Friday, September 18, 2020

A Brief History of the Sonnet - Chapter 7 (From Shakespeare to Milton)

 Shakespeare has many sonnets that haunt us. I am forced to quote a third one now for its purity of thought and diction.

Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds 

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.
(https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45106/sonnet-116-let-me-not-to-the-marriage-of-true-minds)

A beautiful sonnet that for me sums up in its method the previous two I quoted as it uses both the via positiva and negativa methods of defining love, whereas Sonnet 18 which I quoted first was comparative showing up the positive in the fair youth and the sonnet I quoted on the dark lady, 130, was negative, saying that though her breath reeked, that did not hinder the narrator- poet from loving. Here there is a beautiful balance between love is not and love is and what does not alter and what alters - with the love not altering but the circumstances perhaps not always remaining rosy. Time is taken into the reckoning here that love is not "time's fool", though "rosy lips within its compass come", as something that can be transcended and even death and "doom." Love becomes by the end of the sonnet ideal, infinite and eternal. The idealism here for me is superior to the one about the lover in Cavalcanti's sonnet I quoted which is purely conventional, which may be why I consider Shakespeare superior. 

From Shakespeare to Milton might look like a huge leap but it is not, are not both masters? Only experts still read Drayton or Spenser or Sidney which is not to say they are not worth reading but who has not read and enjoyed Milton's sonnet "On his blindness." It now comes to stand for not only  Milton in my mind but also Homer and Borges.

When I consider how my light is spent
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 own 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.”

(https://koshyav.blogspot.com/2020/09/a-brief-history-of-sonnet-chapter-7.html)

The rhyme scheme is abba abba and the sestet cde cde. 
The metre is iambic pentameter.
But what does Milton bring that heightens Shakespeare, if at all. The two sonnets
I deal with today have in them what Longinus called sublimity, one in its clear 
understanding of love, and the other of long-suffering, endurance, persistence, 
perseverance,  patience, steadfastness - all not only Christian but also stoic virtues, 
raise their art to a level that leaves me, though having read all the great writers of 
critics of today,  a bit perplexed as these two move me more. Am I old fashioned, 
hopelessly out of sync with my time and a black skin, wearing a white mask. 
I don't know and basically don't care. 
Poetry moves me on its own and these sonnets matter to me simply by moving me 
deeply  and enlightening me on love and on what it means to be yoked with the 
divine, whatever others think of it or not.

Milton has written a more political sonnet on the massacre at Piedmont which I give 
here but while it may have its own political value and cannot be dismissed for its 
pleasing righteous anger, is nowhere near the one on his blindness. The sonnet is particularly 
accentuated if you have read Samuel Johnson's Life of Milton that speaks of how he 
has very keen eyesight in college that made him an excellent fencer and that his eyes shone 
brightly as  a young man but he had to dictate Paradise Lost, his greatest work to his 
daughter who had to laboriously take it down, showing both his dependence and great powers 
of composition as well as memory.

We finally connect with the human element, or I do, in literature, over and above all 
others. Another critic may prefer the sonnet on the massacre but my taste remains old 
fashioned.

On the Late Massacre in Piedmont

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold,
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones;
Forget not: in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To Heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all th' Italian fields where still doth sway
The triple tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who having learnt thy way
Early may fly the Babylonian woe. 


(Taken from: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Late_Massacre_in_Piedmont)

Here too the line that touches us most is the one on how the Protestant mothers and infants 

were killed for their husbands' new beliefs that went counter to the Catholic ones, not 

the other issues that Milton raises that seem of no relevance to us today in 2020, 

though people still kill mothers and children over religious and casteist and sectarian 

differences as well as political ones.  We do not feel it as much as his personal plaint 

on his blindness with its reference to Jesus's parable of the one talent lodged

useless with him!


Is there any difference between the Miltonic sonnet and the Shakespearean one? Only in the

rhyme he uses in his sestet. While Shakespeare uses the cd cd ee pattern, Milton goes for in 

"On his blindness" a cde cde one, and in the Piedmont sonnet a cd cd cd one.







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