansive conclusion...

...Based on the sequences Dante and Petrarch wrote to the idealized women they loved at a distance, Rossetti speaks as a woman describing an unconsummated passion for a male lover who ultimately leaves her...

...One of the most vocal was Ezra Pound, who dismissively spoke of "well-groomed" sonnets sacrificing truth in favor of ornate rhyme schemes, as if the form were some kind of puzzle rather than a work of artistic truth...