Chapter 6 - Romantic sonnets

Summary

When we think of the English sonnet we inevitably think first of Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney, Donne, and other poets of the Renaissance, but the second great age of the sonnet was the Romantic era. “English Romanticism,” Harold Bloom memorably put it, “was a renaissance of the Renaissance,” and one of the distinctive features of this second renaissance was a revival of lyric forms, among which the sonnet had pride of place. A convenient way to review its history before Romanticism is to look at one of Wordsworth’s, a sonnet on the sonnet, published in 1827:

1. Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned,

2. Mindless of its just honours; with this key

3. Shakespeare unlocked his heart; the melody

4. Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch’s wound;

5. A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound; 5

6. With it Camoëns soothed an exile’s grief;

7. The Sonnet glittered a gay myrtle leaf

8. Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned

9. His visionary brow; a glow-worm lamp,

10. It cheered mild Spenser, called from Faery-land 10

11. To struggle through dark ways; and when a damp

12. Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand

13. The Thing became a trumpet; whence he blew

14. Soul-animating strains—alas, too few!

This is a fairly comprehensive history of the sonnet, naming seven of its greatest creators, three Italian, three English, and one Portuguese (Camoëns), and in all but one case offering a distinctive image for what the sonnet became in their hands. Three of the images are musical instruments, culminating in Milton’s trumpet, the traditional instrument of the epic. It omits Ronsard, Lope de Vega, and other French and Spanish Renaissance sonneteers, but Wordsworth would have had to write at least two sonnets to get everybody in. This one, appropriately enough, is a cross between the Italian or Petrarchan form, which is divided into an octave of two identically rhymed quatrains (abba abba) followed by a sestet (cdecde or some variation), and the Shakespearean form, which falls into three quatrains followed by a couplet (abab cdcd efef gg). The syntax, moreover, sometimes straddles the quatrain structure: “with which Dante crowned / His visionary brow” runs right across the most important break point in the Petrarchan pattern, where there was usually a volta or “turn,” while Milton occupies not just the final couplet but a line and a half before it. It is not the greatest of Wordsworth’s sonnets, but it is something of a tour de force, with some tidbit to chew on about each poet.