IX Back, he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky, With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high! Blood-red were his spurs i' the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat, When they shot him down on the highway, Down like a dog on the highway, And he lay in his blood on the highway, with the bunch of lace at his throat. And still of a winter's night, they say, when the wind is in the trees, When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas, When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor, A highwayman comes riding Riding-riding— A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door. XI Over the cobbles he clatters and clangs in the dark inn-yard; He taps with his whip on the shutters, but all is locked and barred; He whistles a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there But the landlord's black-eyed daughter, Bess, the landlord's daughter, Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair. Alfred Noyes (1880- ) A Sonnet is a moment's monument,— To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be, Carve it in ivory or in ebony, As Day or Night may rule; and let time see A Sonnet is a coin: its face reveals The soul,—its converse, to what Power 'tis due:- Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue, It serve: or, 'mid the dark wharf's cavernous breath, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) ALTHOUGH primitive poetry was largely spontaneous and more or less irregular, skill provoked emulation, poets soon followed models, and many fixed stanzaic forms eventually became established. In like manner at a later period whole poems came to be modeled on certain structural patterns, the chief features of which were uniformity in meter, in rime, in the number of lines, and, sometimes, in the use of a refrain. Great poems have as a rule been of simple structure, but the greatest poets have often, for some of their compositions, delighted in the fixed forms. Because of their difficulty, these forms challenge the careful workman. They encourage the search for the right word and compel condensation. While the thought may be as varied as human experience, the form offers the reader the pleasure of recognition. The most famous of all the fixed forms is the sonnet, great examples of which are found in Italian, French, German, and other modern languages as well as English. The sonnet was a product of the early Italian Renaissance,- -a period when the crafts of the goldsmith, the painter, and the poet were plied with equal care and skill. It was introduced into England early in the sixteenth century by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and at once attained a remarkable vogue. Shakespeare, Spenser, and Sidney, as well as a number of minor Elizabethan poets, wrote sonnet sequences. Between the death of Milton and the dawn of the Romantic period the form was neglected, but from the appearance of William Lisle Bowles's Sonnets in 1789 it has, to the present day, embodied some of the finest thoughts of great poets both English and American. In poetry written in English there are, in order of importance, three main types of the sonnet: the Italian, the Shakespearean, and the Spenserian. The Italian, or Petrarchan, receives its name from the fact that it was used by Petrarch and other Italian poets. Each of the other two types takes its name from the most illustrious English poet who early made an extended use of it. The first great English poet to use the Italian sonnet form was the scholarly John Milton. Afflicted, it is believed, by cataracts which a modern surgeon could have removed in an hour, the poet of Comus served the Commonwealth in spite of failing eyesight, and lived to become the author of Paradise Lost. Milton's reaction from the gloom of blindness is given in a sonnet which concludes with one of the most frequently quoted—and misquoted— lines in the language. The following is a The following is a perfect Italian sonnet of the purest type. It consists of fourteen iambic pentameter lines. The first eight lines form the octave, which rimes abbaabba; the remaining six lines, riming cdecde, constitute the sestet. WHEN I CONSIDER When I consider how my light is spent и Ere half my days in this dark world and wide, And that one talent which is death to hide Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present My true account, lest He returning chide,"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?" I fondly ask:-But Patience, to prevent That murmur, soon replies: "God doth not need Is kingly; thousands at His bidding speed John Milton (1608-1674) John Keats-who, among English poets, was peculiarly the high priest of beauty-was especially stirred by the art and mythology of ancient Greece. In a sonnet he expressed his feelings upon first reading the Iliad and the Odyssey in the translations by the Elizabethan poet, George Chapman. Keats, of course, had Balboa, not Cortez, in mind. Darien is the Isthmus of Panama. All that was said of the form of Milton's "When I Consider" is true of this sonnet except that the sestet rimes cdcdcd, a succession nearly as common as cdecde. Whether a sonnet is printed in two divisions, or four, or three, or one, the structural principles are the same. ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne; Then felt I like some watcher of the skies се John Keats (1795-1821) The two parts of the Italian sonnet have more than a stanzaic significance. The thought is always cast in a certain form. The octave presents a thought, question, or problem, which the sestet completes appropriately. Verify this statement with regard to the sonnets already quoted, observing that the point of division is not always |