A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry (ereader with android TXT) 📖

quatrain there should be a pause, not full, nor

producing the effect of a break, as of one who had finished what he had

got to say, and not preparing a transition to a new subject, but as of

one who is turning over what has been said in the mind to enforce it

further.

 

“d. The opening of the second system, strictly the first tercet, should

turn back upon the thought or sentiment, take it up and carry it forward

to the conclusion.

 

“e. The conclusion should be a resultant, summing the total of the

suggestion in the preceding lines, as a lakelet in the hills gathers

into a still pool the running waters contributed by its narrow area of

gradients.

 

“f. While the conclusion should leave a sense of finish and

completeness, it is necessary to avoid anything like epigrammatic point.

By this the sonnet is distinguished from the epigram. In the epigram the

conclusion is everything; all that goes before it is only there for the

sake of the surprise of the end, or d�nouement, as in a logical

syllogism the premisses are nothing but as they necessitate the

conclusion. In the sonnet the emphasis is nearly, but not quite, equally

distributed, there being a slight swell, or rise, about its middle. The

sonnet must not advance by progressive climax, or end abruptly; it

should subside, and leave off quietly.”

Miss Lockwood, in the Introduction to her admirable collection of English sonnets, [Footnote: Sonnets, English and American, selected by Laura E. Lockwood. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916.] makes a still briefer summary of the thought-scheme of the regular Italian sonnet: it “should have a clear and unified theme, stated in the first quatrain, developed or proved in the second, confirmed or regarded from a new point of view in the first tercet, and concluded in the second tercet. It had thus four parts, divided unevenly into two separate systems, eight lines being devoted to placing the thought before the mind, and six to deducing the conclusion from that thought.”

A surprisingly large number of sonnets are built upon simple formulas like “As”—for the octave—and “So”—for the sestet—(see Andrew Lang’s “The Odyssey,” Oxford, No. 841); or “When” and “Then” (see Keats’s “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” Oxford, No. 635). A situation plus a thought gives a mood; or a mood plus an event gives a mental resolve, etc. The possible combinations are infinite, but the law of logical relation between octave and sestet, premise and conclusion, is immutable.

Let the reader now test these laws of sonnet form and thought by reading aloud one of the most familiarly known of all English sonnets—Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”:

 

“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 stared at the Pacific—and all his men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”

Read next another strictly Petrarchan sonnet, where the thought divisions of quatrains and tercets are marked with exceptional clearness, Eugene Lee-Hamilton’s disillusioned “Sea-Shell Murmurs”:

 

“The hollow sea-shell that for years hath stood

On dusty shelves, when held against the ear

Proclaims its stormy parent; and we hear

The faint far murmur of the breaking flood.

 

“We hear the sea. The sea? It is the blood

In our own veins, impetuous and near,

And pulses keeping pace with hope and fear

And with our feelings’ every shifting mood.

 

“Lo, in my heart I hear, as in a shell,

The murmur of a world beyond the grave,

Distinct, distinct, though faint and far it be.

 

“Thou fool; this echo is a cheat as well,—

The hum of earthly instincts; and we crave

A world unreal as the shell-heard sea.”

And now read aloud one of the best-known of Shakspere’s sonnets, where he follows his favorite device of a threefold statement of his central thought, using a different image in each quatrain, and closing with a personal application of the idea:

 

“That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see’st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west;

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed whereon it must expire,

Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.

This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

Where there is beauty such as this, it is an impertinence to insist that Shakspere has not conformed to the special type of beauty represented in the Petrarchan sonnet. He chose not to conform. He won with other tactics. If the reader will analyse the form and thought of the eighty sonnets in the Oxford Book, or the two hundred collected by Miss Lockwood, he will feel the charm of occasional irregularity in the handling of both the Petrarchan and the Shaksperean sonnet. But he is more likely, I think, to become increasingly aware that whatever restraints are involved in adherence to typical forms are fully compensated by the rich verbal beauty demanded by the traditional arrangement of rhymes.

For the sonnet, an intricately wrought model of the reflective lyric, requires a peculiarly intimate union of thinking and singing. It may be, as it often was in the Elizabethan period, too full of thought to allow free-winged song, and it may also be too full of uncontrolled, unbalanced emotion to preserve fit unity of thought. Conversely, there may not be enough thought and emotion to fill the fourteen lines: the idea not being of “sonnet size.” The difficult question as to whether there is such a thing as an “average-sized” thought and lyrical reflection upon it has been touched upon in an earlier chapter. The limit of a sentence, says Mark Pattison, “is given by the average capacity of human apprehension…. The limit of a sonnet is imposed by the average duration of an emotional mood…. May we go so far as to say that fourteen lines is the average number which a thought requires for its adequate embodiment before attention must collapse?”

The proper distribution of thought and emotion, that is, the balance of the different parts of a sonnet, is also a very delicate affair. It is like trimming a sailboat. Wordsworth defended Milton’s frequent practice of letting the thought of the octave overflow somewhat into the sestet, believing it “to aid in giving that pervading sense of intense unity in which the excellence of the sonnet has always seemed to me mainly to consist.” Most lovers of the sonnet would differ here with these masters of the art. Whether the weight of thought and feeling can properly be shifted to a final couplet is another debatable question, and critics will always differ as to the artistic value of the “big” line or “big” word which marks the culmination of emotion in many a sonnet. The strange or violent or sonorous word, however splendid in itself, may not fit the curve of the sonnet in which it appears: it may be like a big red apple crowded into the toe of a Christmas stocking.

Nor must the sonnet lean towards either obscurity—the vice of Elizabethan sonnets, or obviousness—the vice of Wordsworth’s sonnets after 1820. The obscure sonnet, while it may tempt the reader’s intellectual ingenuity, affords no basis for his emotion, and the obvious sonnet provides no stimulus for his thought. Conventionality of subject and treatment, like the endless imitation of Italian and French sonnet-motives and sonnet-sequences, sins against the law of lyric sincerity. In no lyric form does mechanism so easily obtrude itself. A sonnet is either, like Marlowe’s raptures, “all air and fire,” or else it is a wooden toy.