The Sonnet Then: Understanding the Anatomy of a Sonnet
Take ‘em or leave ‘em, sonnets are one of the most enduring and well-known poetic forms. Named from the term sonnetto, meaning “little song,” sonnets are also one of the oldest, most lyrical, and strictest closed-structure forms, involving a particular meter, rhyme scheme, line count, and thematic organization.
For these reasons, this fourteen-line form tends to provoke and polarize poets.
Phillis Levin calls the sonnet “a monument of praise, a field of play, a chamber of sudden change” in the introduction to The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. But plenty of poets reject the limitations of the form, including Diane Wakowski, who equates writing a sonnet with literary fascism. More recently, poets have put the sonnet’s subversive potential to the test, and, in doing so, have drawn attention to the problematic legacy that attends the sonnet form.
“A monument of praise, a field of play, a chamber of sudden change.”
Let’s take a journey together in this 2-part series on the sonnet. In this article, we’ll explore the history of the sonnet, and we’ll review how different sonnet types emerged at different historical moments. Next week, we’ll continue our exploration by looking at how romantic, Victorian, modern, and contemporary poets play with the form. In the process, you’ll learn about Italian and English sonnets, the Spenserian sonnet, and the curtal sonnet. By the end, perhaps you’ll find yourself weighing the use-value of the sonnet form today.
Anatomy of a Sonnet
At its most stripped-down level, a sonnet has four main components:
14 lines
Standardized rhyme scheme
Consistent meter
The “volta,” also known as a “turn,” that marks a tonal or thematic shift
Over the centuries, though, various poets have taken liberties by deliberately omitting or altering some of these four components. This means the specifics of these characterizations (e.g., what is the rhyme scheme exactly?) change depending on who is writing, when, and what they hope to express. One of the sonnet’s most popular themes remains steady throughout the centuries: to praise someone or something that is beloved.
Laura and the Petrarchan Sonnet
Sonnets are commonly understood to have originated in the thirteenth-century Italian court by poet Giacomo de Lentini, although the fourteenth-century humanist scholar Francesco Petrarca (commonly referred to as Petrarch) was its most famous early practitioner. His collection Il Canzionere features 366 poems, 317 of which are sonnets, and focuses on a woman named Laura. We read repeatedly about how the speaker, which is essentially the poem’s narrator, seeks to love Laura but is never quite able to obtain her love in return. Laura is never given a voice – sometimes her voice is described loosely as an aside – which positions her as the love object (object being the operative term here) who is sought but never caught. This style of poetry, written to express the unattainable love for another, usually an objectified female figure, is referred to as “Petrarchism,” and the Petrarchan sonnet has become synonymous with what we understand as an Italian sonnet today.
In Petrarch’s “Sonnet 227,” we can see the theme of unattainable love play out along with literary devices common to Petrarchan sonnets. Here’s a translation of it by A. S. Kline:
Breeze, blowing that blonde curling hair,
stirring it, and being softly stirred in turn,
scattering that sweet gold about, then
gathering it, in a lovely knot of curls again,
you linger around bright eyes whose loving sting
pierces me so, till I feel it and weep,
and I wander searching for my treasure,
like a creature that often shies and kicks: ← Part 1/Octave (the problem)
now I seem to find her, now I realize
she’s far away, now I’m comforted, now despair,
now longing for her, now truly seeing her.
Happy air, remain here with your
living rays: and you, clear running stream,
why can’t I exchange my path for yours? ← Part 2/Sestet (the resolution)
In “Sonnet 227,” the poetic speaker seeks solace in nature from the pain of unrequited love. The Petrarchan sonnet characteristically treats its theme in two parts. The first eight lines, also known as the octave, state a problem or pose a question. Here, the problem centers on emotional turmoil the poetic speaker feels over the fact that the wind is closer to the beloved Laura and can caress her body in a way that the speaker cannot. Traditionally the octave is rhymed abbaabba. The last six lines, known as the sestet, resolve the problem or answer the question. In “Sonnet 227,” the resolution of the sestet centers on the poetic speaker deciding they’d rather be a stream than wind in order to always flow forward without the distractions of love. The rhyme scheme of the second part, the sestet, can vary, however, usually following a cdecde, cdccdc, or cdedce pattern.
Common literary devices found in Petrarchism include similes (e.g., “and I wander searching for my treasure, / like a creature that often shies and kicks), metaphors (e.g., “you linger around bright eyes whose loving sting / pierces me so, till I feel it and weep”), and conceits, or extended metaphors that make comparisons between two dissimilar things, usually likening a woman’s body to typically grandiose or otherworldly objects (e.g., Laura’s hair as gold coins that the wind collects, and on the treasure chest that is her body). Petrarchism also uses the literary device of “the blazon,” or a lengthy description of the parts of the object of affection, usually from the top down.
The Petrarchan sonnet became a major influence on European poetry. It soon became a poetic staple in Spain, Portugal, and France, and was introduced to Poland, where it spread to other Slavic literatures. Something about wanting someone who doesn’t want you back or whom you can’t have resonates as much then as it does now! As sonnets spread, they became adapted to the standard meter of the different languages that explored the form. For example, France reformed the sonnet into a 12-syllable iambic line (known as the alexandrine sonnet), and it became iambic pentameter, which was meant to mirror the cadence of natural speech, with English-speaking poets.
Renaissance Rebirth: Shakespeare’s Baes
Few forms are more associated with Renaissance poetry than the sonnet, thanks largely to the cultural awareness of Shakespeare. (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” anyone?) Sonnets, along with other Italian verse forms, were first made popular by Sir Thomas Wyatt, who brought his translations and poetic imitations of Petrarch to the royal court of King Henry VIII. Fellow courtier Henry Howard is often credited with creating the English sonnet form during the 16th century with his publication of Songes and Sonettes (later referred to as Tottel’s Miscellany) in 1557. Tottel’s Miscellany was hot, and the sonnet form spread wildly!
The themes explored in the sonnet form broadened as well, with poet John Donne writing on other types of love than romantic, including religious devotion, and John Milton writing sonnets to support his political views and lament his health concerns.
Fun fact: The Renaissance-era sonnet is also thought of as the first poetic form intended to be read silently, as opposed to performed and shared.
While the form was adopted and enthusiastically embraced by the English during the Renaissance, Shakespeare gives us what most think of as the sonnet today: a 14-lined, rhymed, iambic pentameter structure following a tight rhyme scheme and metrical regularity to emphasize its musicality. The English sonnet (AKA the Shakespearean sonnet) consists of two parts. The first part, the proposition, is made up of three quatrains (or 4-line stanzas). The second part, the volta, consists of a couplet (a 2-line stanza) that seeks to resolve the proposition set up by the quatrains by giving a new perspective on the topic. The rhyme scheme follows a distinct pattern we can see in “Sonnet 130”:
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red, than her lips red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. ←Quatrain 1(ABAB)
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. ←Quatrain 2 (CDCD)
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground: ←Quatrain 3 (EFEF)
And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare,
As any she belied with false compare. ←Couplet (GG)
Shakespearean sonnets follow the literary devices of the Italian sonnet, with fun twists. He plays with the device of “the blazon,” which traditionally catalogues the physical attributes of a love object, by focusing on attributes that aren’t necessarily flattering and break cliché imagery. We see examples of this in “Sonnet 130.” Shakespeare’s sonnets include a few love objects. Of his 154 sonnets, the first 126 are written to a young man, and the last 28, including “Sonnet 130,” address a mysterious “dark lady.” In the sonnet, she is described as having eyes that aren’t bright like the sun, her cheeks are unlike roses, and she doesn’t smell great. Her hair is described as black wires growing from her head, and it sounds like she stomp-walks loudly. The speaker unfavorably compares his lover's body to a series of beautiful things, suggesting she is less beautiful than the sun, snow, roses, or a goddess. Each quatrain outlines this truth in varying shades. Then we get to the volta. Ultimately, the speaker concludes that, even if the mistress cannot credibly be compared to the typical imagery of love poems, his love is real and valuable, nonetheless, as is the beauty of the mistress. In this way, Shakespeare suggests that love and beauty shouldn’t be understood through abstract, poetic comparisons alone, but should be valued for being real and flawed and messy. The fact that Shakespeare uses one of the strictest forms of poetry to applaud the messiness of life might account for the fascination his sonnets still hold today.
Another popular sonnet form was created by Edmund Spenser, the author of the epic and awesomely allegorical poem The Fairy Queen, which celebrates the dynasty of Queen Elizabeth I. The Spenserian sonnet is similar to the Shakespearean sonnet, with a variation on the rhyme scheme. We can see this in “Sonnet 75” from his collection Amoretti, which chronicles his courtship and eventual marriage to Elizabeth Boyle:
One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey. ←Quatrain 1 (ABAB)
“Vain man,” said she, “that dost in vain assay,
A mortal thing so to immortalize;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise.” ←Quatrain 2 (BCBC)
“Not so,” (quod I) “let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name: ←Quatrain 3 (CDCD)
Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.” ←Couplet (EE)
Spenser plays with theme, too, often using a discussion of love to talk about the power of poetry itself. In “Sonnet 75,” the poetic speaker wants his beloved to be remembered forever, even as she argues that such ideas are pointless, ego-driven fantasies. She’s a human being, she retorts, and as such her name and memory will one day disappear, like her beauty, like her physical body. Get over it, she seems to insist. The speaker, however, feels compelled to immortalize her, to grant her a triumph over death through his poetry.
There’s a problematic legacy at work here. Each major sonnet movement centers on a woman as a love object: Petrarch had Laura, Dante had Beatrice, Shakespeare had the dark lady, Sidney had Lady Penelope. The love object in Amoretti is one of the first instances of the lover having and using a voice, which is immortalized arguably without her consent.
Join us next week for the second installment on the sonnet, then and now, when we’ll examine how the romantic poets rejected the strict confines of the form while reinventing it all the same. We’ll take a glance at the rise in the sonnet’s popularity again in the Victorian period, and how that popularity continues into the modern and contemporary literary movements.
This article was posted on April 25, 2023. Written by:
