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.

A Brief History of the Sonnet as a Form - Chapter 15 (The "Stirrings Still" of Beckett, Modernism & the late great one and only Berryman)

 I have been to Italy and England as well as France and Germany. Let me now visit Ireland and America and Russia, in passing, via a Beckettian critic like me who is an expert on his poetry.

Samuel Beckett wanted the sonnet to be put out of action for a thousand years by some free verse Malherbe, in "Disjecta," in his thoughts on Irish Poetry of his time.  Beckett himself wrote only one sonnet. A brilliant one, called "Dream", but he preferred straitjackets of his own making later and not borrowed ones, despite it. His sonnet is very Italianesque but does away with the volta. I discuss it more in detail in my book "Samuel Beckett's English Poetry: Transcending the Roots of Resistance in Language (AV Koshy, Authorspress, India, 2013, p 17-18)

Here is the sonnet for those who have not read it.

At last I find in my confusèd soul, 

Dark with the dark flame of the cypresses, 

The certitude that I cannot be whole, 

Consummate, finally achieved, unless

 

I be consumed and fused in the white heat 

Of her sad finite essence, so that none 

Shall sever us who are at last complete 

Eternally, irrevocably one, 

One with the birdless, cloudless, colourless skies, 

One with the bright purity of the fire 

Of which we are and for which we must die 

A rapturous strange death and be entire, 

Like syzygetic stars, supernly bright, 

Conjoined in One and in the Infinite!

A point I want to make is that this sonnet appears in a story by Samuel Beckett and so that has to be noted as an interesting departure for another use for sonnets.

Beckett's contempt for the sonnet was in line with Eliot and Pound and Joyce, the arch modernists who felt all these forms had been done to death. But strangely enough two of us who did research on Beckett's verse or poetry have both come up with sonnet forms, meaning Philip Nikolayev and me. 

"A new poetic form, the "Immured Sonnet," has been invented by the poet Philip Nikolayev. In this triptych, three rhyming sonnets are "wrapped" inside another poetic text that is also metrical and rhymes throughout. " (https://www.facebook.com/SamuelBeckettPage/posts/a-new-poetic-form-the-immured-sonnet-invented-by-the-poet-philip-nikolayev-in-th/10151526341783131/) This is a first-class invention but obviously as in the case of Hopkins not many will follow him, as there is too much hard work involved in the lazy free verse and prose poetry world of today's "anything goes, bad English" poetry to create immured sonnets.

I invented the roseate sonnet. More on that later.

The point is the modernists wanted to invent totally new forms and content but they had not realized what Berryrman realized or I or Philip. Forms may change like my desktop at home I once had that I kept changing the parts of so the old one was subsumed away entirely by the new one but still it remained a computer. So too forms never pass away entirely, they only transmigrate through metempsychosis - "met him pike hoses" - or transmute or undergo transubstantiation. And John Berryman with his "Dream Songs" is the best example of this.

Dream Song 14

BY JOHN BERRYMAN

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.   

After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,   

we ourselves flash and yearn,

and moreover my mother told me as a boy   

(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored   

means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no   

inner resources, because I am heavy bored.

Peoples bore me,

literature bores me, especially great literature,   

Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes   

as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.   

And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag   

and somehow a dog

has taken itself & its tail considerably away

into mountains or sea or sky, leaving            

behind: me, wag.

Dream Song 4

John Berryman - 1914-1972

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken páprika, she glanced at me
twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact of her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her

or falling at her little feet and crying
'You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry's dazed eyes
have enjoyed, Brilliance.' I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoni.—Sir Bones: is stuffed,
de world, wif feeding girls.

—Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes
downcast . . . The slob beside her     feasts . . . What wonders is
she sitting on, over there?
The restaurant buzzes.  She might as well be on Mars.
Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
—Mr. Bones: there is.

(From The Dream Songs by John Berryman, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Copyright © 1959, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969 by John Berryman. Used with permission.)

Berryman attacks the traditional sonnet in a different way from Beckett, not by saying it should be put out of action, but by putting it out of action in a way by breaking all its rules, as now the stanzas have no fixed number of lines, though it totals 14, or rhyme or volta or even line lengths that are fixed and one cannot make out of this is metre or prose or free verse or even part of a short story with the appearance of stream of consciousness, dialogues, and monologue, interior, to use Berrymanian syntax. Henry is Berryman's alter ego but who is Mr. Bones and what are we doing with a sonnet sequence with male characters in it including the poet that stretch throughout them openly, brazenly, strutting their decadence or malaise of wanting only to entertain, and not caring for morals. Why do we still love it? Due to it making us laugh. Long live this kind of poetic, fictional, literary, self-mocking, wry, linguistic expertise in tomfoolery or buffoonery, and sonnets, modernity, sonnet sequences, Berryman, humour, Henry, Mr. Bones, and 'dream songs', as well as the lady eating chicken paprika. I must confess Berryman makes me while reading him lack "Inner Resources" and enjoy it, too, with no complaints from my ethical self!

Here is a last Berryman - one I found unforgettable given for the sheer joy of getting you all to read it and enjoy its quirkiness and lustful playfulness.

Dream Song 69: Love her he doesn't but the thought he puts by John Berryman

Love her he doesn't but the thought he puts
into that young woman
would launch a national product
complete with TV spots & skywriting
outlets in Bonn & Tokyo
I mean it

Let it be known that nine words have not passed
between herself and Henry;
looks, smiles.
God help Henry, who deserves it all
every least part of that infernal & unconscious
woman, and the pain.

I feel as if, unique, she . . . Biddable?
Fates, conspire.
Mr Bones, please.
”Vouchsafe me, Sleepless One,
a personal experience of the body of Mrs Boogry
before I pass from lust!"

It is aptly dream song #69! Funnily enough or interestingly enough, Berryman has a love-hate relationship with Rilke whom I spoke of in the previous chapter for Rilke's poetry, it being perhaps not down to earth enough!  But we" know that he is talking of the person due to Rilke's biographers and what counts here is that once a poet is dead, we do not know what difference it makes to us his readers who he was if he wrote well, as we connect with the work and not the person and so Duino Elegies and his sonnets redeem Rilke the poet, to some extent, in our eyes, even if he was a "jerk". Besides, from his poems, Berryman does not seem cut from any different kind of cloth.

Rilke was a jerk.
I admit his griefs & music
& titled spelled all-disappointed ladies.
A threshold worse than the circles
where the vile settle & lurk,
Rilke's. As I said,— (Dream Song 3)

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/john_berryman/poems/12156

https://www.dialoginternational.com/dialog_international/2009/10/rilke-was-a-jerk.html

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.