Before proceeding, read a brief lecture on lyric poetry.
The sonnet originated in the European romance and “courtly-love” traditions. Its most celebrated early practitioners, Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarca (aka Petrarch), wrote sonnet sequences chronicling the shifting moods of a speaker suffering the alternating ecstasy, exhilaration, pain, and frustration of unrequited love. The object of the male speaker’s desire is always a beloved whose affections he is doomed never to win, usually because she is either married or above his social station or both. So an essential feature of these poems is the unattainability of the beloved, the adulterous or otherwise forbidden nature of the lover’s desire making it all the more poignant.
It should be stressed that these women, though perhaps based on real persons (Dante’s Beatrice, Petrarch’s Laura), are literary fictions. The artificiality of the form is especially evident in the repeated occurrence of stock physical descriptions (alabaster skin, rosy cheeks, golden tresses, dark eyes) and in the alternating hot and cold flashes of the suffering lover (on fire with lust the one moment, freezing with dejection and despair in the next). Such cliché reminds us that rather than a portrayal of some real and common social practice, the sonnet form aestheticizes human desire (both its positive and negative aspects), projecting it onto an idealized and self-consciously artificial domain.
Such artifice, together with our own aesthetic preferences and assumptions, can make it difficult to appreciate the emotional power of these poems. Yet the Italian sonnets of Dante and Petrarch (the latter especially) were admired and widely imitated by English poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The earliest of these writers, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, translated Italian sonnets into English before writing their own original poems which, while based on the Italian, expanded their subject matter and experimented with forms, especially rhyme patterns, that deviated from those earlier models. So while the European romance tradition as described above is featured in numerous English sonnets of the sixteenth century, the subject matter of the genre became increasingly varied over time even as the form itself (fourteen lines of iambic pentameter with a fixed rhyme pattern) remained essentially unchanged (and has endured, indeed, even to the present day).
We begin with two sonnets by Shakespeare, both of them love poems, but far more sophisticated in their emotional register, psychological depth, and handling of imagery and metaphor than their now distant Italian models.
This poem, as is typical of Shakespeare’s sonnets, may be said
to consist of four sections: three quatrains (each one a grouping of four lines
whose final syllables rhyme in an alternating pattern), and a couplet (two lines
whose final syllables rhyme). The fourteen-line structure might be described
using the following shorthand, where the letters a b c d
e f g each represent a rhyme sound common to all lines sharing that
letter:
1
2
3
Exercise one: write four sentences,
one for each section (Q1, Q2, Q3, and C), that paraphrase the poem. Your
sentences should be as brief as possible and literal. That is, you must aim to
ignore altogether the figurative language Shakespeare uses—the poem’s
many wonderful images—and write only the literal meaning. For example, if
I write, “My soul is on fire,” I probably mean something like,
“I’m in love,” or “I’m extremely excited or passionate about
something.” Similarly, if I say that my kitten is “all peaches and
cream,” I mean that my kitten is cute or soft or mellow or pretty or some
combination of these. Structure your response as follows:
Exercise two: taking each of the
four sections, one at a time, list all concrete nouns (i.e., words that
correspond to things we can see, touch, taste, smell, or feel). Do not include
pronouns (thou and me). Your list should look something like this:
Examine your word lists, one section at a time, and see if you
can come up with a single word that summarizes all the words in that section.
The word you come up with will be a label that designates a distinct image
cluster. Again, devise a little map:
By now you will have discovered that the final section C, the
rhyming couplet, has no concrete nouns and therefore no label. Putting that
section aside for now, look again at the first three, Q1 through Q3. What do
these distinct image clusters have in common? How do they differ? And what do Q1
and Q2 have in common that is distinct from Q3?
Exercise three: now, consider that
final couplet, section C. Who is said to be leaving? The speaker, or the one
s/he addresses? Is this a surprise? Does it make sense, given the rest of the
poem? Who, after all, is dying? One way to deal with this problem is to focus on
the pronoun “that” in the final line. All pronouns have antecedents,
i.e., nouns already mentioned and to which they refer. In this
sentence—”You are smart and funny and that is why I love
you”—the antecedent of the pronoun “that” is the
beloved’s state of being smart and funny. What is the antecedent of
“that” in the poem’s final line, and how might the answer help us to
understand the idea that it is the addressee (“thou”) and not the
speaker who is leaving?
Repeat exercises one and two for Sonnet 15 and comment on any of the poem’s most striking features: