Page 48 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

Unit 4: Major Literary Terms-IV

When English sonnets were introduced by Thomas Wyatt in the early 16th century, his sonnets and Notes
those of his contemporary the Earl of Surrey were chiefly translations from the Italian of Petrarch
and the French of Ronsard and others. While Wyatt introduced the sonnet into English, it was
Surrey who gave it a rhyming meter, and a structural division into quatrains of a kind that now
characterizes the typical English sonnet. Having previously circulated in manuscripts only, both
poets’ sonnets were first published in Richard Tottel’s Songes and Sonnetts, better known as Tottel’s
Miscellany (1557).
It was, however, Sir Philip Sidney’s sequence Astrophel and Stella (1591) that started the English
vogue for sonnet sequences: the next two decades saw sonnet sequences by William Shakespeare,
Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, Fulke Greville, William Drummond of
Hawthornden, and many others. These sonnets were all essentially inspired by the Petrarchan
tradition, and generally treat of the poet’s love for some woman; with the exception of Shakespeare’s
sequence. The form is often named after Shakespeare, not because he was the first to write in this
form but because he became its most famous practitioner. The form consists of fourteen lines
structured as three quatrains and a couplet. The third quatrain generally introduces an unexpected
sharp thematic or imagistic “turn”; the volta. In Shakespeare’s sonnets, however, the volta usually
comes in the couplet, and usually summarizes the theme of the poem or introduces a fresh new look
at the theme. With only a rare exception, the meter is iambic pentameter, although there is some
accepted metrical flexibility (e.g., lines ending with an extra-syllable feminine rhyme, or a trochaic
foot rather than an iamb, particularly at the beginning of a line). The usual rhyme scheme is end-
rhymed a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g.
This example, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, illustrates the form (with some typical variances one may
expect when reading an Elizabethan-age sonnet with modern eyes):

Let me not to the marriage of true minds (a)
Admit impediments, love is not love (b)*
Which alters when it alteration finds, (a)
Or bends with the remover to remove. (b)*
O no, it is an ever fixèd mark (c)**
That looks on tempests and is never shaken; (d)***
It is the star to every wand’ring bark, (c)**

Whose worth’s unknown although his height be taken. (d)***
Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks (e)
Within his bending sickle’s compass come, (f )*
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, (e)
But bears it out even to the edge of doom: (f )*
If this be error and upon me proved, (g)*
I never writ, nor no man ever loved. (g)*
* PRONUNCIATION/RHYME: Note changes in pronunciation since composition.
** PRONUNCIATION/METER: “Fixed” pronounced as two-syllables, “fixed.”
*** RHYME/METER: Feminine-rhyme-ending, eleven-syllable alternative.

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