The Sonnet Form.

At Write Time we like to celebrate writing in all its forms and I have decided that it’s about time we looked at a little poetry, just to show that it hasn’t been forgotten. 

Below there are three sonnets; three of my favourites captured from three different centuries.  This is primarily to display just how popular the sonnet has been as a poetic form, and how popular it still is.

The essay that follows these sonnets, looks at the poems and probes the question: why has the sonnet been such a popular form in history, from its renaissance beginnings to its most contemporary usage today?

“When I Consider How My Light Is Spent”  (1673)

When I consider how my light is spent                                 

  Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,                  

  And that one talent which is death to hide                         

  Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent                       

To serve therewith my maker, and present

  My true account, lest he returning chide;                            

  “Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”                                  

  I fondly ask; but Patience to prevent                                   

That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need                   

  Either man’s work or his gifts; who best

  Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best.  His state

Is kingly.  Thousands at his bidding speed

  And post o’er land and ocean without rest:

  They also serve who only stand and wait.”                                                 

“England in 1819” (1839)

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king ¾                 

Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow                      

Through public scorn ¾  mud from a muddy spring;                       

Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,                          

But leechlike to their fainting country cling,

Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow;

A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field ¾ 

An army, which liberticide and prey

Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;

Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;     

Religion Christless, Godless ¾ a book sealed;

A senate ¾ Time’s worst statute unrepealed ¾

Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may

Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

“The White Troops Had Their Orders But The Negroes Looked Like Men” (1945)

They had supposed their formula was fixed.

They had obeyed instructions to devise

A type of cold, a type of hooded gaze.

But when the Negroes came they were perplexed.

These Negroes looked like men.  Besides, it taxed

Time and the temper to remember those

Congenital iniquities that cause

Disfavour of the darkness.  Such as boxed

Their feelings properly, complete to tags ¾

A box for dark men and a box for Other ¾ 

Would often find the contents had been scrambled.

Or even switched.  Who really gave two figs?

Neither the earth nor heaven ever trembled.

And there was nothing startling in the weather.

The focus of this essay is not an exhaustive account of poets and sonnets since the renaissance, and the sonnets covered here are not by any means meant to be the most instrumental, or indeed the most important in the development of the form.  Its focus is to provoke interest by demonstrating the surprising versatility of such a fixed form; a genre that has lent itself to a diverse range of subject matter and fashion.  From its Italian origins in the fourteenth century the sonnet form has been gathered and manipulated by many poets, of whom I have chosen three.  The poems chosen clearly display how the two most popular sonnet forms have been used within their respective historical and political climates, only drawing attention to themselves by defying their own preceding conventions.  Addressed chronologically, this essay looks at the Petrarchan model revived by Milton, the English (Shakespearean) model, somewhat refashioned, by Shelley and a more contemporary sonnet, taken from a series that employs both sonnet forms, with an innovative treatment of rhyme within the sonnet, by the black American writer Gwendolyn Brooks.

John Milton.

After the sonnet’s heyday in the court of Elizabeth, the form started to fall from fashion, subsequently going into hiding for a hundred or so years with very few exceptions.  The last major English poet to use the sonnet form, before this shift in fashion, was John Milton, a very learned and God fearing man whose religious beliefs, study of literature and vocation in poetry are doubtless attributes to consider when examining his verse. 

Milton favoured the Petrarchan sonnet, originally renowned for its ‘courtly-love’ themes of unattainable mistresses and beauty, (these themes later adopted by many Elizabethan poets) but he altered convention by using the form to address different subjects, such as: events, people or occasion, making full use of the form’s ability to express a conflicting argument within its structure.

“When I Consider How My Light Is Spent” is an exemplary illustration of his sonnets, written in the Petrarchan form primarily because it’s better equipped to handle Milton’s subject matter; in this case, frustration and patience are his themes.  The subject of Milton’s blindness, and his concerns how best to serve God with this disability, are serious and the quintessential English (Shakespearean) sonnet, with its three quatrains and couplet, although maintaining a volta (shift or point of dramatic change in a poem), would sound far to sonorous for Milton’s themes.

The volta is a feature that Milton shrewdly manipulates for the purpose of that very poem.  The conventions of the Petrarchan form would stipulate the volta in line nine, answering the octave with a resolution in the concluding sestet; In “When I Consider…” Milton gives the reader no such thing.  Turning on the word “but”, the conclusion to Milton’s dilemma begins in the middle of line eight; the next line only confronts the reader with enjambment where the volta is usually expected:

“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”

  I fondly ask; but Patience to prevent             (8)

That murmur, soon replies, “God doth…                  

                        (My Underlining)

The Romantic’s Sonnet.

No discourse on the evolution and manipulation of the sonnet would be appropriate without addressing the issues raised by ‘the romantics’, and Percy Bysshe Shelley was one whom evoked the spirit of revolution, advocating the power of free thought. 

Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is probably his most significant model of an original sonnet form but if we are to look at his sonnet: “England in 1819” as an English sonnet, it is there we can identify the defined breaks in genre conventions. 

In comparison to earlier English sonnets (Elizabethan for example), Shelley’s choice of subject matter is strikingly different.  He was a man with a passion for human kindness and justice, so there is little wonder that “England in 1819” is oozing with vitriol, directed towards the politics and establishment of the monarchy (which Shelley detested) and no doubt inspired by the horrific Peterloo Massacre in that very year; a focal point for literary representation. 

During the Renaissance the English sonnet was concerned with court patronage, something the romantics cared little about, and the principal use of the English form by Shelley is most probably connected to the social collapse of, and dissatisfaction with state and Shelley’s desire to create a patriotic stir by re-establishing the form into a nation governed by a line of Hanoverian Kings (it is worth noting, Shelley was exiled in Italy at this time, under no illusions that  the sonnet would be published). 

Shelley uses the English form but takes away the musicality within it by using enjambment across the extended boundaries of what would have, conventionally, been quatrains in the original form; the complaint about the “old, mad…King” and his heirs goes on for six lines, using the same  abab… rhyme.  Not only the opening lines, but the whole sonnet is a pressurised list of the country’s weaknesses and mistakes with no resolution of any sort, the only hint of a turning point is where it ends in the couplet by likening the institutions of the English state as a set of graves.  Even this rhyming couplet at the end is uncertain, coming a long way from the tradition of heroic or even concluding couplets. 

“A senate ¾ Time’s worst statute unrepealed ¾

Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may

Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.”

                        (My Underlining)

The rhyming couplet at the end is labelled by F.R. Leavis as a “pathetic weakness” in the form (Leavis), but this appears a little harsh, and Shelley’s use of enjambment has lent the word “may” a powerfully ambiguous stress.  This word is instrumental in creating an air of revolution around the couplet, may to mean perhaps/maybe, or possibly, may to mean allowed/enabled; both ways create a different feeling about the“Phantom [that] may / Burst” out of the current state of emergency in England in 1819.  The entire sonnet would have different effects on different people, as Susan Wolfson writes:-

“Publication [of “England in 1819”] would provoke two audiences, the oppressed for whom the sonnet articulates political grievance and the oppressors for whom it articulates a political threat”

                                                                                    (Wolfson, S. J.)

This hybrid form of English sonnet lends itself to the revolutionary Shelley very well, starting in what is expected of the English sonnet, and nearly concluding like one, it echoes revolution throughout by going ‘off the rails’, so to speak, and denying expectations.

Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks’ sonnet “The White Troops Had Their Orders But the Negroes Looked Like Men” is the seventh in a sequence of twelve called “Gay Chaps at the Bar”, published in her first book : A Street in Bronzeville, and inspired by letters she received from  black Americans in WWII. 

The sonnet sequence used here has evolved greatly, the main difference is that Brooks does not use the same form throughout; the sequence is built up of Shakespearean, Petrarchan and mixtures of the two. 

For this particular sonnet in the sequence, and indeed the subject matter at hand, Brooks steers away from the musical and heroic breed of Shakespearean sonnet.  “The White Troops…” is a powerful example of the regular Petrarchan form, using a tension building octave effectively to portray, in the first quatrain, apprehension of the white soldiers, who had devised “A type of cold, a type of hooded gaze” against their fellow men and been “perplexed” at their appearance.  The second quatrain begins to tell how “Time and the temper” would be needed to remember just how these men became so unjust towards “the darkness”.  This octave is set against the reality and futility of their continued segregation in the sestet; the fixed Petrarchan form allows Brooks to have her speaker create a sarcastic response in the sestet, as there can be no possible solution to the apartheid coffins or the situation in general : “Who really gave two figs? / Neither the earth nor heaven ever trembled”. 

Conclusion

The original sonnet of the renaissance has developed many revivals and hybrid forms since the Italian original was brought to us by Thomas Wyatt.  From the serious sounding, re-invention of the Petrarchan form by Milton and the deeply vitriolic breed of English sonnet by Shelley, to the subtle directness of Gwendolyn Brooks, the sonnet is still able to deliver, whether that be lyrical musicality, serious debate, lament or any conflict of emotion; if only by breaking its prior conventions.  The sonnet truly is still a great poetic form.

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