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
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.
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