A Brief History of the Sonnet - Chapter 14 - Rilke in Germany

 There is no end to sonnets or those who write sonnets and sonnet sequences or are specialized in sonnets. But only some matter to me in sketching out its history. Rilke is one. I started in Italy and went over to England or the UK, then to France and am now in Germany.

A few among my readers may have heard of Rainer Maria Rilke's "Sonnets to Orpheus", the legendary Greek musician who is comparable to India's Tansen. They were written between 1875-1926.

Here is a sonnet from it, one of many that are worth reading, chosen for its simplicity and appeal: 

Just a moment ..., I savour this ... ah, but it’s flown already.
... Only a bit of music, stamping in time, humming-:
Girls, you grow warm, - girls, you silently mime, -
Dance the flavour of this fruit as we experience it!

Make of the orange a dance. Who can be oblivious
Of how it drowns in itself, of how it restrains
Its very essence of sweetness, holds it back? It
Has possessed you. You have deliciously converted it into you.

Dance the orange. The warmth of the landscape,
It draws you forth, so that your ripeness streams forth
Resplendent on the local breezes! A glow arising, revealed

Aroma after aroma! Evoke its affinity
With the pure, self-denying peel,
With the juice which joyously fills it!

Translated by Robert Temple.

I love this sonnet especially in translation as it breaks with rhyme and metre but  flows just to show we are in what I call Modernism now, as the translation is flexible but retains the unmistakable Rilkeness needed as well as the poetry of the original. 

What is the Rilkeness here? When young I read Rilke on Paul Cezanne. I do not know how many of you have read that book. In it, he says that what God is to the believer/disciple/devout the subjects of his still life studies were to Cezanne. The book is called "Letters on Cézanne" (“Only a saint could be as united with his God as Cézanne was with his work,” Rilke wrote.) This was in 1907.

"For a long time nothing, and then suddenly one has the right eyes."

This sonnet means a lot to me as in it I find Rilke's attempts to make an orange in words the same way Cezanne did it in paint. For a writer to grow he needs to read and listen, hear and speak and write, it is true; and for a painter to look, see and draw and sketch and paint, to know the beauty of colour. This is a "sonnet of colour". A single colour, orange, and of the fruit, as a single fruit as in Cezanne's still lives, but it becomes many, by making it a dance of vitality, the dance of (the) orange and talk of how it drowns in its own self, its essence of sweetness, its peel, its deliciousness aroma, purity, restraint, possession, ripeness,  glow, the juice that fills it, and its associations to a bit of music, stamping feet, a hum, a dance, a landscape, local breezes, bringing to us not only the orange and its colour but where it was born, grew, was plucked, and matured. The poem invokes the history of the orange, of oranges, all of it, in entirety. This is what Rilke learned from Cezanne and this evocation in what is in the translation in free verse, of the oranges of lands that to us Indians are alien and beautiful in Europe, like Tuscany with their orange groves, but sweet, nameless often, leaving one thirsty, thirsty for more of Cezanne, for Rilke, for those lands and women and those dances and music and finally for those oranges....themselves. 

Rilke's mastery is that he paints (an) orange in words and Cezanne's that he writes the fruit/the colour in paint.

Archibald Macleish said "A poem must not mean but be."  

" A poem should be palpable and mute   

As a globed fruit" he says in the same poem Ars Poetica. As an orange, we can say.

Perhaps he had read Orpheus sing through Rilke bringing Eurydice back to life for us again in his sonnets as an...orange, silently miming to us that a sonnet too must not mean, in the modern dispensation, but be.

(Disclaimer: he connections I make in this book between poems and work of art are my own as are the ones between poems and not necessarily factual, but intuitive and aesthetic. For instance, the sonnet may have preceded the book on Cezanne but does not annul, in any way, the way I feel about it)

https://sonnetstoorpheus.com/book1_15.html

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/17168/ars-poetica

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/086547639X/?tag=braipick-20

http://sonnetsincolour.org/2017/11/on-rilkes-letters-on-cezanne/

A Brief History of the Sonnet - Chapter 13 The First Stirrings of Modernism (Rimbaud and Hopkins).

 Rimbaud's sonnet is so powerfully moving  I can read it again and again.  But for poetry in English, no one is as powerful as Hopkins at his best, just as for drama Shakespeare is, for the novel, Dickens, maybe, for prose, Joyce and for fantasy Tolkien. Hopkins might be too rich and for years I stayed away from him as my literary mentor said he had a tinkle in his words that irritated him, my mentor being more the R S Thomas kind, whom too I love but RS Thomas and Dylan Thomas/Hopkins come from two extreme ends of the poetic spectrum. Hopkins is not just a complete poet but an inventor, a discoverer, an explorer like James Joyce and and Eliot or an RS Thomas are only complete poets with no add ons.

Take "Pied Beauty."

Some people say it has only ten and a half lines, in terms of metre, and some say eleven, but what manner of radical, extreme thinking would imagine up an idea that a sonnet can be curtailed to create an eleven line one that can be called a curtal sonnet. Only a genius, obviously. But the poem first:

Pied Beauty 

BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.

1. He expands our vocabulary and knowledge of poetic technique as well as diction and various other things with words like pied (a pun), dappled (seldom used, freshly used, a favourite word of Hopkins'), brinded (never used before or after, perhaps), rose-moles (neologism and compounding), stipple (newly used), fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls (compounding of a very unlikely kind to form a four-word combine into an almost single word), fallow (noun made out of adjective), fold (pun as noun and verb), plough ( metonymy), áll trádes (look at the use of those accents for bringing in sprung rhythm!), trim ( original usage), counter (half-word to mean opposite to or running counter to), fickle (changing) freckled (who would use a world like this in a poem in such a place or juncture), adazzle (Why the a? To add a syllable obviously), dim (in the shadow), and fathers-forth (neologism/compounding) 

Inscape is there, definitely, into/of Pied Beauty, and instress too of "fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls" , which when imagined is awe-inspiringly creative, though not as much as the AND in Windhover. Duns Scotus was never this interesting.

What about the metre? No more the mouldy iambic for Hopkins but one entirely his own.where each line can have any number of unstressed syllables or unaccented ones but must have the same accented ones or stressed ones as all other lines of the sonnet so the rhythm is immaculate like the Virgin he worships. Immaculate and impeccable rhythm, beat, metronome, it dances along or marches along like none other and can be done only by him and was never before or has not been attempted ever after!

To come back to the poem as sonnet or poem what we have here is a mini tour de force where Hopkins does everything with titling, imagery, figures of speech, and sound devices that other poets do and just as well but adds to it like a cake with many terraced layers, and as for what he does with meaning or structure or rhyme scheme or form it is simply explosive and implosive.  His superstructure is amazingly, decadently, a riotous affair, one that makes up more than enough for his austerity in his philosophy that is unmistakably Jesuit and monastic, ascetic, and ashram-based! This is cake with frills, garnishing, bows, geegaws, toppings, cherries, patterns, and totally designer!

Let's have a brief look at the rhyme scheme. Abc, abc, dbc, dc. Intricate and interlocking. Simple to/but "it's complicated". And the alliteration, it is so full of assonance and consonance. As for the images, visual (rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim) and auditory (the packed, breathless alliteration and the rhyme scheme that stands for the pied and dappled nature of beauty and things) and kinetic (swift, slow), as well as tactile (rose-moles) and gustatory (sweet, sour), and the figures of speech that are implicit and explicit metaphors (pied, dappled - showing the binary nature of existence)  and metonymy, and a single simile (as a brinded cow), as well as personification (God as father) and the stanza break for structure etc., it is all exquisite. We are in the presence of a master who has just broken the pattern of the sonnet open and blown our heads off, in the bargain, teaching us the true beauty of what poetry really means! And finally, the meanings that collide into one another and blow your head off, running counter, spare, strange, original, no matter how! Praise it!

At the back of Hopkins' mind is the Psalms, no doubt, with a verse like "the heavens declare the glory of God" and Shakespeare's "oh, what a piece of work is man", but there is also Keats with his "beauty is truth and truth, beauty' that is all ye know and all ye need to know on earth" as well as "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." Hopkins is agreeing but also going beyond it, or countering it, when he says" He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change." Philosophically, it is to put Being above, or as transcendental to, its outcomes, even ones like Beauty.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44399/pied-

A Brief History of the Sonnet as a Form - Chapter 12 - The First Stirrings of Modernism (Arthur Rimbaud)

Writing poetry is one of the greatest pleasures in the world. So is reading it and learning how to write it, at least for those who are addicted to it. If one is on Facebook these days, for instance, the number of poets writing and the anthologies, poetry magazines, chain poetry attempts and individual or group collections coming out or the poetry pages or groups there are simply mind-boggling. As are the sheer number of poems posted everywhere else.

In this series, I would like to dwell on where it really matters. What people really love about poetry nowadays is imagery. Naturally enough they prefer visual imagery. I teach poetry. Students nowadays are excited by poems being made into videos and images. But those slightly more experienced know that putting an image to a verbal one makes it a one to one correspondence and kills it by killing the imagination’s ability to use the inner eye.

Here is a beautiful sonnet by Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1861)

It is a green hollow where a stream gurgles,
Crazily catching silver rags of itself on the grasses;
Where the sun shines from the proud mountain:
It is a little valley bubbling over with light.
A young soldier, open-mouthed, bare-headed,
With the nape of his neck bathed in cool blue cresses,
Sleeps; he is stretched out on the grass, under the sky,
Pale on his green bed where the light falls like rain.
His feet in the yellow flags, he lies sleeping. Smiling as
A sick child might smile, he is having a nap:
Cradle him warmly, Nature: he is cold.
No odour makes his nostrils quiver;
He sleeps in the sun, his hand on his breast
At peace. There are two red holes in his right side.

Arthur Rimbaud
October 1870

– As translated by Oliver Bernard: Arthur Rimbaud, Collected Poems (1962) (http://www.mag4.net/Rimbaud/poesies/Sleeper.html

This poem that deals with the tragedy of war that sends youth and children out to die is made effective by breaking Romanticism in the way it should be, not in terms of form but in terms of theme, and making it stand on its head in building up first a very calm and beautiful atmosphere or surrounding, so peaceful that one is lulled into a false sense of security, along with the poem's protagonist and not its narrator, and then breaking this spell of beauty like a pot over our heads, in breaking the suspense by introducing first the word "sick." Then comes the realization the poet gives us that the youth is dead and finally that he is the spoil or prey of war as a climax at the very last second. This gives us a severe jolt and shock which the War Poets do not necessarily have in their poems.  But the horror is heightened by the beauty of the surroundings described in classic imagery and it is only later we see that yellow "flags" instead of flowers maybe ironical and not nationalistic.

One needs to observe life carefully, lovingly, intensely, and be in love with life with an eye for its amazing details and wanting to find the language for describing it. Then read such poets to see how they defamiliarize things with words, make it slightly askew. An example is Rimbaud using “crazily catching silver rags” (kinetic imagery) in the second line and “bubbling” in the fourth. And the masterpiece is of course “two red holes.” The second is an example of an auditory image but coupled with “light” it again becomes beautifully askew. And what a line is: "Pale on his green bed where the light falls like rain."   

Yes. Observe carefully using all the five inner and outer senses, read, jot down for use, keeping in mind that unleashing the imagination fully means using the five external and internal senses.

Too simple a formula, you may think, but so effective in the case of Rimbaud.  As for his mastery in the sonnet form, it is in how well he says what he has to say while casting it in the form or mould which is what today's poets are unable to do. The beauty of the rhyme scheme is lost in the translation but not much else is, as the effect is not lost. With Rimbaud and Hopkins in terms of content here and of form in the latter, we enter the beginning of modernism in the world of the sonnet.

(This article appeared here earlier in a slightly different form when I was a columnist for Plum Tree run by Niamh Clune.  https://ontheplumtree.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/wednesday-on-the-plum-tree-in-the-sandbox-with-dr-ampat-koshy/ )

A brief history of the sonnet - Chapter 11 (The Victorian Age and Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

 Where did Arnold say that Shelley is "in poetry, no less than in life, a beautiful and ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain"?

 In his Essays in  Criticism, of course. But while he makes Shelley sound asexual and as if that is a crime, the fact is Arnold's blind spot is the same as Samuel Johnson's in that in both their lives of the poets, or essays on the poets, and their reckoning of poets who matter no Veronica Franco exists or E B Browning who was Arnold's contemporary.  Women exist for them only as muses, realistic, or idealistic, or fantastic, or as a bias, or as objects of desire. This is true not only of these two great critics but also of the poets I mentioned whether Dante with his Bice or Cavalcanti with his two women, or Petrarca with his Laura - only Michaelangelo standing apart, but homoeroticism can also be threatening to women in a patriarchy if allied to power - or Spenser or Sidney or Shakespeare with his dark lady, or Keats with his Fanny or Wordsworth with his mother's breasts fixation which he transfers to Nature the nurturer or Robert Browning with his talk of Raphael with his lost sonnets on Margherita and Dante's sketch of an angel.  Milton and Shelley have more balls than all of them, they write as men for a man's world. We have to wait till the Victorian age for the emergence of an Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and an Emily Bronte and a Christina Rosetti, the same way as in the history of the novel we had to wait for a Jane Austen to shine forth to rival her men competitors by showing them she could not only take a leaf from the form of the novel but also do a better job at it. Emily Bronte's sonnets, and the Sonnets to the Portugese remain classics of the form even today. 

43.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and Ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise;
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith;
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

We have here an authentic voice that reminds us of one of Shakespeare's sonnets again.

Sonnet 30

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear times’ waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night.
And weep afresh love’s long-since cancell’d woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight.
Then can I grieve at grievance foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
  But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
  All losses are restor’d, and sorrows end.

What is amazing here is measure for measure Elizabeth Barrett Browning matches Shakespeare, 

according to me, putting to rest the idle speculation of whether writing is gender centred, it isn't. Writers 

can write well in any tongue, whether men or women, and it really has nothing to do with their sex or 

gender which is where Arnold got it wrong and so do many others, it has to do with their ability to 

express themselves effectively in language, their literary and lingguistic intelligence, to quote 

Howard Gardner, which is why here Shakespeare's sonnet makes a deep 

impact as friendship is a theme that is asexual and here E B B scores as well as anybody else, 

while also being centred on her self and pointing out that for a woman what matters is not 

being the object of desire  or being a muse but being  the one to give love and of being stable in love, 

her love being an "ever fixed mark", yet unique to herself so not generalized though it can be

universalized if she wants it to be.

This chapter toasts E B B, not her remarkable love story, or the woman seen through Robert Browning's 

eyes, but the woman who celebrated her power in writing great poetry with her unforgettable sonnets to 

the Portugese, lending lustre to world and English or Victorian literature, along with Mary Ann Evans 

(George Eliot),  Charlotte  Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anne Bronte, and others I already mentioned up 

above.

Eleven chapters into this exercise, thus, I would like to point out that my essays show there is scope for 

doing research on all these poets or their sonnets and their forms and sequences even today, it is not done

with and finished, unlike what people think, in terms of all the modern literary theories including 

feminism, now, the theories that come from ecocriticism (Wordsworth, of course)  onwards.

What is refreshing about Browning, E B here is that she is no longer anyone's muse or goddess or temptress 

or sexual fantasy or object of desire or ridicule but a poet in her own right outside the gaze of men 

and looking at herself, at how she loves and  that is the beginning of a new world and revolutionary even 

if she looks at love naturally, as a noble  cause, conditioned by her time and place, like all her fellow "men"

poets before her, and those who are her contemporaries.

https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780191826719.001.0001/q-oro-ed4-00010031S

https://poets.org/poem/how-do-i-love-thee-sonnet-43

https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/shakespeare/when_to_sessions.html

A Brief History of the Sonnet - Chapter 10 (Under the spell of Shelley)

 Each Romantic is underestimated after Eliot's strictures but worth reading, amazing writers who make us return to them again and again if we like reading English poetry. One of those really not recognized as much as he should be is Percy Bysshe Shelley, partly due to Arnold's calling him "an ineffectual angel beating his luminous wings in the void". As for me Shelley never ceases to enthrall me, whether with his Ode to the West Wind or his poem on Manchester or his play the Cenci, which is in the classic Shakespearean mould, but of course, he is world-famous for his sonnet against tyranny.

Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias"

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

"Shelley's "Ozymandias" is a sonnet, written in iambic pentameter, but with an atypical rhyme scheme (ABABA CDCEDEFEF) when compared to other English-language sonnets, and without the characteristic octave-and-sestet structure." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias)

 It is comforting to think that this will be the end of Donald Trump 

too and today's tyrants starting from Jair Bolsonoro to Narendra 

Modi and ending with Boris Johnson or Vladimir Putin as well 

as Xi Jinping (Winnie the Pooh), Kim Jong Un and the whole kit 

and kaboodle of the neofascist rulers. While they are not yet

Hitlers, in their alliances  and similarities and commonalities in

decision making where they prioritize themselves and their 

supporters over the deaths of the many in their nations, they are

rulers of "cold command," though the "sneer" and the "wrinkled 

lip" may be hidden from the view of the populace. Shelley might 

have been an atheist but it is the prophetic voice that appears 

here that is Biblical in its resonance pronouncing to the king who

thinks he is God that he is only dust and will return to dust. 

Please do not think Islamic dictators are exempt. Or Aung San Su, from Shelley's scathing 

indictment. No ruler or government is. whether French, Australian, 

Canadian, German or Pakistani, Bhutanese, Bangladeshi, Nepalese, Syrian, Saudi Arabian, Yemeni,  

Iranian, Israelite (Benjamin Netanyahu), Iraqi, Afghanistani, Turkish (Erdogan), the Hamas,  

Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, neo-Nazi white supremacists groups like

the Knight Templars etc. I have extended the list to warlords and terror

-mongers too now, who lead such groups 

of all hues and shapes, varieties or sizes.

The  voice of the rebel and the unafraid who know that

the message of the traveller speaks the truth, and not that of

Ozymandias who is only a victim of megalomania

and verbose grandiloquence, and does not know that the King of 

Kings, the real one, catches the wise in their wisdom and the

crafty in their craftiness, as "He shews himself wise to the wise 

and crafty to the crafty" in the long run, so they are scattered

as specks of dust in the wind and in the sand nothing of them remains

except as a warning to future tyrants that they too are only grains of sand, not like the Blakean 

ones, but mere grains of sand. And how exactly does God overthrow tyranny?

Through poets like Shelley and the sculptor and even the traveller who brings the news,

as well as through the common people, through their hardiness, long-suffering, endurance,

persistence, perseverance, and rebellion or dissent or protest or silence or revolution 

or revolt, their steadfastness in holding on to the truth,

and if none of these things works, by spiritual forces or by divine intervention.

So what makes Shelley and this sonnet unique? It is unique as it is the poetic, prophetic voice that speaks the truth to power timelessly, much more effectively than Milton's Piedmont sonnet does.

A Brief History of the Sonnet - Chapter 9 ( The Keatsian Sway)

We see Dante and Cavalcanti praising their true loves. We see the same in Michaelangelo and we see Petrarch too going gaga over Laura. But in England we find the sonnet becoming a vehicle fit for spreading in the world as it goes beyond this in Shakespeare's praise of poetry, the sonnet and the power of creation and writing, in Milton taking on the questioning of and explaining of God's ways to me(n), and taking on the might of the Catholic Church, in Wordsworth who offers a tribute to England and Milton as well as to Nature and to London. 

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 

Earth has not any thing to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty:

This City now doth, like a garment, wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep

In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;

Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will:

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

And all that mighty heart is lying still!

The city here has not been spoiled by industrialization - note the "smokeless air" - and is lying down, asleep, although a "mighty heart", and Wordsworth praises it, finding something akin in the way it lies open to the fields and sky to "the sea that bares its bosom to the moon," with the word "bare" coming in again here, to contradict "like a garment," reminding us of "naked" in the previously quoted sonnet, in the last chapter. This precariously held, beautiful balance between the artificial - "ships, towers, dome, theatres and temples"  - and the natural sun steeping in his first splendour valley, rock and hill while "the river glideth at his own sweet will", suggesting the city is now the woman implicitly waiting to be awakened, is admirable.  

Keats carried this nature of a sonnet being a tribute to something or someone started by Surrey's sonnet to Wyatt after his death (left unquoted) one step further in his sonnet on Homer in translation by Chapman, walking a deeper road whereby now not only writing and literature matters or Milton and Nature or the city but so do the classics, their authors and translation with his first metaphor that reading is a journey through "realms of gold", so he surprisingly privileges the act of reading too.  This is really to bring in the note of Romanticism in a way similar to Wordsworth's paean to the "pagan".

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

BY JOHN KEATS

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

What is extolled here is not just Chapman but the spirit of the English Renaissance, with its search for treasures, the journey, the voyage, the discovery and exploration of new lands, with its conquests and quests, with the aspiration to even gaze at the stars with longing and cross continents, yet by connecting it to reading, got from knowledge gained, it interiorizes it and this may be the charm of this sonnet, that it brings us back to the writer himself who is wandering within himself and not the world's borders and expanding margins, to find a parallel to the greatness of Homer in his own poetry. Keats' form is very Wordsworthian. The sestet is a cd cd cd.

However, it would be unjust to let go of Keats, the poet, just yet, without also referring to his Achilles' heel, that which Arnold found not sublime, but which we find pathos-filled. 

“Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art”

BY JOHN KEATS

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—

         Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

         Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

         Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

         Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—

No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

         Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

         Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

The bright star is, of course, Fanny Brawne, his muse. We do not know what to make of this sonnet in 2020 as it sounds a bit jejune to today's hardened, sex-jaded souls. Perhaps it did even then. But we cannot but admire the mastery of the sonneteer even as we decry his childishness or mere sensuality, if we do, and also remark on the difference in his rhyme scheme which suddenly becomes abab abab cd cd ee. Step by step we see the sonnet evolving to become fluid in its strictness, and yet retain enough of a form to serve its deeper purpose. Arnold said of Keats " that many who are themselves, also, badly bred and badly trained should enjoy it, and should even think it a beautiful and characteristic production of him whom they call their "lovely and beloved Keats," does not make it better. These are the admirers whose pawing and fondness does not good but harm to the fame of Keats; who concentrate attention upon what in him is least wholesome and most questionable; who worship him, and would have the world worship him too, as the poet of

"Light feet, dark violet eyes, and parted hair,
Soft dimpled hands, white neck, and creamy breast."

This sensuous strain Keats had, and a man of his poetic powers could not, whatever his strain, but show his talent in it. But he has something more, and something better." 

And what was better in him, as Arnold sees it,  resurfaces in Arnold's famous "Dover Beach", therefore.

Thus, Keats' "The moving waters at their priestlike task

         Of pure ablution round earth's human shores" 

become in Arnold: "The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled."

Keats' "negative capability" and his sonnets are in a sense inseparable, as we see it in them, especially in these two, in enough measure to know that he could lose himself totally in his surroundings, like Shakespeare who could lose himself in his dramatis personae.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45514/composed-upon-westminster-bridge-september-3-1802

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/search?query=On+First+Looking+into+Chapman%27s+Homer

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44468/bright-star-would-i-were-stedfast-as-thou-art

http://spenserians.cath.vt.edu/CommentRecord.php?action=GET&cmmtid=6504

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43588/dover-beach

A Brief History of the Sonnet - Chapter 8 The Sonnet and the Romantic Age I (Wordsworth)

 Wordsworth, known for his Nature poetry, startles us with his London 1802 sonnet that is Blakean and also refers back to the Life of Milton written by Samuel Johnson that I already referenced. 

London, 1802

BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee: she is a fen

Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,

Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,

Have forfeited their ancient English dower

Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;

Oh! raise us up, return to us again;

And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.

Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:

Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,

So didst thou travel on life's common way,

In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart

The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

What catches us immediately is the octave with its unusually didactic and political note in it, extolling the domestic and also reminding us of the indictments of London by the author of Tyger, Tyger in poems like the Chimney Sweeper: "That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, & Jack,

Were all of them locked up in coffins of black;" This reminds me of "fen of stagnant waters", and vice versa. In the sestet the great Nature poet suddenly comes back to the fore, with "soul like a Star, voice whose sound was like the sea, pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free" that makes us also take off, like that "ethereal minstrel, pilgrim of the sky", Wordsworth's Skylark. 

How is it different from the Shakesperean sonnet? In the sestet  Wordsworth's rhyme scheme turns strange as it is a cddece.

Then there is "The world is too much with us" which is his famed avowal of  a return to polytheism or pantheism or paganism as Christianity is not able to live up to its greater promise due to its practitioners who are taken over by "sordid" commerce. This is not the polytheism or pantheism or the paganism of the East but of the West, however, just in case anyone gets it wrong. It is Graeco-Roman.

The World Is Too Much With Us

BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

An exhibitionist of a sensuous Sea and a peeping, voyeur of a moon and a Nature that is personified, and waves like sleeping flowers, tied to suckling and visions of the past of gods still there on earth visible in our nights to make us feel less forlorn, make this poem sing lifting us from the melancholy of its beginning plaint against materialism - though here the rhyme scheme becomes a cd cd cd in the sestet.

We see in all the sonneteers a tendency to fixity in the octave and use of the volta and in the English ones fixity in the meter but none regarding themes and laxity in the rhyme scheme of the sestet right up to the age of the Victorians. We see it in Shelley and Keats too whom I am going to deal with next.

I know you want me to talk of these sonnets in terms of ecocriticism to make it of some value in recent times but they stand well enough on their own without theory is my own personal assumption. What interests me more is the Freudian note in the second one that militates against ecocriticism and lends itself more to psychoanalysis in its breast fixation, if at all theory is to be brought in. This note is there in the first one too that suddenly introduces an adjective like "naked" into the poem, making the heavens pure but also majestic in its free nudity!

1. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45528/london-1802

2. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45564/the-world-is-too-much-with-us