The Principles of English Versification Part 14

Lo! see soone after how more bold and free Her bared bosome she doth broad display; Lo! see soone after how she fades and falls away.

Faerie Queen, II, xii, 74.

Or like the h.e.l.l-borne Hydra, which they faine That great Alcides whilome overthrew, After that he had labourd long in vaine To crop his thousand heads, the which still new Forth budded, and in greater number grew.

Such was the fury of this h.e.l.lish Beast, Whitest Calidore him under him downe threw; Who nathemore his heavy load releast, But aye, the more he rag'd, the more his powre increast.

Ibid., VI, xii, 32.

O ruthful scene! when from a nook obscure His little sister did his peril see: All playful as she sate, she grows demure; She finds full soon her wonted spirits free, She meditates a prayer to set him free: Nor gentle pardon could this dame deny (If gentle pardons could with dames agree) To her sad grief that swells in either eye And wrings her so that all for pity she could die.

SHENSTONE, The Schoolmistress.

And hither Morpheus sent his kindest dreams, Raising a world of gayer tinct and grace; O'er which were shadowy cast Elysian gleams, That played, in waving lights, from place to place, And shed a roseate smile on nature's face.

Not t.i.tian's pencil e'er could so array, So fleece with clouds the pure ethereal s.p.a.ce; Ne could it e'er such melting forms display, As loose on flowery beds all languishingly lay.

JAMES THOMSON, The Castle of Indolence, I, xliv.

The chearfu' supper done, wi' serious face, They, round the ingle, form a circle wide; The sire turns o'er, wi' patriarchal grace, The big ha'-Bible, ance his father's pride: His bonnet rev'rently is laid aside, His lyart haffets wearing thin an' bare; Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide, He wales a portion with judicious care; And 'Let us worship G.o.d!' he says, with solemn air.

BURNS, Cotter's Sat.u.r.day Night.

Now, where the swift Rhone cleaves his way between Heights which appear as lovers who have parted In hate, whose mining depths so intervene, That they can meet no more, though broken-hearted; Though in their souls, which thus each other thwarted, Love was the very root of the fond rage Which blighted their life's bloom, and then departed: Itself expired, but leaving them an age Of years all winters,--war within themselves to wage.

BYRON, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, III, xciv.

(Childe Harold begins with many deliberate imitations of Spenser's language and style, but soon neglects them. Here perhaps more than in any other metre the tone and subject of the poem determine the movement of the stanza. The above is but one example of Byron's great variety.)

The One remains, the many change and pa.s.s; Heaven's light forever shines, earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-colored gla.s.s, Stains the white radiance of eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments.--Die, If thou wouldst be with them that thou dost seek!

Follow where all is fled!--Rome's azure sky, Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.

Sh.e.l.lEY, Adonais, lii.

The ancient Beadsman heard the prelude soft; And so it chanced, for many a door was wide, From hurry to and fro. Soon, up aloft, The silver, snarling trumpets 'gan to chide: The level chambers, ready with their pride, Were flowing to receive a thousand guests: The carved angels, ever eager-eyed, Stared, where upon their head the cornice rests, With hair blown back, and wings put cross-wise on their b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

KEATS, Eve of St. Agnes, iv.

During the earlier half of the seventeenth century a small group of poets, imitating Spenser both in substance and in external manner, introduced a number of stanzas, some of them not to be admired, whose chief characteristic is the alexandrine for a last line--e. g., _abababcc^{5}c^{6}_, _ababcc^{5}c^{6}_, _ababbcc^{5}c^{6}_, and _ababbc^{5}c^{6}_ (which last is that of Milton's On the Death of a Fair Infant, The Pa.s.sion, and the introduction to On the Morning of Christ's Nativity). Another modification is that of Milton's Ode itself, _aa^{3}b^{5}cc^{3}b^{5}d^{4}d^{6}_. Matthew Prior attempted to improve the Spenserian stanza in his Ode on the Battle of Ramillies by a rime scheme (suggested perhaps by the English sonnet) _ababcdcde^{5}e^{6}_--of which Dr. Johnson says: "He has altered the stanza of Spenser, as a house is altered by building another house in its place of a different form." Still farther from the Spenserian original, but probably a development from it, is Sh.e.l.ley's To a Skylark _abab^{3}b^{6}_ (mainly in falling rhythm); and an extension of this last is Swinburne's Hertha (see above, page 81) _abab^{2}b^{6}_ in triple rising rhythm.

_Fourteen-Line Stanza: 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 l.u.s.tral 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: its face reveals The soul,--its converse, to what Power 'tis due:-- Whether for tribute to the august appeals Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue, It serve; or, 'mid the dark wharf's cavernous breath, In Charon's palm it pay the toll to Death.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSETTI.

The sonnet is a world, where feelings caught In webs of phantasy, combine and fuse Their kindred elements 'neath mystic dews Shed from the ether round man's dwelling wrought; Distilling heart's content, star-fragrance fraught With influences from breathing fires Of heaven in everlasting endless gyres Enfolding and encircling orbs of thought.

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.

A sonnet is a wave of melody: From heaving waters of the impa.s.sioned soul A billow of tidal music one and whole Flows, in the "octave"; then, returning free, Its ebbing surges in the "sestet" roll Back to the deeps of Life's tumultuous sea.

THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON.

It is the pure white diamond Dante brought To Beatrice; the sapphire Laura wore When Petrarch cut it sparkling out of thought; The ruby Shakespeare hewed from his heart's core; The dark, deep emerald that Rossetti wrought For his own soul, to wear for evermore.

EUGENE LEE-HAMILTON.[60]

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [60] See also the collection of Sonnets on the Sonnet, edited by M. Russell, London and New York, 1898. +--------------------------------------------------------------+

The only English stanza that can be said to rival the Spenserian in artistic merit is the sonnet: but the two are for very different purposes, the one being nearly always used in long, clearly connected series, generally narrative, the other nearly always as an independent poem. Even when sonnets are written in 'sequences,' the relation of the individual sonnets to each other is rarely very close; the unity of the whole sequence (as in Rossetti's House of Life, for example, or Mrs.

Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese) is one merely of general tone and subject. Some of Shakespeare's sonnets are bound together by an intimate unity like stanzas of one poem; others are completely detached.

Occasionally a poem is composed of three or four sonnet-stanzas, as Leigh Hunt's The Fish, the Man, and the Spirit, but even then each sonnet remains an independent whole.

The word 'sonnet,' borrowed with the metrical form from Italy in the late sixteenth century,[61] was at first used loosely for almost any short poem on love not obviously a 'song'; but soon the term became restricted to a poem of fourteen 5-stress iambic lines arranged according to one of two definite rime schemes or their modifications.

These two rime schemes are the original Italian _abba abba cde cde_ and the English _abab cdcd efef gg_.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [61] On the origin of the sonnet in Italy (Sicily) see the references in Alden's English Verse, p. 267. Still a standard work is C. Tomlinson's The Sonnet, London, 1874. +--------------------------------------------------------------+

_Italian Sonnet._ The organization of the subject matter of an Italian sonnet is (at least theoretically) as fixed as that of the rimes. The whole should aim to convey without irrelevant detail a single thought or feeling. The first quatrain, _abba_, should introduce the subject; the second, _abba_, should develop it to a certain point, at which a pause occurs; such is the octave. The sestet continues in the first tercet, _cde_, the thought or feeling in a new direction or from a new point of view, and in the second, _cde_, brings it to a full conclusion.[62] The rime sounds of the octave and those of the sestet should be harmonious but not closely similar.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [62] Elaborate rules for the sonnet are given by William Sharp in the introduction to his Sonnets of the Century, and by Mark Pattison in the introduction to his edition of Milton's sonnets. There is valuable matter in the Introduction of J. S. Smart's The Sonnets of Milton, Glasgow, 1921. Compare also the 'divisioni' of Dante's sonnets in the Vita Nuova. +--------------------------------------------------------------+

It stands to reason that very few poets have enslaved themselves to such an imperious master without a.s.suming certain liberties. Very few sonnets of any poetic value can be found conforming strictly to all these requirements. But the general purport of the formal division may be seen in Christina Rossetti's poignant "Remember"--

Remember me when I am gone away, Gone far away into the silent land; When you no more can hold me by the hand, Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day You tell me of our future that you plann'd: Only remember me; you understand It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while And afterwards remember, do not grieve: For if the darkness and corruption leave

A vestige of the thoughts that once I had, Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad.

The first quatrain says: Remember me when I am gone and we can no longer meet and part as in life. The second quatrain adds: when we can no longer enjoy the companionship of mind, planning what might have been.

The sestet continues: Nevertheless, do not let the memory of me become a burden, especially if you ever learn what was in my living thoughts.

Most sonnet writers, while regarding the form as in the abstract something almost sacred, have felt free to mould it in some measure to the immediate demands of their subject--not all, however, with the same success.[63] For the sonnet demands perfection, a single flaw almost cripples it; and few have the absolute command of language necessary to forge a single idea without irrelevance and without omission according to so strict a pattern. Those who are too subservient to the form weaken their poetic thought; those who, like Wordsworth often, are in.o.bedient to the form, produce a poem which is imperfect because it is neither a sonnet nor not a sonnet. Few have come as near the true balance as Milton at his best. "A hundred Poets," says Sir William Watson,

A hundred Poets bend proud necks to bear This yoke, this bondage. He alone could don His badges of subjection with the air Of one who puts a king's regalia on.

And yet Milton, while preserving the rime scheme, generally disregards the thought divisions, and in half of his sonnets has the pause, not after the eighth line but within the ninth. Commenting on this division Wordsworth says: "Now it has struck me, that this is not done merely to gratify the ear by variety and freedom of sound, but also to aid in giving that pervading sense of intense unity in which the excellence of the sonnet has always seemed to me mainly to consist. Instead of looking at this composition as a piece of architecture, making a whole out of three parts, I have been much in the habit of preferring the image of an orbicular body--a sphere or dew-drop."

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [63] "In the production of a sonnet of triumphant success, heart, head, and hand must be right." Corson, p. 145. +--------------------------------------------------------------+

Such a close unity can easily be obtained from the Italian sonnet, as hundreds of examples prove,--Milton's On his Blindness is a striking case, with no full stop until the end of the fourteenth line,--but even better for this object is the rime scheme invented by Spenser and used in a hundred and twenty-one sonnets: _ababbcbccdcdee_. The Spenserian sonnet, however, has found no favor with later poets.

Certain variations in the Italian form are regularly admitted as legitimate. The quatrains must always rime _abba_, but the sestet may rime _cdecde_ or _cdcdcd_ or _cdedce_ or _cdedec_, or almost any arrangement of two or three rimes which does not end in a couplet. And even this last caveat is sometimes disregarded by careful sonneteers. A greater liberty is to vary the rimes of the octave to _abbaacca_. The division of the sestet into two distinct tercets is very rarely maintained; and that of the octave into quatrains is frequently neglected with impunity. Thus the poet adjusts his theme to the strict rules of the sonnet much as he adjusts the natural rhythm of language to the strict forms of metre; the one inescapable requisite being that in neither may he lose hold of the fundamental pattern. But there is this difference, that the sonnet form is extraordinarily firm, and breaks if forced very far from normal. _How_ far one may go can be determined only in special cases, for "the mighty masters are a law unto themselves, and the validity of their legislation will be attested and held against all comers by the splendour of an unchallengeable success" (Pattison).

The early Italian sonnets in English, those of Wyatt, Surrey, and Sidney, are very irregular: Sidney's nearly always end in a couplet and rime the octave _abbaabba_ or _abababab_ or _ababbaba_. Sometimes he uses such a scheme as _ababbababccbcc_. Wyatt has one rimed _abbaaccacddcee_, and Surrey one _ababababababaa_.

Donne's Holy Sonnets (written about 1617, though not printed till 1633, 1635) were regular in form, and were practically the first English sonnets not concerned with love. Milton followed this tradition, and expanded it to further themes--his only successful poems in lighter mood are sonnets--occasional and political subjects--

... in his hand The thing became a trumpet, whence he blew Soul-animating strains--alas, too few!

On the formal side Milton handled the sonnet, as has been said, with the freedom of a master.

From the time of Milton's (1642-58) very few sonnets were written in England till towards the end of the eighteenth century. Then the form was revived, under the original impulse of the Wartons in the mid-century, by Bowles, and given a new life by Wordsworth and Keats. In 1850 Mrs. Browning published her Sonnets from the Portuguese, and in 1870 and 1881 Rossetti his sonnet-sequence, The House of Life. The latter contains on the whole the truest representatives of the Italian model.

The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings, With green hath clad the hill and eke the vale: The nightingale with feathers new she sings; The turtle to her make hath told her tale.