A Brief History of the Sonnet - Chapter 20 (The Conclusion - A Meditation on Form/s in Verse/Poetry)

 I have told you the definition of the sonnet. I have given you the note on what M H Abrams said of it, where it began and where all it has spread to in its key moments, the poets whose names matter in it, the best examples, and also through their content a glimpse of how the content and the form itself has undergone changes, showing also the history of the changing times in minuscule, and the theoretical concerns it had and still holds for us. The fact that it ends with a discussion on the form is no coincidence as it ends as of now here in this book with me with postmodernity which is meta-form oriented, postcolonial albeit of an underlying note kind, and with democratic left-leaning nationalism with a holistic attempt to combine Western and Eastern elements rather than to deconstruct them with an either/or approach. Meanwhile I also bring in trauma, disability, ethnic and minority studies, affect theory, feminism, ecocriticism etc., briefly in flashes and touches for those with the eyes to see.

I spoke of the beginnings of the sonnet in Old Provencal with the Sicilian school of poets, and with Lentini, then of the arrival of the form in glory in Italy with the terza rima sonnet, then the Petrarchan sonnet, and of Dante, Cavalcanti, Michaelangelo, and Rafael. Then I spoke but not in order of the English Spenserian sonnet, the Shakespearean, the Miltonic, the Wordsworthian, the Shelleyesque, and the Keatsian sonnets, and after that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Emily Bronte, DG Rosetti, the curtal sonnet and Hopkins, and then going away from England, of Irish Beckett, the American Berryman and ee cummings and Edna St Vincent Millay, the French Rimbaud, the German Rilke, the Russian Pushkin and his Onegin sonnet, the South American Neruda, and finally of the Latin caudate sonnet of Berni, of Sonnet Mondal's version, of the immured sonnet and Philip Nikolayev, of the roseate sonnet and myself and also of the Indians including Micheal Madhusudan Dutt, Toru Dutt, Sri Aurobindo, Henry Derozio, Vikram Seth using the Onegin sonnet, Santosh Bakaya, Dev Mishra, Daipayan Nair and Geethanjali Dilip for their voluminous production of roseate sonnets and the anthology of sonnets coming up edited by Gauri Dixit, Sunita Singh, Vineetha Mekkoth and Bhuvaneshwari Shivakumar Shankar.

But I want to end talking of forms on a comparative note. Even among the sonnet forms people still try out the terza rima sonnet, the Shakespearean and the Petrarchan, and the roseate sonnet form rather than the variants, or a free verse version or mongrel one, and this is due to the fact that it offers a fine balance between ease and difficulty that holds the interest of poets enough and intrigues them enough to try them out. So this matters in form-making.

We see that Greece had many forms like the epic, tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, all in verse, and ode, elegy, lyric, threnody etc. But slowly things changed and verse was left behind for prose in tragedy, comedy and tragicomedy, over time, in history, leading to the novel and short story and prose drama, and the rise of non-fiction in prose, and only the lyric and occasional poetry survived, while the epic faded as too difficult. Courtly love poems died out when there were no more courts as did bucolic and pastoral poetry, and love poems in such backgrounds or rural settings as the city became important, and in the same way while there have been many forms worldwide that tried for pre-eminence slowly free verse gained ascendancy over meter and urbanized-in-content poems took over. We see now that while the freed haiku, the gogyoshi or five liners, and the limerick,  the sonnet, and the ghazal are practiced many French forms like the villanelle are never or seldom tried out due to their difficulty. I love forms and have tried to keep writing in a form, this one, to keep it alive, with my contribution to the art knowing that no one will try one unless it has a harmony between what we ask of the poet and the freedom it gives him that is his creative input, even to make half the rules, which only I have done, which shows my mastery and greatness as a teacher and form-maker as well as skills, competencies and values creator in the students by encouraging their sleight of hand, and that is what makes my form attractive. There are two factors at work, one is that in language there is the principle of ease over labour while in form people want order in the midst of chaos, yet not too much of it. The same happens in prose too, which is why no one reads "Finnegan's Wake" but talk of it but all read "Old Man and the Sea", the latter has form and ease, while the former looks formless, and offers too much difficulty to the reader. It is the same with writers and poets.

To end, this is not a decrying of the attempts of a Hopkins or e.e.cummings, or a Sonnet Mondal or Philip Nikolayev or of the attempt at making the roseate sonnet more complicated than it is, as Dev Mishra has tried extremely well and successfully, or even by making it a syllable based or word based form like the 'tideling' which is a form by Daipayan Nair, or even my friends in spirit in other forms like those who want to make the haiku, tanka or gogyoshi (a five liner) most strict and old fashioned, or Duane Vorhees's couplette, or those who want to write stilted, laboured, artificial ghazals only, like Agha Shahid Ali did in English. Such attempts are towering and overawe us, but remain as mountains no one tries to scale again. The real way forward, even for Ghazals, is to listen to a Shabir Ahmad Mir and free it or an Amita Paul who asks for the same balance. Or for five liners to be loose tankas etc. The balance always has to be between less rigor and more of allowance or laxity. Lyrics and love poems sans harp or lyre will continue ad nauseam as well as didactic poems and cause-based ones and ones of social outrage on recent events.

Let me end by repeating that sonnets have a skeleton, it has fourteen lines, and those are divided into stanzas, rhymed or not, metered or neutered, that invariably, naturally, break themselves into structurally constituent parts that fit well into each other, and often lead to narrative poems or sequences and intricately beautiful images, sounds, figures of speech and interlinked layers of words and meanings. Things like rhyme, meter, line length, and syllabic or word count should not matter here though rhythm and beat must,  not of the metronome; but in a more organic or musical notation as in an onomatopoeic, repetitive, incantatory, evocative, hypnotic fashion. Then sonnets will add beauty immeasurable to our world and be relevant even today if on topical issues and I have offered you the best examples for you to enjoy and see why they do and even try out if you want, if you are poets. 

Read, relate, and enjoy to your heart's content, till my next sally into the lands of poetry, its forms, critical literary explication, and my own unique brand of poetry-loving, literary theory craziness. 

THE END

 

A Brief History of the Sonnet - Chapter 19 (On Neruda and the Roseate Sonnet)

 Reading sonnets is something like being on a train journey when you are a child and watching random scenes through the window of the rural landscape drenched in beauty. Then the train takes to wings and you see the sky with birds swimming in it. It becomes a submarine and you see the underwater creatures frolic and play there. Glimpses of nations, of historical eruptions and changes, of poets and muses, of labouring and burnt midnight oil and quill and ink, giving way to the computer age. The scenery becomes urban and the birds less, the sky becomes polluted and the journey resumes on railway tracks. Soon you will reach your destination. There is a lady in the compartment with you. You want to please her and so you read her this sonnet from Neruda all women like.

One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII

BY PABLO NERUDA

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,

or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:

I love you as one loves certain obscure things,

secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries

the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,

and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose

from the earth lives dimly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,

I love you directly without problems or pride:

I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,

except in this form in which I am not nor are you,

so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,

so close that your eyes close with my dreams.

She snuggles closer to you languorously and lets you make love to her, for opening the treasure box of all the sonnet-diamonds you have for her in all the previous chapters as now she has become more learned than before.

The journey that carried you around the world and now even to South America leaves you pondering about India. Michael was Bengali, so was Toru, so was Derozio, so was Sri Aurobindo, so is Sonnet Mondal. But Seth? Even he was born in Kolkatta.

And what about Kerala? And Kashmir? And Tamil Nadu? And Uttar Pradesh? and Maharashtra? And Orissa? Etc. The other states of India.

Patience to prevent that murmur soon replied by letting me make the roseate sonnet form as an alteration of the sonnet form to put Kerala too on the international sonnet writing map.

The roseate sonnet is two quatrains, a couplet which is a volta, no rhyme scheme, line length, metronome, beat or syllable or meter , and a last stanza which is an acrostic for ROSE which makes it a hybrid form but of four stanzas and fourteen lines in classic sonnet style (4-4-2-4). But by removing the thorny obstacles that stand in the way of Indian sonneteers, mainly meter, though criticized for it as therefore making it too easy, I achieved unexpected success and soon so many roseate sonnets began pouring in it is now being made into an anthology. The ROSE was used as a symbol because of its universal literary associations. I have put Kerala on the international map of sonnet writing.

Not just that - I revived interest in the form, especially my version, to the extent that poets from Kashmir, like Dr Santosh Bakaya wrote a whole narrative poem in it, for the anthology, putting Kashmir on the map and Jaipur, of world sonnet writing. It is called "You heard the Scream, didn't you?" It follows in the tradition of Pushkin and Vikram Seth, therefore, by telling a story, as narrative verse, in fifty sonnets.

There are others too.

I have written about a hundred roseate sonnets - thirty will come out soon in the anthology.

Daipayan Nair has written any number of powerful roseate sonnets and cached it on a wonderful page on FB. This is Bengali- Malayali in origin and coupled with pictorial matching.

Geethanjali Dilip has written many putting Tamil Nadu on the map along with Bhuvaneshwari Shivakumar Shankar who is the editor for the anthology.

Dev Mishra has written them becoming a representative of it in a way from Orissa though he is much wider and has carried it to a deeper level by doing it in many different ways and even mixing it with Duane Vorhees's form the Couplette. Dev Mishra is one of the best in India at present at writing in forms.

"(P)-   Indeed! I  see you experiment rigorously with many forms and styles, even new formats like the Roseate Sonnet. Which format is truly the most challenging one for Dev Mishra and why?

DM– No format is impossible if you intend to do it. However, I will consider the Roseate Sonnet Couplette — a merger of two novel forms, done by me — to be the toughest. A Roseate Sonnet is devised by Dr. Ampat Koshy. It is pretty simple. A traditional sonnet re-modelled with an acrostic at the end reading ROSE. A couplette, on the other hand, demands the rhyme of syllables. For instance, the first syllable has to rhyme with the second, the third with the fourth and so on. This is relatively challenging because you have to take care of the rhyme of syllables and the acrostic at the end, without compromising with the idea that you have."

The form Couplette (not couplet) is invented by Dr. Duane Vorhees."

Dev Mishra has also tried several versions of the Roseate Sonnet making it more difficult by using the acrostic in the beginning of all stanzas or in the end and/or middle, in the case of the couplet to complete it etc, besides doind the roseate couplette.

Roy Mark Azanza Corrales of the Philippines has also brought out an entire book of Roseate Sonnets.

Gauri Dixit comes from Maharashtra, Sunita Singh from Uttar Pradesh, Satbir Chadha from Haldwani, Reena Prasad from Kerala with Vineetha Mekkoth (our co-editor) - all have graced the form. Writers from 12 countries, including Michelle "Wyn" Corbett from Canada, from UK Dominic Francis, from USA Alistair Towesland Allen, Michele Baron, Angel Meredith etcetera, and poets in three languages, English, Hindi and Urdu have attempted it or variations on it, naturally, more than 500 have already been written and the secret of this success is it is simple, with just the right amount of difficulty. The anthology contains 102 poets with 180 sonnets and before that there was a competition which was judged by Lopa Banerjee and Elizabeth Kuriakose and in it also some 50 or so took part. This was in the Learning and Creativity-Silhouette e-magazine. The anthology will soon be published by Authorspress and Sudarshan Kcherry. Writers from almost all states in India have given poems for it spreading the sonnet fever again from Kerala first to all over India. Uiba Mangang who is one from the North East is another example. Lily Swarn from Punjab is too. Sarmita Dey continues writing it and carrying on the form thus, in a sense, in Bengal. We have Precious Chilongozi from Malawi, Africa, writing one.

Here is one by me that has been published to make you get the structure:

A Roseate Sonnet by Dr AV Koshy

August 31, 2020

I understand
why dawn ‘breaks’
& night ‘steals’.
But why hearts have to, too, or do

or people wheel and deal
to steal
from one another
I never could. I am naive,
sometimes.

Restless hearts, break like the dawn
O debtors, stolen from by others or life
Steal away from the dark night(s) in the hearts of men, and fate
Enjoy the first, fiery, red flush of dawn. 

(http://odetoapoetess.com/2020/08/31/a-roseate-sonnet-by-dr-koshy-av/?fbclid=IwAR2_3MZiZK-I0vkMl1xfOS8rg387Og7rsC5LgtCf0xPi-GPyjosGjX4j1-Y) first credit link.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49236/one-hundred-love-sonnets-xvii

https://www.photonews.in/2019/03/28/poetry-is-a-pilgrimage-debasish-mishra/

https://learningandcreativity.com/roseate-sonnet-an-experience-in-learning-the-art-of-poetry/

A Brief History of the Sonnet - Chapter 18 (Spenser, MH Abrams , Pushkin and Vikram Seth)

 We know that one of the strange abilities that can come about in writing sonnets is that we can tell stories with them, either in just a single sonnet or by linking them together,  as Berryman proved. The earliest example is perhaps by the great Edmund Spenser who tells us a love story in his famous sonnet that is also about mortality but not any the less enchanting for it.

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
"Vain man," said she, "that dost in vain assay,
A mortal thing so to immortalize;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise."
"Not so," (quod I) "let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name:
Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew."

— Edmund Spenser, Amoretti, Sonnet 75  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spenserian_sonnet)

This is a complete love story, besides foreshadowing Shakespeare's "so long lives this and this gives life to thee." Pushkin, influenced by Lord Byron and sonnets pushed this notion further by writing a whole novel in sonnets, the famed Eugene Onegin and this bred the Russian or Pushkin sonnet or Onegin sonnet as it is called. To think of writing a novel in sonnets is a mind-boggling idea and kudos to him for doing it proving it is not for nothing he is called the greatest perhaps of the Russian writers.

I quote a long section here out of my desire to explain what I mean which is Tatiana's dream as it explains the power that can be unleashed if sonnets are linked together into a narrative or for  creating a narrative.

XI

   A dreadful sleep Tattiana sleeps.
   She dreamt she journeyed o’er a field
   All covered up with snow in heaps,
   By melancholy fogs concealed.
   Amid the snowdrifts which surround
   A stream, by winter’s ice unbound,
   Impetuously clove its way
   With boiling torrent dark and gray;
   Two poles together glued by ice,
   A fragile bridge and insecure,
   Spanned the unbridled torrent o’er;
   Beside the thundering abyss
   Tattiana in despair unfeigned
   Rooted unto the spot remained.

   XII

   As if against obstruction sore
   Tattiana o’er the stream complained;
   To help her to the other shore
   No one appeared to lend a hand.
   But suddenly a snowdrift stirs,
   And what from its recess appears?
   A bristly bear of monstrous size!
   He roars, and “Ah!” Tattiana cries.
   He offers her his murderous paw;
   She nerves herself from her alarm
   And leans upon the monster’s arm,
   With footsteps tremulous with awe
   Passes the torrent But alack!
   Bruin is marching at her back!

   XIII

   She, to turn back her eyes afraid,
   Accelerates her hasty pace,
   But cannot anyhow evade
   Her shaggy myrmidon in chase.
   The bear rolls on with many a grunt:
   A forest now she sees in front
   With fir-trees standing motionless
   In melancholy loveliness,
   Their branches by the snow bowed down.
   Through aspens, limes and birches bare,
   The shining orbs of night appear;
   There is no path; the storm hath strewn
   Both bush and brake, ravine and steep,
   And all in snow is buried deep.

   XIV

   The wood she enters—bear behind,—
   In snow she sinks up to the knee;
   Now a long branch itself entwined
   Around her neck, now violently
   Away her golden earrings tore;
   Now the sweet little shoes she wore,
   Grown clammy, stick fast in the snow;
   Her handkerchief she loses now;
   No time to pick it up! afraid,
   She hears the bear behind her press,
   Nor dares the skirting of her dress
   For shame lift up the modest maid.
   She runs, the bear upon her trail,
   Until her powers of running fail.

   XV

   She sank upon the snow. But Bruin
   Adroitly seized and carried her;
   Submissive as if in a swoon,
   She cannot draw a breath or stir.
   He dragged her by a forest road
   Till amid trees a hovel showed,
   By barren snow heaped up and bound,
   A tangled wilderness around.
   Bright blazed the window of the place,
   Within resounded shriek and shout:
   “My chum lives here,” Bruin grunts out.
   “Warm yourself here a little space!”
   Straight for the entrance then he made
   And her upon the threshold laid.

   XVI

   Recovering, Tania gazes round;
   Bear gone—she at the threshold placed;
   Inside clink glasses, cries resound
   As if it were some funeral feast.
   But deeming all this nonsense pure,
   She peeped through a chink of the door.
   What doth she see? Around the board
   Sit many monstrous shapes abhorred.
   A canine face with horns thereon,
   Another with cock’s head appeared,
   Here an old witch with hirsute beard,
   There an imperious skeleton;
   A dwarf adorned with tail, again
   A shape half cat and half a crane.

   XVII

   Yet ghastlier, yet more wonderful,
   A crab upon a spider rides,
   Perched on a goose’s neck a skull
   In scarlet cap revolving glides.
   A windmill too a jig performs
   And wildly waves its arms and storms;
   Barking, songs, whistling, laughter coarse,
   The speech of man and tramp of horse.
   But wide Tattiana oped her eyes
   When in that company she saw
   Him who inspired both love and awe,
   The hero we immortalize.
   Onéguine sat the table by
   And viewed the door with cunning eye.

   XVIII

   All bustle when he makes a sign:
   He drinks, all drink and loudly call;
   He smiles, in laughter all combine;
   He knits his brows—’tis silent all.
   He there is master—that is plain;
   Tattiana courage doth regain
   And grown more curious by far
   Just placed the entrance door ajar.
   The wind rose instantly, blew out
   The fire of the nocturnal lights;
   A trouble fell upon the sprites;
   Onéguine lightning glances shot;
   Furious he from the table rose;
   All arise. To the door he goes.

   XIX

   Terror assails her. Hastily
   Tattiana would attempt to fly,
   She cannot—then impatiently
   She strains her throat to force a cry—
   She cannot—Eugene oped the door
   And the young girl appeared before
   Those hellish phantoms. Peals arise
   Of frantic laughter, and all eyes
   And hoofs and crooked snouts and paws,
   Tails which a bushy tuft adorns,
   Whiskers and bloody tongues and horns,
   Sharp rows of tushes, bony claws,
   Are turned upon her. All combine
   In one great shout: she’s mine! she’s mine!

   XX

   “Mine!” cried Eugene with savage tone.
   The troop of apparitions fled,
   And in the frosty night alone
   Remained with him the youthful maid.
   With tranquil air Onéguine leads
   Tattiana to a corner, bids
   Her on a shaky bench sit down;
   His head sinks slowly, rests upon
   Her shoulder—Olga swiftly came—
   And Lenski followed—a light broke—
   His fist Onéguine fiercely shook
   And gazed around with eyes of flame;
   The unbidden guests he roughly chides—
   Tattiana motionless abides.

   XXI

   The strife grew furious and Eugene
   Grasped a long knife and instantly
   Struck Lenski dead—across the scene
   Dark shadows thicken—a dread cry
   Was uttered, and the cabin shook—
   Tattiana terrified awoke.
   She gazed around her—it was day.
   Lo! through the frozen windows play
   Aurora’s ruddy rays of light—
   The door flew open—Olga came,
   More blooming than the Boreal flame
   And swifter than the swallow’s flight.
   “Come,” she cried, “sister, tell me e’en
   Whom you in slumber may have seen.”

   XXII

   But she, her sister never heeding,
   With book in hand reclined in bed,
   Page after page continued reading,
   But no reply unto her made.
   Although her book did not contain
   The bard’s enthusiastic strain,
   Nor precepts sage nor pictures e’en,
   Yet neither Virgil nor Racine
   Nor Byron, Walter Scott, nor Seneca,
   Nor the Journal des Modes, I vouch,
   Ever absorbed a maid so much:
   Its name, my friends, was Martin Zadeka,
   The chief of the Chaldean wise,
   Who dreams expound and prophecies.

   XXIII

   Brought by a pedlar vagabond
   Unto their solitude one day,
   This monument of thought profound
   Tattiana purchased with a stray
   Tome of “Malvina,” and but three(56)
   And a half rubles down gave she;
   Also, to equalise the scales,
   She got a book of nursery tales,
   A grammar, likewise Petriads two,
   Marmontel also, tome the third;
   Tattiana every day conferred
   With Martin Zadeka. In woe
   She consolation thence obtained—
   Inseparable they remained.

   [Note 56: “Malvina,” a romance by Madame Cottin.]

   XXIV

   The dream left terror in its train.
   Not knowing its interpretation,
   Tania the meaning would obtain
   Of such a dread hallucination.
   Tattiana to the index flies
   And alphabetically tries
   The words bear, bridge, fir, darkness, bog,
   Raven, snowstorm, tempest, fog,
   Et cetera; but nothing showed
   Her Martin Zadeka in aid,
   Though the foul vision promise made
   Of a most mournful episode,
   And many a day thereafter laid
   A load of care upon the maid.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/23997/23997-h/23997-h.htm

Now if anyone read that carefully which I doubt they may have gathered exactly why Pushkin is great and also deliciously readable like his master Byron.

Pushkin predicts Lenski's death at Onegin's hands in Tatiana's dream and later Onegin kills Lenski in a duel but more tragically Pushkin himself died in a duel at the hands of a man Georges d'Anthes who loved his wife Natalya, in a duel, life mirroring art and making us mourn, as we mourn about another great poet, dramatist, and sonnet writer, Christopher Marlowe, for dying in a duel. If Pushkin has been immortalized by Tchaikovsky and later by Nabokov in translation it is no joke. That Vikram Seth was influenced by him and wrote the entire Golden Gate in Onegin sonnets is a worthy tribute. As Marjorie Perloff said if nothing else it drives us back to read Pushkin. 

"After Eugene Onegin, I turned to Vikram Seth's novel in verse The Golden Gate (Random House, 1986), which is written entirely in the form of Onegin stanzas. And I mean entirely, from the dedication and table of contents to the "About the Author" note.

It's an astonishing homage from one writer to another, and an amazing performance in its own right. The Golden Gate's stanzas are fluid, witty, and follow the intricate Pushkinian rhyme scheme...while rarely landing with a thud on an obvious rhyme or stretching too far for a groan-worthy one, unless it's with an implied wink to the reader. (Seth does display a Nabokovian love of puns and wordplay, which he—just—manages not to overdo.) ... 

Ultimately, despite its many virtues, The Golden Gate feels slighter than it should." https://exoticandirrational.blogspot.com/2013/10/reaching-end-of-line-vikram-seths.html

Seth might not be as great as Pushkin but he is great in his attempt.  And for a poor Indian like me the dream of going to San Francisco and writing a novel about it in Onegin sonnets and being published by Faber and making it at one shot is all just that a dream, so he is someone I think many should look up to to aspire to be like.

But what is the Onegin sonnet? "Onegin stanza (Russian: онегинская строфа oneginskaya strofa), sometimes "Pushkin sonnet", refers to the verse form popularized (or invented) by the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin through his novel in verse Eugene Onegin. The work was mostly written in verses of iambic tetrameter with the rhyme scheme aBaBccDDeFFeGG, where the lowercase letters represent feminine rhymes (stressed on the penultimate syllable) and the uppercase representing masculine rhymes (stressed on the ultimate syllable). Score one for Seth for even attempting it, let alone pulling it off. Maybe I admire him being a small-town guy not being able to do anything of the kind.

Here is Seth trying to pull it off: 

How ugly babies are! How heedless

Of all else than their bulging selves--

Like sumo wrestlers, plush with needless

Kneadable flesh--like mutant elves,

Plump and vindictively nocturnal,

With lungs determined and infernal

(A pity that the blubbering blobs 

Come unequipped with volume knobs),

And so intrinsically conservative,.

A change of breast will make them squall

With no restraint or qualm at all.

Some think them cuddly, cute, and curvative.

Keep them, I say. Good luck to you;

No doubt you need to be one too. 

(https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-04-06-bk-24942-story.html)

And what does MH Abrams say about sonnets?

"The stanza is just long enough to permit a fairly complex lyric development, yet so short and so exigent in its rhymes as to pose a standing challenge to the artistry of the poet. the rhyme pattern of the Petrarchan sonnet has on the whole favored a statement of problem, situation, or incident in the octave, with a resolution in the sestet. The English form sometimes uses a similar division of material, but often presents a repetition-with-variation of a statement in the three quatrains; the final couplet, however, usually imposes an epigrammatic turn at the end....

Following Petrarch's early example, a number of Elizabethan poets wrote sonnet sequences, or sonnet cycles, in which a series of sonnets are linked together by exploring the varied aspects of a relationship between lovers, or by indicating a development in that relationship which constitutes a kind of implicit plot."

https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~felluga/guide337.html#sonnet

It is this implicit plot that has been teased out by Pushkin and later by Vikram Seth and turned into not just explicit plots but whole novels, rewriting the meanings of sonnets, sonnet sequences, and the novel or narrative in verse, while also keeping in the international view Russian sonnets and Indian sonnets too, by way of their hard work and ingenuity, keeping the Aspidistra, to put it in a humorous manner, of sonnets, flying  

 

A Brief History of the Sonnet - Chapter 17 (Toru Dutt, Edna St Vincent Millay, Sonnet Mondal and e.e.cummings.)

 The sonnet thus became an international phenomenon, but what is a sonnet? The sonnet is from the Italian word sonetto which means little sound if we look back at Latin or little song/small poem if we look back to Old Provencal, so that also means it was originally a small song meant to be sung to the accompaniment of a musical instrument, perhaps the lyre but more likely the one the troubadours used, so lyrical or meant to serenade ladies, maybe, hence the origins of the poem being dedicated to and on the muse, on courtly love. I like to think the instrument was the vielle which became the viol. Which is not the violin.

My aim is not really to talk of the sonnet in terms of all the things you can learn about it by googling it or looking it up on Wikipedia but there are a few gaps I need to close in my chapters on the sonnet before I go on to other things, gaps regarding forms and themes.

I have only touched on the Spenserian sonnet and not mentioned that some people have written, including  Shakespeare who wrote one, sixteen line sonnets but the rule is fourteen lines. The Spenserian sonnet differs in the rhyme used which is ABAB BCBC CDCD EE. Interlocked except for the final couplet which is something I love.

There is also the caudate sonnet from Latin or in Latin. I heard of it first in connection somehow with Sonnet Mondal. "A caudate sonnet is an expanded version of the sonnet. It consists of 14 lines in standard sonnet forms followed by a coda (Latin cauda meaning "tail", from which the name is derived). The invention of the form is credited to Francesco Berni." The sonnet per se was invented by a Lentini. He was part of the Sicilian school of poetry under some king or the other whose full name I have forgotten as have I Lentini's full name.  But you can look it up if you really want to.  They started this lovely journey in the thirteenth century which fact I remember as it makes me feel warm and nice all over to think I am writing of a 700-year-old form, that has survived when many others died out.

Sonnet Mondal's tailed or caudate sonnet has 21 lines, two sonnets and a half one as tail of seven lines but its rhyme scheme is interesting. "Sonnet Mondal’s innovative form of the fusion sonnet is written in 21 lines; in which the 1st, 5th, 9th and 10th lines rhyme, while the same rhythm is found in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th lines and, also, in the 6th, 7th and 8th lines, followed by free verse in the 11th, 12th, 13th and 14th lines, reflecting an optimistic tone.  Each sonnet is followed by a half sonnet of 7 lines beginning with the same 1st line and ending with the 5th line in the poem."  My problem, if you can call it that,  with this is that as in the case  of Hopkins' kind of poetry or Philip Nikolayev's while it shows a really admirabe amount of skill on the part of the poet, it makes no one else want to try it again except those few who like trying out things merely because they are difficult. Such forms leave no followers and have no predecessors but maybe that is what their makers want, and so it is fine as it does make them unique.

Meanwhile, in the West one chap wrote unholy sonnets to rival Donne's holy ones, and two poets came to the fore again, namely Edna St. Vincent Millay and e.e.cummings. In the East many wrote sonnets like possessed including Aurobindo, Henry Derozio and so many others but Toru Dutt needs to be mentioned for being that of a woman writing a sonnet in India, that too one of very high quality. Toru Dutt too was introduced to me by my mother, same as Michael Madhusudan Dutt.

Sonnet.--Baugmaree.

A poem by Toru Dutt

A sea of foliage girds our garden round,
But not a sea of dull unvaried green,
Sharp contrasts of all colours here are seen;
The light-green graceful tamarinds abound
Amid the mangoe clumps of green profound,
And palms arise, like pillars gray, between;
And o'er the quiet pools the seemuls lean,
Red,--red, and startling like a trumpet's sound.
But nothing can be lovelier than the ranges
Of bamboos to the eastward, when the moon
Looks through their gaps, and the white lotus changes
Into a cup of silver. One might swoon
Drunken with beauty then, or gaze and gaze
On a primeval Eden, in amaze.

What makes this so beautiful is the use of Indian geography, in terms of plants and trees and fruits,

and the ending that equates India as Nature to Eden.  The poem is Shakespearean and in perfect iambic

pentameter and rhyme. All born and brought up in India can feel this poem's beauty, and taste it too, 

in fact their mouths will water at the mention of the tamarinds as mine does and the 'mangoe'. It really 

does rival as does Michael Madhusudana Dutta's sonnets the Romantic poets fetchingly and fittingly.

Meanwhile, Edna St. Vincent Millay, or maybe not meanwhile, as it is all jumbled in my head and follows 

not the chronology of the world of time but of poetry which is rather a different clock, wrote another 

impeccable sonnet that shattered man's preconceptions about women the same way Toru Dutt shattered 

ours about the English green that she found monotonous compared to Indian green that is multicoloured.

“What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why”

BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,

I have forgotten, and what arms have lain

Under my head till morning; but the rain

Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh

Upon the glass and listen for reply,

And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

For unremembered lads that not again

Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,

Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,

Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:

I cannot say what loves have come and gone,

I only know that summer sang in me

A little while, that in me sings no more.

I am left wordless, speechless after reading it, at its sorrow after bygone youth.

But let me not stop  yet, as I want to leave you with another sonnet, entirely different 

and modern, as modern as MM Dutt and Toru Dutt as timeless or not modern, 

none other than the experimental juggler of words e.e.cummings.

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]

BY E. E. CUMMINGS

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

                                                      i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Makes me wish to be a woman and have someone write to me like that. These 

sonnets keep coming from different parts of the world to enchant us with no change

in their structure as in the case of the two women poets I quoted or with changes

as in the case of the not capitalized fifteen-line poem of cummings that has a bridge

and also a one line ending or stana and a five line penultimate one apart from the 

usual eight in two quatrains. It carries your heart away.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/49493/i-carry-your-heart-with-mei-carry it-in

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46557/what-lips-my-lips-have-kissed-and-where-and-why

https://www.poetrycat.com/toru-dutt/sonnet--baugmaree

http://www.indianruminations.com/contents/review/21-lines-fusion-sonnets-of-21st-century-by-sonnet-mondal-a-review-by-patricia-prime-new-zealand/

"A sonnet is a poetic form which originated at the Court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in Palermo, Sicily. 

The 13th-century poet and notary Giacomo da Lentini is credited with the sonnet's invention and the Sicilian 

School of poets who surrounded him is credited with its spread." (Wikipedia)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caudate_sonnet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spenserian_sonnet

A Brief History of the Sonnet - Chapter 16 (The sonnet in India, the beginnings in West Bengal, with reference to Tagore & Michael Madhusudan Dutt)

 I could go on about the sonnet abroad and how DG Rosetti embellished his paintings with sonnets or vice versa but refrain as I want to come to what is really refreshingly new about my book which is about the popularity and growth of the sonnet in India.

After English education came in rightly or wrongly through colonialism and imperialism as one of the gifts or curses of the British Empire it was natural that Indians who read all the sonnets and more quoted in my book so far, except for the French, Italian and German ones perhaps, and the ones by Berryman and Beckett, should feel the urge to take up writing sonnets.

And so the sonnet  (and sonnet sequences and the muses, which have traveled nations, times, spaces, places and also poets, and gone through the hands of women too as readers and writers, all having been reported on more or less diligently by me, till now, also showing the differences in its content, form, structure, the language used changing, the historical background mutating, all delineated to a brief extent, the topics and themes dealt with widening etc.,) entered its last phase in "the jewel in the crown", as it was then called, our India. And naturally, it found its first most devoted votary in West Bengal, in the great poet, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, who wanted to make the East and the West meet through his sonnets and epic poems in English and Bengali. He found the iambic pentametre ideal and wrote a sonnet that is also memorable on why he turned back to writing on Indian topics, (after his dalliance with the British, that also led to his conversion to Christianity, and his very Victorian looking beard, and his wife Henrietta being from abroad/ over there,) but by also using freely all foreign models to make Indian poetry in the mother tongue as well as in English more powerful.

Rabindranath Tagore (by writing the foreword) and Theodore Dunn (1918) brought out a book  of English sonnets by Bengalis in which we find these sonnets by Michael Madhsudan Dutt (https://www.amazon.com/Bengali-Book-English-Verse-Rabindranath/dp/1112470972)

Sonnets.
I.

I am not rich, nay, nor the future heir
To sparkling gold or silver heaped on store;
There is no marble blushing on my floor
With thousand varied dies:—no gilded chair,
No cushions, carpets that by riches are
Brought from the Persian land, or Turkish shore;
There is no menial waiting at my door
Attentive to the knell: and all things rare,
Born in remotest regions, that shine in
And grace the rich-man's hall, are wanting here.
These are not things that by blind Fate have been
Allotted ever to the poor man's share:
These are not things, these eyes have ever seen,
Tho' their proud names have sounded in this ear!

II.

But oh! I grieve not;—for the azure sky
With all its host of stars that brightly shine,
The green-robed earth with all her flow'rs divine,
The verdant vales and every mountain high,
Those beauteous meads that now do glittering lie
Clad in bright sun-shine,—all, oh! all are mine!
And much there is on which my ear and eye
Can feast luxurious!—why should I repine?
The furious Gale that howls and fiercely blows,
The gentler Breeze that sings with tranquil glee,
The silver Rill that gayly warbling flows,
And e'en the dark and ever-lasting Sea,
All, all these bring oblivion for my woes,
And all these have transcendent charms for me!

 (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Bengali_Book_of_English_Verse/Sonnets_(Michael_Madhusudan_Dutt)

"He dedicated his first sonnet to his friend Rajnarayan Basu, along with a letter which in which he wrote:

“What say you to this, my good friend? In my humble opinion, if cultivated by men of genius, our sonnet in time would rival the Italian.”

When Madhusudan later stayed in Versailles, France, the sixth centenary of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri was being celebrated all over Europe. He composed a poem in memory of the immortal poet and translated it into French and Italian and sent it to the court of the king of Italy. Victor Emmanuel II, the then monarch, was enamored of the poem and wrote back to the poet:

“It will be a ring which will connect the Orient with the Occident.:

Sharmistha (spelt as Sermista in English) (1857) was Madhusudan’s first attempt at blank verse in Bengali literature and is a verse play in the Shakespearean manner in being poetry. It is a type of verse used in poems. In this type of verse every line of the poem should have exactly 14 letters. ..Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee, while paying a glowing tribute to Madhusudan’s blank verse, observed:

“As long as the Bengali race and Bengali literature would exist, the sweet lyre of Madhusudan would never cease playing.” (https://stepupbdit.wordpress.com/2015/09/05/bengali-sonnet-star-michael-madhusudan-dutt/)

The two sonnets that I quoted are clearly Romantic and form a whole showing in seed his ability to write poems that connect into a totality much needed for writing epic poems but his most startling sonnet is in Bengali explaining why he chose to write an epic poem on the Ramayana though influenced by Milton, the most. I do not know the translator so cannot give the name but here it is in English:

“Oh Bengal, myriads of gems are there in your treasure trove; -

neglecting it all (imbecile that I am),

mad with lust for the riches of others, did I roam

in lands foreign; resorting, unfortunately, to begging.

Many days did I spend relinquishing pleasure!

Surrendering body and mind to insomnia and starvation,

destroyed myself in fruitless worship, venerating unworthy ones; -

I dallied in the moss; forgetting the lotus-garden!

In my dream, your guardian goddess said to me later –

“Dear child, your mother’s treasury abounds with jewels,

then why this destitution of yours today?

Go back, you ignorant one, go back home!”

I complied to this order with pleasure; in time I found

my vernacular mine, filled with gems.” (taken from the introduction to http://www.kaveribooks.com/index.php?p=sr&Uc=9789386191052)

As it is a translation it is not true to his ability to rhyme and write in iambic pentametre and use the volta effectively etc., but the sonnet is startlingly great in showing him as not only the father of  Bengali blank verse but also of the Indian and Bengali sonnet rivalling the Petrarchan and Shakespearean varieties and he is arguably the best epic poet of our modern nation, India, better in my humble opinion, any day, than Aurobindo with his Savitri which is too didactic, at any rate. What I find most compelling here is his marriage of the East and the West, a meeting of the God the Father and the Nation-(State/Bengal as)Mother and himself as the son of both, having a very different vision from that of a Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. He has inspired me a lot as a poet and so has the latter saint. I was told about Michael Madhusudan Dutt by my mother. It is no wonder that I too have turned to the sonnets, blank verse and writing on him at my age.

Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar’s lofty praise runs:

“Meghnad Badh is a supreme poem.”

Rabindranath Tagore would later declare:-

“It was a momentous day for Bengali literature to proclaim the message of the universal muse and not exclusively its own parochial note. The genius of Bengal secured a place in the wide world overpassing the length and breadth of Bengal. And Bengali poetry reached the highest status.”

In the words of Sri Aurobindo :-

“All the stormiest passions of man’s soul he [Madhusudan] expressed in gigantic language.” 

(https://stepupbdit.wordpress.com/2015/09/05/bengali-sonnet-star-michael-madhusudan-dutt/)

This chapter is my humble tribute to him as a sonneteer who shows the way to me along with all the other giants I have quoted in this book, to be added to the above tributes I have given by three greats on him.  He inspired me as a poet, Indian, Christian and sonneteer and as the innovator of Bengali Blank Verse as well as for his ability to go beyond what others were doing at the time, to be truly an international figure of literature, and not limited only to his own state or language or the country in his art, whereby he like Tagore gave it all greater lustre, though that may not be understood by narrow language chauvinists or straitened fanatic nationalists or geographically minded people, in these days of rising parochialism. His gift is to find and make the necessary ruptures where it is needed, and reinstate continuities where they are needed to be kept intact and to transcend in the matters of religion, creed, nationalities, languages, cultures, and classes/classics.

If Dante revived pride in the vernacular and the literature of a nation Michael Madhusudan Dutt did the same for Bengal and India and more in thus undoing the colonial yoke, fighting it the only way he could with literature and poetry/words.