Poetry Knowledge Zone > Class 10   
The Soulful Sonnet

When I think sonnet, I think Shakespeare. His sonnets were an integral part of my growing up years and many of my childhood memories include curling up on the couch with a tattered copy of Shakespearian sonnets in my hand. Then I could escape to the beautiful land of magical words created by him. So deeply were the two words inter connected in my mind, that for a long while, I thought that Shakespeare was the one who introduced the sonnet form. Imagine my surprise when I found that neither was Shakespeare the pioneer of the form nor was it an English form of poetry to begin with.

History and origin of the sonnet

Sonnet is derived from the Italian form sonneta which means “little song”. The exact origin date of the sonneta is kind of sketchy an various sources cite different information, but everyone agrees that it was written long before the 11th century in Italy.

By the 1200's, the sonnet form (from the Italian sonneto, "little song") was set well enough to be defined as Italian poets were writing them: 14 lines are divided into an 8-line problem statement that is resolved in the last 6 lines.

Originating in Italy, the sonnet was established by Petrarch in the 14th century as a major form of love poetry, and came to be adopted in Spain, France and England in the 16th century, and in Germany in the 17th. The standard subject-matter of early sonnets was the torments of sexual love (usually within a courtly love convention), but in the 17th century John Donne extended the sonnet's scope to religion, while Milton extended it to politics. Although largely neglected in the 18th century, the sonnet was revived in the 19th by Wordsworth, Keats, and Baudelaire, and is still widely used. Some poets have written connected series of sonnets, known as sonnet sequences or sonnet cycles: of these, the outstanding English examples are Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella (1591), Spenser's Amoretti (1595), and Shakespeare's Sonnets (1609); later examples include Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and W. H. Auden's 'In Time of War' (1939). A group of sonnets formally linked by repeated lines is known as a crown of sonnets. Irregular variations on the sonnet form have included the 12-line sonnet sometimes used by Elizabethan poets, G. M. Hopkin's sonnets of 10-1/2 lines, and the 16-line sonnets of George Meredith's sequence Modern Love (1862).

Gli occhi di ch'io parlai si caldamente was one of many written by Francis Petrarch to express grief over the death of "Laura," an unidentified woman who became his ideal of love.

The eyes that drew from me such fervent praise,
The arms and hands and feet and countenance
Which made me a stranger in my own romance
And set me apart from the well-trodden ways;
The gleaming golden curly hair, the rays
Flashing from a smiling angel's glance
Which moved the world in paradisal dance,
Are grains of dust, insensibilities.
And I live on, but in grief and self-contempt,
Left here without the light I loved so much,
In a great tempest and with shrouds unkempt.
No more love songs, then, I have done with such;
My old skill now runs thin at each attempt,
And tears are heard within the harp I touch.

(Translated by Edwin Morgan. In Maynard Mack and others, eds. World Masterpieces, 6th ed. Vol. 1, Literature of Western Culture Through the Renaissance. New York: Norton, 1992.)

In the 1500's, William Shakespeare and many others adapted the form to include two more rhymes at the ends of lines than the Italian form used. Although there is still an echo of the shift in tone in lines 8-9, the last two lines of the English sonnet rhyme together and cap off the previous 12 lines.

– Continued

Page : 1 | 2 | 3 

Top | Poetry Knowledge Zone