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 

 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

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

BY JOHN MILTON

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.

A Brief History of the Sonnet - Chapter 6 (The Golden Age of the Elizabethan Sonnet)

 From the Vantage point of the 21st century Shakespeare matters for several reasons as a sonneteer, for his use of rhymed iambic pentameter, for his rhyme scheme, and for his use of the volta and the final couplet to telling effect, for writing sequences, but most of all for his, seen in retrospect, overthrowing of the ideas of classicism regarding what to write of, and moving off from the Italian sonnet sequences not just as a Renaissance man, in his subject matter, bringing in realism predictively, the move to modernity and romanticism as well as a tough and tempered psychological scrutiny of his subjects, which are what make him more significant to me than Spenser with his Amoretti or Sidney with his Astrophel and Stella or even Michael Drayton, as he foreshadows even a John Donne with his metaphysical conceits and puns and is neo-classical, form-wise,  quite the stick of dynamite in other words, except for his inability to understand what Tolkien called "faerie". When he enters that world he often seems more a dabbler, his goblins and fairies and elves and creatures like Ariel never take on the convincing stature of the ones in Beowulf or in Coleridge or Tolkien, for someone like me, there is something airy and not substantial about them even at their most charming or delightful, as in the case of Puck, who may be the one exception that goes to prove the rule. But I am going away from the sonnets which are my prime quarry. Let us take another of his sonnets that matter in this regard of theme and content.

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun (Sonnet 130)

William Shakespeare - 1564-1616

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My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
     And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
     As any she belied with false compare.

I have a particular reason to take this sonnet as it runs directly counter to the previous one I studied in Chapter 5 where the fair youth shines brighter than the sun but here Shakespeare inverts the entire argument by saying that the dark lady's power is just the opposite, that the sun's light outshines her but does not in any way diminish her or his love for her. In deconstructing, again, the simile, and ideas of beauty and love, and the trope of the sun as central metaphor it is a highly nuanced poem that bespeaks and celebrates feminity far before the arrival of feminism and this is remarkable considering his day and age, the time and place in which it was written. It is also a robust realism and an unmasking of poetic duplicity and tearing down of the kind found in the idealism of Dante, with his Bice, Michaelangelo, Rafael, Petrarca, and Cavalcanti whose women never, unlike the scatological Swift's Celia, defecate or urinate, as well as Shakespeare's protest against how what was once beautiful in poetry becomes justcliché and needs to be laughed at and dethroned so that poetry can ever have a fresh voice, and be constantly original, innovative, inventive, unique, creative and progressive.

To come finally to the question of why Shakespearean sonnets still matter to me, the reason is that when we discuss the latest trends in literary theory, whether of trauma (due to the betrayal faced by the narrator, betrayed by the dark lady), or disability, or ethnic studies or affect studies or queer studies and psychoanalysis with themes like betrayal, deconstruction or linguistic and philosophical analysis with is neologisms and views on time - all of these theories can still be applied to them, which is rather startling, don't you think?

1. https://poets.org/poem/my-mistress-eyes-are-nothing-sun-sonnet-130

You Have To Surrender To Me, To Conquer

The controversial sarga eight of Kumara Sambhavam by Kalidasa says of Shiva that he made love to Parvathy (Malayalam transliteration) non-stop for 25 years after getting married to her and it seemed to him like a single night in #91. This shows the power of Shakthi (Malayalam transliteration) which inspired me to write this poem. This is really a spiritual and mystical poem, with an ambiguous title that could be about Shiva- shakti, God-man, I-thou, man-woman, Ardhanareeshwara (Malayalam transliteration) etc.

I look into* the mirror

My hair is black

Thick, lustrous, soft

Wavy, long, rich 

My eyes sparkle

Stars dancing in them

My lips are a luscious cherry red

My cheek has a dimple that drives men mad

And I long  for you to, one day, be led 

To know what it means to be me

My lissome skin, what it feels like, when touched

My legs, why they tremble, when they 'ope' 

My breast, why it is tender

My third eye, why it spews fire

My nose, that is sharp and cuts like a knife

My hands, gentle, when I  hold our child

I am Shakthi

Your Other

Your piece makes my puzzle complete

We become us, where I make you melt 

And  in reciprocation, you harden

Remember how, for years

You could not leave my side 

After our wedding

Even for a moment

Each day and night 

How you spent it in longing

In the nuptial bed

When you weaken, I strengthen

You, and you straighten

I am your spine

I make you divine

Without* me, even you

Yes, even you, 

Would be 

Nothing.

*As opposed to in

*Outside (of)/Apart from

A Brief History of the Sonnet - Chapter 5 - William Shakesepare (Dedicated to M Padma Shri, the poet's, memory; on whom I wrote a poem)

 

Q1 Q2 Q3V EC	"Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? - a Thou art more lovely and more temperate: -b Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, -a  And summer’s lease hath all too short a date: -b Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, -c And often is his gold complexion dimmed; -d And every fair from fair sometime declines, -c By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed: -d But thy eternal summer shall not fade, -e Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st; -f Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade -e When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st: -f So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, -g So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." -g	4  8 12 14
	—William Shakespeare Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets. The one quoted above, called sonnet 18 and about the fair youth,  is often called his best. It may or may not be the best but it is definitely the most famous, with even  David Gilmour of Pink Floyd setting it to song. While reading these sonnets one of the things to be kept in mind is that Shakespeare probably wrote them thinking of them as his legacy to posterity, his contribution to English literature, whereas his plays were meant to be performed and the rough & tumble of his earning bread and butter. Here he has put in his best, according to him, yet in other words, I know that in a world after Roland Barthes and Michael Foucault, we cannot really know such things for certain and what we do and can know is that the above sonnet was written by him. I do not want to talk of the poem thus in a biographical analysis but in a 'presentist' one and what appeals to me there is that the poem could be about a lover but is more about literature and poetry and 'sonnetry'  (if I may be permitted to coin such a word) if one will and how the art of the reader can  make something immortal and eternal. This is startling, of the two things  here that are: one, that Shakespeare is sure his sonnet or writing will not die and the other that he depends on the readers to keep it alive through their imagination and love for the poet and what he is talking of.  The sonnet starts with a dismissal of a literary trope, that of the simile. Shakespeare says that the simile falls  short in describing someone who will live forever, unlike a summer's day or summer or the sun or summer's  flowers, or summer's length, or summer's heat, or summer's loveliness. It all waxes and wanes sometimes, and even the fair declines, and is not temperate or equable enough, balanced enough. And here  Shakespeare makes the leap that shows why he can be considered great, the leap of a real poet when he  says all are subject to chance and nature's changing course, using a rare word that makes the poem leap  into realms we would not go usually, the word "untrimmed"! But let us briefly imagine this sonnet is about Marilyn Monroe who had golden hair and so fits the comparison  to the golden sun and being written by Arthur Miller before the break up of "All That Fall." Marilyn's photographs and movies would easily fit the description of eternal and infinite but Shakespeare uses another phrase that  tantalizes us "in eternal lines to time thou grow'st." Here we have the lodestone, the philosopher's stone, the Holy  Grail,  the poet's claim to be inspired by his muse and being spoken through which ensures half the work is done,  the anti-Platonic note that love makes the loved one breathe and draws to itself men who will in their turn see  the sonnet as their own and use it to extol their lovers or wish someone else would see it as theirs and use it to extol  them. This is Shakespeare's old fashioned mastery, he believes in the power of the written word, of poetry,  of the beauty of its being read aloud or again and again and kept alive, in the power of love, literature, life, and art and in the power of defeating death through all this. His sonnet is an invocation and a chant as well as an evocation and not what people praise now,  which is a description, but indirect and that is why it leaves us longing to read it  over and over as the job of filling in the blanks is left to us, half the world is left to us but only after half is done.  The image that the lover cannot be compared to is described painstakingly as one that has to be discarded, even if the best,   the sun in all its glory in the brightest season and the day in all its finery and finesse, but it stretches our imagination thereby  to where only one person can fit in into such comparison, not Shakespeare's fair youth but whoever it is that we love most.    I could talk of how he creates this effect or 'affect' in the reader, of love, precious love, that it is by using the measure  of the iambic pentametre, that the rhyme helps, that the volta is used impeccably as are the stanzas and the  couplet and that what seems an egotistic boast at the end regarding one's own prowess as a writer turns out not to  be as it is canceled out previously by investing in the power of the reader and handing over the task to him/her,  humbly, of keeping the sonnet alive. Even Shakespeare is not God, he needs the help of the human race who can  read and appreciate his poem to keep it going. Be that as it may, the sonnet, whether stripped of our knowledge of its author or not, never fails to be loved by those  sensitive to art, love poetry, literature, life, and death, as well as to the beauty of nature, human and natural. 126 of his sonnets are to the fair youth, as all know, and some to a dark lady. The conjecture as to whether he was  bisexual apart, the more interesting one to me is whether this sonnet is an answer to the first seventeen that ask  the young man to have children by saying that whether he does or not his likeness will be preserved and carried on  through the generations by the sonnets themselves, asserting art over nature as the way to overcoming death. Shakespeare wrote another six and a half sonnets found in his plays. That takes the total tally to 160 and a half. And  one was found recently that may or may not be his. However, only one thing is sure, whoever WH or the dark lady is or  his patron, Shakespeare "in eternal lines to time ...growest" and to all who loves sonnets and want to write them, is a master  who can teach well that what matters is not only form and structure but content and felicity of expression as much as any Petrarch or Cavalcanti or Dante or Thomas Wyatt or Henry Howard or more.  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnet_18 (Used for the sonnet) Note- M Padma Shri was a good poet I met on FB who died of cancer  and once sent me her photograph of herself with her head shaved as she had to for chemo and I wrote a poem on it that she liked a lot. This sonnet by Shakespeare could very well be about her as she was a lovely, sensitive human being and a wonderful person in all her dealings with me. I am dedicating today's chapter to her as I just got to know of her death. My poem was a roseate sonnet and not a Shakespearean one, or I'd include that too here.

A Brief History of the Sonnet - Chapter 4 The English Sonnet continued

 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:

1. a quatorzain, written with a Petrarchan octave followed by an envelope quatrain ending with a rhyming couplet.
2. metric, primarily iambic pentameter.
3. the rhyme scheme...
4. it is composed with the volta... or pivot (a shifting or tilting of the main line of thought) sometime after the 2nd quatrain.
5. 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/

A Brief History of the Sonnet - Chapter 3 The English Sonnet's Beginnings

 Chapter 3 - The English Sonnet 1

Everything has to find its way into a place from another through a conduit. In the case of the sonnet, it came to England via Wyatt (not Earp) and Surrey. Thomas Wyatt is the originator of the English sonnet. Though he used Italian models he introduced the sestet with a new rhyme scheme of cdcd ee mostly that was significant as it led to the development of the English sonnet as a variant on the Petrarchan one into three quatrains and a couplet. Influenced by Petrarch, Dante, and others he wanted to raise English to the same level as Italian and other European languages and introduced personal experiences into his poetry. He also wrote of unrequited love but his sonnets could also be satirical. The iambic pentameter was not yet in fashion and Wyatt tried terza rima and ottava rima in English, not to mention the alexandrine ( and the poulter's measure of twelve syllables) and the iambic tetrameter, and the fourteener, as well as many other forms like the Rondeau from France and Italy but his sonnets found their mark and were welcomed hugely to the nation's bosom although he was the bridge and came before the Elizabethan Age and made English poetry for the first time perhaps, under the influence of Chaucer, both readable and clear. He was supposed to have had a love affair with Anne Boleyn - the same one who was Henry VIII's paramour and a brunette put in prison for adultery with five men who were all executed with her except for Wyatt who was one of them, fortunately for him, and the juicy part of this section is he may have seen her being executed from his jail window - and was imprisoned several times but also was an ambassador and man of the court under kings, as well as Cromwell's trusted employee, all of which worked both in his favour and against him; a very interesting life, in short. He became famous through the landmark anthology Tottel's Miscellany, and for his work on Petrarch, letting loose in England a torrent or storm of sonnets thenceforth that created a great set of poems, if ever there was one.

I find no peace and all my war is done,

I fear and hope, I burn and freeze like ice,

I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise,

And nought I have and all the world I seson;

That loseth nor locketh holdeth me in prison;

And holdeth me not; yet can I scape nowise,

Nor letteth me live nor die at my devise,

And yet of death it giveth me occasion.

Without eyen I see; and without tongue I plain:

I desire to perish, and yet I ask health;

I love another: and thus I hate myself;

I feed me in sorrow; and laugh in all my pain:

Likewise displeaseth me both death and life,

And my delight is causer of this strife.

The English comes from the first half of the 16th century so is a bit strange to us and in some parts not fully clear but on the whole it is a delightful sonnet. To make it clear I have tried my hand at making it modern for all of you. But it also arrests our attention as it talks of his prison stints.

I find no peace and all my war is done,

I fear and hope, I burn and freeze like ice,

I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise,

And nought I have and all the world I (seize on);

That losses nor locks hold me in prison;

And holds me not; yet can I escape in nowise,

Nor lets me live nor die at my device,

And yet of death it gives me occasion.

Without eyes I see; and without tongue, I complain:

I desire to perish, and yet I ask health;

I love another: and thus I hate myself;

I feed me in sorrow; and laugh in all my pain:

Alike displeases me both death and life,

And my delight is the cause of this strife.

A delightful sonnet, to repeat, about his "Delight" or mistress/love all in oxymoron with a classic cddc ee ending in terms of rhyme and mostly in iambic lines of ten or eleven or twelve syllables of two lines each. What I mean is in the couplet if the first line has ten syllables the second will too and if the third has eleven the next one will too and if one has twelve the next one will have twelve too. It also arrests us by bringing in the knowledge of how he felt about his prison stints.

I love the history of the sonnet and am indebted to Dante, Cavalcanti, Rafael's lost sonnets for his mistress Margherita, Michaelangelo and Wyatt and many, many others as these chapters will gradually unfold and it would not have been possible for me to come to my own experiments with the form if not for ALL of them.

Wyatt wrote only 31 sonnets and ten are more or less translations from Petrarch, if I remember rightly, which was his tribute to the master, but the mark he left is deep and still felt even in Kerala from which it will spread again to India and the world due to some key Indian sonneteers ending with me, as of now.

http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/Archive/Wyatt2.htm

A Brief History of the Sonnet - Chapter 2

 A Brief History of the Sonnet.

Chapter 2 - Dante, Cavalcanti, Michaelangelo and the terza rima sonnet. (All rights reserved by Dr Koshy AV)

Petrarch's father knew Dante Alighieri. This is not fortuitous. Before we talk of the Petrarchan sonnet, we need to talk of two seminal figures, Dante Alighieri and Guido Cavacanti, and the terza rima sonnet and Cavalcanti's contribution to the Petrarchan sonnets. And as a bonus, I want to toss in something on Michaelangelo Buonarotti for all of you, my dear readers.

But first the terza rima sonnet. Like the Petrarchan one it has 14 lines but the stanzas go in threes except for the last one which only has two and the rhyme scheme is interlocking with an aba, bcb, cdc, ded, ee pattern so the very last line of the sonnet and/or the series (of sonnets) written in terza rima has to rhyme with the middle line of the previous tercet (three lines). Terza refers to the stanzaic form and rima to the fact that it has to rhyme. Its originator was Dante and he used it in the Divine Comedy and it swept the world. I would like to give an example from one of the most famous poems in the Western world, by PB Shelley "Ode to the West Wind." When western poets used this form they naturally tended to write it in iambic pentametre, meaning lines having five feet or ten syllables, and going da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM, to keep the beat or the metronome too intact, not to mention stressed-unstressed &/or accented-unaccented, being Shakespearean and Elizabethan in this matter.

I am not going to quote Dante as it brings in Italian and people do not read that and instead read the translation and get confused as the appearance changes as in translation into English the syllables become less. But Shelley is ideal in both his mastery of the ode and the terza rima as well as in his mastery of sound and all the tropes of poetry.

I

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, - a

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead -b

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, -a

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, -b

Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou, -c

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed -b

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, -c

Each like a corpse within its grave, until -d

Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow -c

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill -d

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) - e

With living hues and odours plain and hill: -d

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; - e

Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear! -e

I don't know how many people realize or know that the power of the poem "Ode to the West Wind" stems from it being five terza rima sonnets in iambic pentametre. While his ear for metre is impeccable, so is his eye for rhyme though he uses a couple of slant rhymes with 'thou' and 'where', to fulfil his purpose. Nowadays people speak of free verse, and imagery and figures of speech simply to hide their paucity in mastering sound devices, genre, structure and form and depths of meaning, but it is excusable to not write in metre only if one is not a native speaker. It does not make it right for them to not find it laudable when done exquisitely in the names of silly literary theories like decolonization.

Another poet who needs to be seen as a forerunner of the Petrarchan sonnet is Guido Cavalcanti.

"Guido Cavalcanti, was born in 1255, in Florence [Italy and died on Aug. 27/28, 1300, Florence), Italian poet, a major figure among the Florentine poets who wrote in the dolce stil nuovo (“sweet new style”) and who is considered, next to Dante, the most striking poet and personality in 13th-century Italian literature.

Born into an influential Florentine family of the Guelf (papal) party, Guido Cavalcanti studied under the philosopher and scholar Brunetto Latini, who earlier had been the teacher of Dante. Cavalcanti married the daughter of the rival Ghibelline (imperial) party leader Farinata degli Uberti but joined the White Guelf faction when, in 1300, that party split into Blacks and Whites. That same year, Dante, who had dedicated several poems to Cavalcanti and called him his “first friend,” apparently was involved in banishing Cavalcanti from Florence. In exile in Sarzana, Cavalcanti contracted malaria and was permitted to return to Florence, where he died.

Cavalcanti’s strong, temperamental, and brilliant personality and the poems that mirror it were admired by many contemporary poets and such important later ones as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ezra Pound. He left about 50 poems, many addressed to two women: Mandetta, whom he met in Toulouse in 1292, and Giovanna, whom he calls Primavera (“Springtime”). Cavalcanti’s poems glow with the brilliance, grace, and directness of diction characteristic of the "dolce stil nuovo (sweet new style)" at its best. Love is the poet’s dominant theme, generally love that causes deep suffering.

Two of Cavalcanti’s poems are canzoni, a type of lyric derived from Provençal poetry, of which the most famous is “Donna mi prega” (“A Lady Asks Me”), a beautiful and complex philosophical analysis of love, the subject of many later commentaries. Others are sonnets and ballate (ballads), the latter type usually considered his best.

...Cavalcanti’s poetry was first collected in 1527 and later in Le rime de Guido Cavalcanti (1902). Many poems were translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in The Early Italian Poets (1861; later retitled Dante and His Circle) and by Ezra Pound in The Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti (1912)."

Here is his best sonnet according to some - and here we find the Petrarchan sonnet already nascent or ab ovo, there in essence even before Petrarch/Petrarca, though with variations in the rhyme scheme. Rosetti has cast it in iambic pentametre.

Who is she coming, whom all gaze upon (Cavalcanti)

(Translated by D.G. Rossetti)

Who is she coming, whom all gaze upon, - a

Who makes the air all tremulous with light, - b

And at whose side is Love himself? that none - c

Dare speak, but each man’s sighs are infinite. -b

Ah me! how she looks round from left to right, - b

Let Love discourse: I may not speak thereon. - a

Lady she seems of such high benison -c

As makes all others graceless in men’s sight. -b

The honour which is hers cannot be said; -d

To whom are subject all things virtuous, -e

While all things beauteous own her deity. -f

Ne’er was the mind of man so nobly led, -d

Nor yet was such redemption granted us -e

That we should ever know her perfectly. f

Here we see that it is still a continuous flow but the stanzas are demarcated by the change in rhyme scheme, as usual, so it is an octave and sestet. Cavalcanti's lady is very much an idealized figure, seat of all virtues and so a bit boring like Beatrice, but his poetry is lovable and for those interested in gossip her name was Mandetta or Giovanna, or both. She is plural!

Last, but not least, my personal favourite Michael Angelo Buonarotti of whose sonnets there is a copy in Thiruvananthapuram Public Library that my eldest brother brought home. Most of the best things in my life came through him. I read it enchanted as they were exquisite love poems, and later found out to my surprise that they were probably for Tomasso Cavallieri, as he was gay. I loved them and still do, the sonnets: as they remind me of these lines by Robert Browning from "One Word More," his preface to his famous Fifty Men and Women, that made the dramatic monologue the form the Victorian Age's poetry would be remembered by.

"This: no artist lives and loves that longs not

Once, and only once, and for One only, 60

(Ah, the prize!) to find his love a language

Fit and fair and simple and sufficient—

Using nature that’s an art to others,

Not, this one time, art that’s turn’d his nature.

Ay, of all the artists living, loving, 65

None but would forego his proper dowry,—

Does he paint? he fain would write a poem,—

Does he write? he fain would paint a picture,

Put to proof art alien to the artist’s,

Once, and only once, and for One only, 70

So to be the man and leave the artist,

Save the man’s joy, miss the artist’s sorrow."

To return to Michael Angelo, all know his paintings (the Sistine chapel) and sculptures (Moses, David, the Pieta) but few know his poetry so let me close this chapter with his exquisite sonnet of his that is famous called The Silkworm

D' altrui pietoso.

Kind to the world, but to itself unkind, - a

A worm is born, that dying noiselessly -b

Despoils itself to clothe fair limbs, and be -b

In its true worth by death alone divined. - a

Oh, would that I might die, for her to find - a

Raiment in my outworn mortality! -b

That, changing like the snake, I might be free -b

To cast the slough wherein I dwell confined! -a

Nay, were it mine, that shaggy fleece that stays, c

Woven and wrought into a vestment fair, -d

Around her beauteous bosom in such bliss! -e

All through the day she'd clasp me! Would I were -d

The shoes that bear her burden! When the ways - c

Were wet with rain, her feet I then should kiss! -e

And yes, it is a Petrarchan sonnet! (translated by J Aldington Symonds)

(https://allpoetry.com/Xxi.-_the-silkworm._)

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Guido-Cavalcanti

https://www.poetryimmortal.com/who-is-she-coming/

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45134/ode-to-the-west-wind

https://genius.com/Robert-browning-one-word-more-annotated