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

 

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.