We see many inconsistencies, in a sense, in the sonnets of Wyatt. He uses lines that are ten or eleven or twelve syllables in couplets in the same sonnet and his rhyme schemes are not exactly fixed. There is nothing wrong in all this and I only want to point out the fluidity. What I want kept in mind is that he started a literal and literary revolution in the world of English poetry as after him came an innumerable number of sonneteers and sonnets, sonnet sequences and mistresses. Their names drip from my mouth like a poem in itself, like honey, the Earl of Surrey being the first, then Edmund Spenser with his Amoretti, Michael Drayton, Philip Sidney with Astrophel and Stella, William Shakespeare, John Milton, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Emily Bronte, D G Rosetti, GM Hopkins, the delectable Henry (Mr Bones) sonnets, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Pushkin, Vikram Seth, Sonnet Mondal, myself, and in France Rimbaud, and Baudelaire, in Germany Rilke and... and...and...
But let me not rush ahead too fast and break the suspense. Let me start with Henry Howard who was the Earl of Surrey who died or was rather executed at thirty at Tower Hill, accused of treason and perhaps partly also for being supposedly someone who held on to the Roman Catholic faith who however is a person enshrined in the history of poetry, for first using the Shakespearean sonnet and blank verse or the iambic pentameter without rhyme which was later called Marlowe's "mighty line". As in the case of Guido Cavalcanti who was probably more an originator of the Petrarchan sonnet than Petrarch or Petrarca himself, in the case of the Shakespearean sonnet too, and the use of iambic pentametre, while Marlowe and Shakespeare stole the thunder coming later and hence being more well versed in it as those before had already ploughed the land, the credit belongs to a great extent to the Earl of Surrey in his sonnets and in the translation of Virgil's Aeneid in that order for the two achievements. "Tottel's Miscellany" which I spoke of earlier as containing Thomas Wyatt's sonnets is actually titled "Songes and Sonettes, Written by the Ryght Honorable Lorde Henry Haward Late Earle of Surrey and Other (1557)". The Other there is others and includes Thomas Wyatt
Surrey introduced the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg and used iambic pentametre rhymed for his sonnets setting the stage for some of the best poetry in the world to come from England through the sonnet sequences that came forth then and also the tradition of writing great sonnets. The Britttanica Encyclopedia says that "Surrey achieved a greater smoothness and firmness (than Wyatt), qualities that were to be important in the evolution of the English sonnet."
"The elements of the Wyatt/Surrey sonnet are:
- a quatorzain, written with a Petrarchan octave followed by an envelope quatrain ending with a rhyming couplet.
- metric, primarily iambic pentameter.
- the rhyme scheme...
- it is composed with the volta... or pivot (a shifting or tilting of the main line of thought) sometime after the 2nd quatrain.
- distinguished by the declamatory couplet"
The following sonnet of the Earl of Surrey I give not for its merit but it deals with his pain in unjust imprisonment, perhaps referring to his Windsor confinement, perhaps not, and it makes me feel.
"The fancy of a wearier lover by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
The fancy, which that I have served long,
That hath alway been enemy to mine ease,
Semed of late to rue upon my wrong,
And bade me fly the cause of my misease.
And I forthwith did press out of the throng,
That thought by flight my painfull heart to please
Some other way: til I saw faith more strong:
And to my self I said: alas, those days
In vain were spent, to run the race so long.
And with that thought, I met my guide, that plan
Out of the way wherein I wandered wrong,
Brought me amidst the hills, in base Bullayn:
Where I am now, as restless to remain,
Against my will, full pleased with my pain."
I do not know if I imagine it but I find that in Ode to a Nightingale Keats might have been influenced by Surrey in bringing in "fancy". The idea that fancy is an enemy is the same there too: "Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well. As she is famed to do, deceiving elf."
1. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-Howard-Earl-of-Surrey
2 .http://www.poetrymagnumopus.com/topic/1045-wyattsurrey-sonnet/
Posts
