So Remembering

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,

All Ye That Walk In Willow-wood

Here are four of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's sonnets, a series called the Willowwood sonnets, followed by a response from his sister Christina Rossetti. I am interested here, besides the beauty of the language and the depth of emotion that all five sonnets produce in me, in the question of originality.

Our modern conception is that for a work of art to be great it must be thoroughly original. But that has not always been the assumption for great art. Sometimes it is in the interplay between the source material and the new version that we find the real ART. Take for example CS Lewis' reworking of the Myth of Sisyphus, which he titled "Till We Have Faces."

Such Structure As The Sonnet

That the sonnet is still a fitting vehicle for people's poetic urges is well demonstrated by the following. And what variety of poetic urges we find here! The rules and structure of the sonnet did not hamper any of these voices. The whole goal of this experiment is perfectly summed up in a comment that Teri made when she sent me her sonnet.

"Such structure as the sonnet is...well...freeing."


A Transplant's Sonnet
by Teri Field

For what bright cause did I from you depart,
Whose people are pacific, strands are fair?

Mine Eye Is In My Mind

Very, very little is actually known about William Shakespeare the man. For a man who wrote so much and had such a great influence on his own day as well as ours, he himself is hidden in the mist. But the mysteries surrounding him are not for lack of autobiographers and scholars who would like to pen the final and authoritative work on him.

And when people are seeking to get to know the real William Shakespeare, they turn primarily not to his 33 plays, but to his sonnets. These are by far the most personal of his writings that have survived.

Fire-Featuring Heaven

Here is part (slightly revised for this blog) of an article I wrote a few years ago for CHRISTIANITY AND SOCIETY JOURNAL. I wanted to include it here in part because it has to do with a sonnet written by Gerard Manley Hopkins: Spelt From Sibyl's Leaves. This sonnet does not conform to the standard of five stressed syllables per line; it goes for eight. Yet he wrote it as a sonnet and it has been generally so accepted. There is room, even in so strict a form as the sonnet, for some deviation.

Reading Difficult Poetry as a Christian Endeavor
Tears began welling up in my oldest daughter's eyes.

Each Time I Love I Find It Still My Own

Dorothy Parker was an American extreme. Her loves gave the tabloids something to write about. She shocked the middle class morality of her time. She, by turns, failed to stay with her man, or failed to keep him with her. Desperately sad as some episodes of her life were, she was able to mock her own folly in them and turned them into stories and poems that had America laughing with her. She walked a very fine line between being seen as an outrageously clever - though baudy - character and becoming an object of pity and scorn.

But, in public at least, she kept to the profitable side of that line.

Wanton As Unfledged Cupids

Aphra Behn was the first woman that any English people knew of to earn her living through her literature. Of course that ignores the Hebrew and pagan Sybyls who lived on their words, as well as many other prophetess poets from a variety of religions around the world. Ah, so we are, we so easily assume that our own small circle represents the whole of vast creation. So Aphra Behn was hailed and hated as the first woman in the history of the world to earn her living with her writing.

During her time, the later 1600's, she had to struggle to be accepted as a legitimate author

Two Half-Fast Sonnets

Two early sonnets that each strike an unusual chord.

The pun in line four of the first is not accident. The first gains much of its satiric effect from the fact that sonnets were much in vogue at court at the time for praising the glories of one or another woman.


Satan, No Woman
Fulke Greville

Satan, no woman, yet a wandering spirit,
When he saw ships sail two ways with one wind,

When Passion Speechless Lies

Just because it's lovely. . .


Since There's No Help
Michael Drayton

Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part.
Nay, I have done: you get no more of me,
And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart
That thus so cleanly I myself can free.
Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows,

The Sole Unbusy Thing

Sonnets are a great place to ponder the relationship of the rhyme scheme to the voice, or feeling, of the verse. For in sonnets the rhyme scheme is almost always changed between the two sections of the poem. In Italian sonnets the first section generally went abbaabba, and the second was either cdecde or cdcdcd. In English we use more variety, yet the scheme of the two sections almost always changes, and the voice changes in tandem with it. Often English sonnets will be three four line sections, abab cdcd efef and the a concluding rhymed couplet that changes tone: gg.

Differing rhyme schemes produce, or at least accentuate, different attitudes and voices.

Satisfying Imbalance of Structure

In his introduction to The Oxford Book of Sonnets, John Fuller makes an interesting observation:

"The sonnet is a dualistic structure, formalizing the essence of drama in statment and response. In its origin in thirteenth century Sicily, the sestet [the final six lines] of the Italian sonnet may have had a different and answering music to that of the octave [the first eight lines] (typically abbaabba cdecde or cdcdcd). Certainly its defiance of the expectation of a second stanza complementary in length to the first is crucial to the satisfying imbalance of structure (8:6)."

He is quite right, there is a change of tone, and often a change of voice in the second section of many sonnets. Sometimes the latter portion answers the first, sometimes it intensifies it, or contradicts it. Perhaps it merely changes perspectives

A Challenge

After all this thinking about sonnets I've got a hankering to try my hand at making one. I'm really not a poet, just a lover of poetry. But I notice that when I get something especially delicious at a Thai restaurant I always come home and try to cook it myself. Although it generally isn't quite like what I had eaten at the restaurant, it is still usually tasty in its own way.

So I'm itching to see what I can do by way of a sonnet.

Verse That Immortalizes Whom It Sings

When William Cowper was ill and in need of care, the family of the Reverend Morley Unwin took him in. They cared for him for years in his illness.

The son, William Unwin, grew and became a minister. Cowper was to him something of mentor and elder brother to whom he would write with his ministerial questions, to which Cowper would respond with long, thoughtful, and affectionate letters.

But it was to Mary, the wife of Morley and the mother of William that Cowper became the most attached. When Morley died, Cowper remained in the home with William and Mary until William moved away for his ministerial duties.

The Soul in Paraphrase

Well, if yesterday's post of John Donne's sonnets didn't do it, this glittering sonnet from George Herbert should put the nails in the coffin of the theory that I advanced a few days ago. That theory, that the sonnet is best suited to themes of love-from-a-distance, I now renounce. Donne and Herbert did me in. Gerard Manley Hopkins should have made me think twice before posting such a thought. But, oh me, I write this blog on the fly, in spare moments, and I don't always think enough before hitting the 'publish' button.

Ne'ertheless, I still hold that such a theory of sonnets being especially well suited to love-from-a-distance

Immensity Cloistered in Thy Dear Womb

Now to post a few poets whose sonnets do not fit the pattern that I described a couple days ago. While there may be longing in these sonnets, and undoubtedly there is, it is not primary. These sonnets are not of romantic love of a man for a woman or a woman for a man. Here we find the adoration of a mortal on his face before his creator. This is adoration in its highest sense.

John Donne is more known for his Holy Sonnets, "Death be not proud. . .," but I have chosen some others to present here. While the Holy Sonnets can be considered a set of sonnets, LA CORONA is truly a sonnet sequence. It absolutely must be read in order, so I am posting the whole series here.

Love From a Distance

The last few posts having been dedicated to sonnets, I am left with one question.

I vaguely sense why the sonnet is so well suited to themes of love, not so as to try to explain it, yet I can feel that it is a perfect fit. Love-sonnet. Sonnet-love. It just fits well.

Yet I am left with the question, why are sonnets so perfectly fitted to love from a distance?

Whom I Grieve to Grieve

"Beatrice, immortalized by 'altissimo poeta. . . cotanto amante'; Laura, celebrated by a great tho' inferior bard,-- have alike paid the exceptional penalty of exceptional honour, and have come down to us resplendent with charms, but (at least, to my apprehension) scant of attractiveness."

Thus, speaking of Dante and Petrarch, begins Christina Rossetti's intro to her 'sonnet of sonnets', MONNA INNOMINATA.

The phrase, 'sonnet of sonnets,' is not to be taken in the sense of 'a man among men,' or 'King of kings.' Rather, the sonnet being fourteen lines, this is a series of fourteen sonnets.

My Late Espoused Saint

The sonnet seems well adapted to expressions of love, adoration, longing and even lust. And for some time, fifty or eighty years after it was introduced from the Italian into English poetry, that was almost its exclusive function. For half a century or so the writing of love sonnets was all the rage among the gentry and courtiers of Elizabeth's court. Then, as with all things, the form which had once seemed so vibrant began to feel trite and formulaic. This was partly due to overuse, and even more due to the weakness of many of the poets who had been using it while it was the rage. So it goes with all fads; they fade.

The sonnet had become the meduim of choice for every half-baked infatuation. It no longer carried the extended passion of a Sidney or a Spencer or a Shakespeare. Poor poets allowed its fire to die down.

And the sonnet slowly fell out of favor.

Then came Milton:

Who Quake to Say They Love

Philip Sidney was one of the premier courtiers in Elizabeth's court. As a young man he travelled with the queen to the home of a Lord Essex, where he met the charming and beautiful daughter of Essex, Penelope. For someone so enthralled with the literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the name Penelope alone would have been enough to pique his interest.

In his own words:


Not at first sight, nor with a dribbed shot
Love gave the wound, which while I breathe will bleed;
But known worth did in mine of time proceed,
Till by degrees it had full conquest got:

The Ends of Being

In the years before their marriage Elizabeth Barrett wrote forty-four sonnets to Robert Browning. Although she did not want to publish them, being somewhat bashful about their extremely personal tone, he persuaded her. Still, in order to somewhat distance herself from them she gave the collection the inaccurate title of Sonnets From the Portuguese.

They are, as her husband told her, the best sonnets in English since Shakespeare. And, much more than Shakespeare's sonnets, they are a series rather than simply a collection. To some extent Shakespeare's sonnets should be read roughly in order and in context with one another. To a much greater extent Barrrett's sonnets should be read strictly in order. It is no accident