VARIATIONS AND FORMS OF THE ENGLISH SONNET (PART II)

 

    The Variation of the English Sonnet 

    Wang and Niu finds that the difficulty in writing an English sonnet in the Italian form was because the main instinct in English poetry is for iambic or occasionally anapestic movement and most English poetry seems to shape itself in lines of five feet in each line. Also, there are far more vowels sounds in English than in Italian and hence fewer words to each sound, so it is harder to find rhyming words in English than in Italian (41).

The Elizabethan Age 

    The first sonnets in English were written by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, both closely associated with the court of Henry VIII. Some of these sonnets are rough translations and versions of Petrarch as well as sonnets that were dealt with decorum, conduct, and eloquence, articulating the values and attitudes of English court life. Wyatt and Surrey’s were collected and posthumously published by Richard Tottel in a volume titled Songes and Sonettes (1557), later referred to simply as Tottel’s Miscellany. 

Sir Thomas Wyatt 

    Some of Wyatt's sonnets retain the feature of Petrarchan style in the pattern of octave and sestet. (Wang and Niu 42). But Sir Thomas Wyatt is credited for the first reformation of English metrical irregularity. He introduced a major structural change, i.e., reorganizing the sestet so that it functioned effectively as a third quatrain with a closing couplet: abba abba cddc ee. This innovation subtly alters the dynamics of the sonnet, giving it force and progression as an instrument of perception and disputation, with the couplet sometimes serving as a witty apophthegm (Synonymous to the term aphorism, it is a short, cryptic remark of an accepted truth).

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

    Surrey further refined the structure of the English sonnet by adopting alternating rhymes in the octave, and by introducing a greater variety of rhyme words, so facilitating the challenge of rhyming in English: abab cdcd efef gg. This is the form that came to be known as the English or Shakespearean sonnet. 

    The important reforms of Surrey in the development of the sonnet are: 

 1. With regard to the iambic movement of decasyllabic verse: he took care to make the tonic accent fall as a rule on even syllables using a trochee only in the first two syllables of the verse. 

 2. His verses as a rule contain ten syllables or at least five perfect iambic feet. 

3. He also defined harmoniously the place of the rhythmical pause both in the middle of the verse and at its rhyming close. Usually this pause came after the fourth syllable but occasionally after the fifth. 

 4. He rejected weak syllables for purposes of rhyme. All of his predecessors had been accustomed to the cheap device of forcing a rhyme, for example flieth and appeareth; or forgetfulness and cruelness; or reason and season as in Wyatt. Surrey avoided the forced rhyme and the double rhyme and selected either full sounding monosyllables or disyllabic words forming a regular iambus. (Davis 40-41)

The Spenserian Sonnet and The Shakespearean Sonnet 

    The rhyme-scheme of the Spenserian sonnet is a b a b, b c b c, c d c d, e e. It contains four parts: three quatrains and a concluding couplet. The Spenserian sonnet is also called “linked sonnet”, because of its peculiar rhyme scheme where the three quatrains are linked together: the last line of the first quatrain rhymes with the first line of the second quatrain; and similarly, the last line of the second quatrain; and similarly, the last line of the second quatrain rhymes with the first line of the third quatrain. The concluding couplet summarizes the argument of the foregoing lines or binds up the sense of the foregoing lines. The Shakespearean sonnet does not vary very much from the Spenserian sonnet. One difference is that the Spenserian sonnet quatrains are linked but not in the case of Shakespearean sonnet. The other difference relates to the rhyme-scheme, the Shakespearean rhyme-scheme being: a b a b, c d c d, e f e f, g g.

The Rise and Fall of the English sonnet

    The sonnet flourished in the 16th century but by the end, it started to decline because of the change in the spirit brought by the Puritan Laws and the change in the attitude toward life (The Elizabethan age was followed by the Puritan age (1620-1660). In the puritan age, the chivalry, the romantic love, the flirtations, the hypocrisy in love, etc. disappeared consequently, the sonnet starved for want of its staple food love).

    John Donne the metaphysical poet, in his Songs and Sonnets introduced variety in the form of the sonnet. Donne did not always stick to the 14-line length of the sonnet. For instance, his sonnet “The Token” is an 18-line sonnet. 

     After fifty years, John Milton (1608-74) attempted to revive the sonnet. Milton imbued his sonnets with an urgent political topicality while introducing a flexible placing of the Volta and the addition of a coda (Birkan Berz 3). After Milton, the sonnet again was dormant; for during the whole of the 18th century, poets did not show any interest in sonnetry. 

    Only a few good sonnets were composed, such as Thomas Gray’s Ode on the Death of Richard West, Thomas Warton’s To the River London, William Bowles’ At Ostend, etc. The sonnet was taken up once again in the romantic period. Most of the major poets like Wordsworth, Keats, P.B. Shelly followed the both the Shakespearian and Petrarchan forms (Marcico 4). They used the sonnet form for diverse purposes, writing only very few sonnets on the theme of love.

Victorian Age 

    The sonnet form was preferred by some of the Victorian poets. Several sonnet sequences were composed in this period are Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese (1847- 50), Robert Bridge’s The Growth of Love (1976), D.G. Rossetti’s The House of Life (1881) and George Meredith’s Modern Love (1862).

    The most interesting experiment on the sonnet form in the Victorian period, was done by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89). In the sonnet, he combined the twelve-syllable line with his own invention of the sprung rhythm. 

    The sprung rhythm is a peculiar form of rhythm which in his preface to poems (1918), Hopkins writes: 

(It) is measured by feet of from one to four syllables, regularly, and for particular effects any number of weak or slack syllables may be used. It has one stress, which falls on the only syllable, if there is only one, or, if there are more, than scanning as above, on the first, and so gives rise to four sorts of feet, a monosyllable and the so-called accentual trochee, Dactyl, and the First Paeon (Paeon is a foot of one stressed and three unstressed syllables). And there will be four corresponding natural rhythms, but nominally the feet are mixed and any one may follow any other (Bera 74-75).  

Modernism

    The 20th century did not witness much of experiments on the form or the pattern of the sonnet. There was not even a lingering interest in the sonnet was found. Only a handful of poets have composed sonnets in this century like Rupert Chawner Brooke, a war poet and Wystan Hugh Auden who wrote a number of splendid sonnets on public affairs, and on famous men, such as A.E. Houseman, Rimbaud and Edward Lear, and not on personal affairs or on love. 

    Another major poet, the Irish-English poet, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) wrote very few sonnets but has left the indelible mark of his poetic skill and his experiment on the form of the sonnet in his sonnet or sonnets. His sonnet The Folly of being Comforted has rhyming couplets and is divided onto three parts: sestet, sestet, and a concluding rhyming couplet.

    Modernists reject the sonnet as an over-rehearsed exercise (Birkan Berz 3). The difficulty in recognizing a sonnet again arises because the form has diversified to the point where its definitive boundaries are so blurred that it has effectively ceased to exist. Ever since it established its basic form, any fourteen line poem is considered a variation on the sonnet. Poets have made their tweaks by allowing the meter to overflow the line a bit, or allowing slant rhyme instead of full rhyme, but sticking to most of the requirements of the form and retaining its spirit (Richardson 6).

The Contemporary English Sonnet 

    Grace observes that the contemporary sonnet begins at some point in the two decades after the end of the Second World War (18). Today, the written contemporary poems are divided into two categories: mainstream poets who adhere to the traditional form of sonnets or linguistically innovative sonneteers who rejects formalism in favour of open-form procedures (Mainstream poetry, with its heavily subsidised major publishing houses, poetry prize culture and events directed at a wider audience, and linguistically innovative or avant-garde poetry, with its small presses and restricted audience of poets and university critics).

    Some of the mainstream poets are Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Don Paterson and Alice Oswald. Birkan Berz finds Alice Oswald uses ‘Shakespearean or a Miltonian form’ when writing about the mind or the heart, and a sonnet structured on a series of couplets invented by John Clare when writing about the natural world. Her poem, Leaf has a hybrid rhyming pattern as the rhyme scheme goes as ababcbcbddefeg indicating an octave/sestet organisation (6). 

    While reading the linguistically innovative poets such as Tom Raworth, Peter Riley, and Geraldine Monk, one has to constantly piece together symbolical, thematic or linguistic elements to achieve a measure of provisional meaning. All of these semi-narrative sequences are symbolical of the agony of the contemporary sonnet. Modern poets have also tapped into the process of sonnet translating, version or adaptation might abate the feeling of self-consciousness, allowing poets to use a form while concomitantly commenting upon it.

Conclusion

    That the sonnet is in vogue, few critics seem to do doubt (Grace 6). However, it is considered that the sonnet is still in use today for powerful short poetic statements about particular aspects of those great themes. It hasn’t changed all that much, and the ‘Shakespearean’ sonnet is still recognizable in modern poetry. One observation from the modern sonnets is its stark digression from love, nature to addressing more magnanimous issues like immigration, images of violence to the human body, reminiscent of the aim of rocket launchers and suicide bombers, ecological crisis and so on. We must keep in mind that although there are many variants of the sonnet, each individual likes to put his or her own individual stamp upon it therefore, as Grace quotes Don Paterson in Forms of Memory: The Sonnet in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry that “the sonnet is pretty much in the eye of the beholder.” (6)

WORKS CONSULTED 

    Bede, Lew Icarus. “Thirty-One Sonnets: Renaissance to New Millennial | Society of Classical Poets.” The Society of Classical Poets, 3 Mar. 2018, classicalpoets.org/2018/03/03/essaythirty-one-sonnets/#:~:text=Of%20Life%2C%20or%20dower%20in. Accessed 25 Jan. 2022.

     Bera, Dr. Sunit Kr. “The History of English Sonnet.” International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Invention, vol. 3, no. 4, Apr. 2014, pp. 64–80, www.ijhssi.org. Accessed 25 Jan. 2022. 

    Birkan Berz, Carole. “Mapping the Contemporary Sonnet in Mainstream and Linguistically Innovative Late 20th– and Early 21st–Century British Poetry.” Études Britanniques Contemporaines, no. 46, 3 June 2014, 10.4000/ebc.1202. Accessed 25 Jan. 2022. 

    Davis, Bertha Mattie. Growth and Development of the Sonnet in England in the Sixteenth Century. 1940, pp. 4–8, hdl.handle.net/2144/4434. Accessed 25 Jan. 2022. 

    Grace, Stephen William. Forms of Memory: The Sonnet in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry. Sept. 2019, pp. 6–20, etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/26008/. Accessed 22 Jan. 2022. 

    Hecht, Anthony. “The Sonnet: Ruminations on Form, Sex, and History.” The Antioch Review, vol. 55, no. 2, 1997, pp. 134–147, www.jstor.org/stable/4613483. Accessed 25 Jan. 2022. 

    Lindsay, Alan, and Candace Bergstrom. “The Sonnet, History and Forms.” Introtopoetry2019.Pressbooks.com, Good Words Unlimited, 1 June 2019, introtopoetry2019.pressbooks.com/chapter/9-the-sonnet/. 12 

    Marsico, Lynn. “Studying the Sonnet: An Introduction to the Importance of Form in Poetry.” Teachers.yale.edu, teachers.yale.edu/curriculum/viewer/initiative_05.01.11_u. Accessed 25 Jan. 2022.

 Milton, John. “Sonnet 19: When I Consider How My Light Is Spent.” Poetry Foundation, 2019, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44750/sonnet-19-when-i-consider-how-my-light-isspent. Accessed 23 Jan. 2022. 

    Regan, Stephen. The Sonnet. Oxford, United Kingdom, Oxford University Press, 2019, books.google.co.in. Accessed 20 Jan. 2022. 

    Richardson, Rachel. “Learning the Sonnet by Rachel Richardson.” Poetry Foundation, 19 Feb. 2020, www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70051/learning-the-sonnet. Accessed 19 Jan. 2022. 

    Smith, Charlotte Turner. Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems. 1784. 9th ed., vol. 1, London, T. Cadell, Junior, and W. Davies, 1800, pp. 2–86, books.google.co.in. Accessed 23 Jan. 2022. 

    Wang, Jiancheng, and Jilian Niu. “Metrical Art of Thomas Wyatt’s Sonnets.” International Journal on Studies in English Language and Literature, vol. 2, no. 8, Aug. 2014, pp. 40– 43, www.arcjournals.org. Accessed 25 Jan. 2022. 

    Wordsworth, William. The River Duddon : A Series of Sonnets : Vaudracour and Julia: And Other Poems. To Which Is Annexed, a Topographical Description of the Country of the Lakes, in the North of England. London, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820, archive.org/details/riverduddonserie00word/page/n5/mode/2up. Accessed 23 Jan. 2022.