Sonnet

Sonnet (Ital. sonetto, dim. of suono; Fr. sonnet). In poetic art the sonnet—a stanza mostly iambic in movement, properly decasyllabic or hendecasyllabic in metre, always in fourteen lines arranged properly according to some law that is recognised at once as having universal acceptance—belongs entirely to the rhymed poetry of the modern world. Sonnets are divided into regular and irregular. All regular sonnets are divisible into: (1) The sonnet of simple stanza in which the staves follow each other in three quatrains of alternate rhymes clinched at last by a couplet. This form is for obvious reasons called the Shakespearean sonnet. (2) The sonnet of compound stanza divided generally, but not always, both as regards sense-rhythm and metre-rhythm, into two parts—an octave consisting of eight lines (the first line of which rhymes with the fourth, the fifth, and the eighth lines, the second line with the third, the sixth, and the seventh), and a sestet consisting of six lines running on two or else three rhymes in an arrangement which, though free from prescription, must always act as a response by way of either ebb or flow to the metrical billow embodied in the octave. This form is for equally obvious reasons called Petrarchan. Within the space at our command it is impossible even to glance at the history of the sonnet here, save as it now and then discloses itself in our remarks upon the general principles governing the sonnet's matter and its form.

Though poetic art has many functions and many methods, the two following among its functions seem specially to concern us in treating of the sonnet: The function of giving spontaneous voice to the emotions and passions of the poet's soul; and the function of poetising didactic matter and bringing it into poetic art. With regard to the first of these functions, although the sonnet is a good medium for expressing passion and emotion, it cannot be said to take precedence in this respect of other and less inherently monumental forms. The ode of Sappho, the bird-like song of Catullus, and the free-moving rhymed lyric of modern times are probably better adapted to give expression to simple passion at white heat—while on the other hand they are certainly better adapted to give voice to that less intense form of passion which can pause to deck itself with the flowers of a beautiful fancy—than is the sonnet—even the sonnet of simple stanza of Shakespeare and Drayton. With regard, however, to the second of the above-mentioned functions of the poet—that of poetising didactic matter—a function which of course can only be exercised by passing the didactic matter through a laboratory as creative and as recreative as nature's own, the laboratory of a true poet's imagination, the pure lyric must of course yield to the sonnet. Indeed, it is an open question whether since the Romantic revival the sonnet has not been gradually taking precedence of most other forms as an embodiment of poetised didactics. And should this on inquiry be found to be the case, the importance of this form will be made manifest. For as the mind of man widens in mere knowledge and intelligence fresh prose material is being furnished for the poetic laboratory every day. And the question, What is the poetic form best suited to embody and secure this ever-increasing and ever-varying wealth?—a question which has to be answered by each literature, and indeed by each period of each literature, for itself—goes to the root of poetic criticism. Of course, before didactic matter can become anything more than versified prose, it has to be excarnated from the prose tissue in which all such matter takes birth, and then incarnated anew in the spiritualised tissue of which the poetic body is and must always be composed. Hence it is not enough for the poet to use the sieve, 'as Dante would say,' in selecting 'noble words.' The best prose writers from Plato downwards have been in the habit of doing this. When Waller said:

Things of deep sense we may in prose unfold,
But they move more in lofty numbers told, he meant by 'lofty numbers' those semi-poetic 'numbers' of the English couplet in which poetised didactics were in his time embodied—as in the time of Shakespeare such poetised secretions of the mere intellectus cogitabundus were put into the mouths of dramatic characters after the approved old fashion of the classical dramatists.

Since the Romantic revival, however, poetic art has undergone an entire change. Acted drama cannot now receive poetised didactics, which would in these days slacken the movement and disturb the illusion required, while as to the kind of epigram-in-solution or half-poetised quintessential prose which is embodied in the 18th-century couplet the criticism of the Romantic revival is apt to consider this not so much as poetry as an intermediate form—and an extremely rich and precious one—between poetry and prose. Epigrammatic matter must, to exist at all, be knowing, and as knowingness and romanticism are mutually destructive, it is evident that some form other than the couplet, which is so associated with epigram, must in our time be used for the poetising of didactic matter of the unworldly and lofty kind. And the sonnet of octave and sestet is a form less epigrammatic than any other—a form moreover which can never, as certain other stanzaic forms can do, embody mere quintessential prose without proclaiming its poverty, but must always be poetic in its very texture—a form indeed which will not bear one line that is not either in essence or in method poetic or else ‘rhetorical’ in Dante’s sense when he defined poetry to be ‘a rhetorical composition set to music.’ So absolutely poetic a form is this that if it should happen that the diction will not on account of the subject bear elevation, it has to be at once poetised by one of those skilful disturbances of the prose order of the words of which Wordsworth was so great a master.

The fact of the word sonnet being connected with suonare, to play upon an instrument, shows that a knowledge of music, though perhaps not essential, is of great value to a sonnet-writer. Indeed, owing to the consonantal character of our language a knowledge of music is really of more importance to the English than to the Italian sonnet-writer. Although the ‘singing words’ essential to a good song for music need not perhaps be greatly sought in the sonnet (save in the special and somewhat rare form mentioned further on), still vowel-composition and that attention to sibilants which Pindar is constantly showing in his odes—that attention which Dionysius of Halicarnassus extolled—and also the softening of consonantal feet by liquids are extremely important in the sonnet even although it is no longer written to be set to music. After much practice in the art of rhymed poetry—when every feasible rhyme leaps into the brain of the poet the moment that a line-ending has suggested itself to his mind—this attention to structural demands becomes instinctive, and is exercised in that half unconscious and rapid evolution of the mental processes which the witty conversationist shows in repartee, and which the pianist exhibits when touching the keyboard—supposing of course that the poet is a born rhymen. It is, however, a curious and interesting fact that ever since the time of Piers Plowman (when alliterative measures gave way to rhymed measures) English poets have been clearly divisible into two classes—those to whom rhyme is an aid and those to whom rhyme is more or less a check. And still more curious and interesting is it, that while three of the greatest poets, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Milton, belong to the one class, Coleridge (who by endowment perhaps stands next to them) belongs to the other. This is why some of the strongest English poets have not been successful in the sonnet, where the rhyme-demands are very great. For some reason or another the rhythmic impulse within them has not been stimulated but crippled and tortured by the spur of rhyme.

With regard to prescription in the number of the lines and the arrangement of the rhymes of the sonnet, metrical art offers the reader two opposite kinds of pleasure; the pleasure derived from a sense of prescribed form, as in the sonnet, the ballade, the rispetto, the stornello, &c., and the pleasure derived from a sense of freedom from prescribed form as afforded by those pure lyrics, in which the form is, or at least should be, governed by the emotion. Now every poetical composition should show at once which of these kinds of pleasure is being offered to the reader and should also satisfy the expectation raised, for he will experience a sense of disappointment on being proffered one kind of poetic pleasure when he has been led, by the stanzaic arrangement or otherwise, to expect another. Nevertheless a certain few of our great sonnets are irregular, for a great poet can do anything.

With reference to regular sonnets it is self-evident, as regards the sonnet of compound stanza, that there are four different forms into which one may fall a metrical structure consisting of an octave of a prescriptive arrangement of rhymes and a sestet consisting of another set of rhymes that are free in arrangement from prescription. And some years ago the present writer exemplified these in ‘four sonnets on the sonnet,’ one only of which, under the name of ‘The Sonnet’s Voice,’ originally printed in the Athenæum, was widely circulated in sonnet-anthologies. These varieties of the sonnet of octave and sestet are: (1) The sonnet in which the stronger portion both in rhythm and in substance is embodied in the sestet. (2) The sonnet in which the stronger portion both in rhythm and in substance is embodied in the octave. (3) The sonnet in which the sestet is not separated from the octave, but seems to be merely a portion of the octave’s movement rising to a close more or less climactic. (4) The sonnet in which the sestet seems to be added to the octave’s movement, added after its apparent termination in a kind of tailpiece, answering to what in music we call the ‘coda.’

With regard to the second of these varieties—the one exemplified in ‘The Sonnet’s Voice’—perhaps the ideal form has the octave in double rhymes and the sestet in single rhymes. But it has to be remembered by the poet that between the effect of Italian rhymes and the effect of English double rhymes there is a great difference. Save in the hands of a sonnet-writer of great practice in the art of vowel-composition, in the art of using singing words, and in the art of softening our consonantal language, by the proper use of liquids and subtle and concealed alliterations, the English rhyme-beat in the double-rhyme octave of this variety is apt to become too heavy for the single-rhyme rhyme-beat in the sestet. By attention to these requirements, however, the rhyme-beat may be so lightened that this variety may become the most brilliant of all.

With regard to the sonnet of simple stanza, it has two special glories: it was the form adopted by Shakespeare, and in it is written Drayton’s famous love-sonnet. Hartley Coleridge wrote some fine sonnets in this form; so did Keats: but on the whole it has been neglected in recent times. A renewed attention has, however, been lately given to it by critics of the sonnet both in England and America owing to Dr Gordon Hake’s book of nature poems, The New Day, where the Shakespearean form of sonnet is used. Here, by a free use of double rhymes the poet gives a lyrical movement to his verse, which, though an occasional feature of Shakespeare’s sonnets, is not a characteristic one.