Sonnet PDF

SONNET 369 A related stage device is the aside, in which a character expresses to the audience his or her thought or intention in a short speech which, by conven- tion, is inaudible to the other characters on the stage. Both...

SONNET 369 A related stage device is the aside, in which a character expresses to the audience his or her thought or intention in a short speech which, by conven- tion, is inaudible to the other characters on the stage. Both devices, common in Elizabethan and later drama, were largely rejected by dramatists in the later nineteenth century, when the increasing requirement that plays convey the illusion of real life impelled writers to exploit indirect means for revealing a character’s state of mind, and for conveying exposition and guidance to the audience. Eugene O’Neill, however, revived and extended the soliloquy and aside and made them basic devices throughout his play Strange Interlude (1928). For references to soliloquy in other entries, see pages 64, 66, 96. Son of Ben: 281. sonnet: A lyric poem consisting of a single stanza of fourteen iambic pentameter lines linked by an intricate rhyme scheme. (Refer to meter and rhyme.) There are two major patterns of rhyme in sonnets written in the English language: 1. The Italian or Petrarchan sonnet (named after the fourteenth-century Italian poet Petrarch) falls into two main parts: an octave (eight lines) rhyming abbaabba followed by a sestet (six lines) rhyming cdecde or some variant, such as cdccdc. Petrarch’s sonnets were first imitated in England, in both their stanza form and their standard subject—the hopes and pains of an adoring male lover—by Sir Thomas Wyatt in the early sixteenth cen- tury. (See Petrarchan conceit.) The Petrarchan form was later used, for a great variety of subjects, by Milton, Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, D. G. Rossetti, and other sonneteers, who sometimes made it technically easier in English (which does not have as many rhyming possibilities as Italian) by introducing a new pair of rhymes in the second four lines of the octave. 2. The Earl of Surrey and other English experimenters in the sixteenth cen- tury also developed a stanza form called the English sonnet, or else the Shakespearean sonnet, after its greatest practitioner. This sonnet falls into three quatrains and a concluding couplet: abab cdcd efef gg. There was a notable variant, the Spenserian sonnet, in which Spenser linked each quatrain to the next by a continuing rhyme: abab bcbc cdcd ee. John Donne shifted from the hitherto primary subject, sexual love, to a variety of religious themes in his Holy Sonnets, written early in the seventeenth century; and Milton, in the latter part of that century, expanded the range of the sonnet to other matters of serious concern. Except for a lapse in the English Neoclassic Period, the sonnet has remained a popular form to the present day and includes among its distinguished practitioners, in the nineteenth century, Wordsworth, Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and in the twentieth century, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, and Dylan Thomas. The stanza is just long enough to permit a fairly complex lyric devel- opment, yet so short, and so exigent in its rhymes, as to pose a standing Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  370 SONNET CYCLE challenge to the ingenuity and artistry of the poet. The rhyme pattern of the Petrarchan sonnet has on the whole favored a statement of a problem, situation, or incident in the octave, with a resolution in the sestet. The English form sometimes uses a similar division of material but often presents instead a repetition-with-variation of a statement in each of the three quatrains; in either case, the final couplet in the English sonnet usually imposes an epigrammatic turn at the end. In Drayton’s fine Elizabethan sonnet in the English form “Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part,” the lover brusquely declares in the first quatrain, then reiterates in the second, that he is glad that the affair is cleanly ended, then hesitates at the finality of the parting in the third quatrain, and in the concluding couplet suddenly drops his swagger to make one last plea. Here are the third quatrain and couplet: Now at the last gasp of love’s latest breath, When, his pulse failing, passion speechless lies, When faith is kneeling by his bed of death, And innocence is closing up his eyes; Now if thou wouldst, when all have given him over, From death to life thou mightst him yet recover. Following Petrarch’s early example, a number of Elizabethan authors arranged their poems into sonnet sequences, or sonnet cycles, in which a series of sonnets are linked together by exploring the varied aspects of a relation- ship between lovers, or else by indicating a development in the relationship that constitutes a kind of implicit plot. Shakespeare ordered his sonnets in a sequence, as did Sidney in Astrophel and Stella (1580) and Spenser in Amoretti (1595). Later examples of the sonnet sequence on various subjects are Wordsworth’s The River Duddon, D. G. Rossetti’s House of Life, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, and the American poet William Ellery Leonard’s Two Lives. Dylan Thomas’ Altarwise by Owl-light (1936) is a sequence of ten sonnets that are abstruse meditations on the poet’s own life. George Meredith’s Modern Love (1862), which concerns a bitterly unhappy marriage, is sometimes called a sonnet sequence, even though its component poems consist not of fourteen but of six- teen lines. On the early history of the sonnet and its development in England through Milton, see Michael R. G. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (1992). See also Michael R. G. Spiller, The Sonnet Sequence: A Study of the Strategies (1997); Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1997); Stephen Burt and David Mikics, The Art of the Sonnet (2010). sonnet cycle: 370. sonnet sequence: 370. sound symbolism: 197. Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.