The Sonnet

While the precise origin of the sonnet remains obscure, it is thought to have developed from the Italian canzone (Italian for “song”) of the 13th century. This early sonnet consisted of an octave (8-line stanza) followed by a sestet (6-line stanza). It could also be divided into two quatrain (4-line) and two tercet (3-line) sections, resulting in 14 lines altogether. The form was also characterized by a volta, a turn in thought occurring between the octave and the sestet. A standard rhyme scheme of abbaabba in the octave developed through the works of Italian poets Dante Aligheri and Petrarch, who wrote in the 13th and 14th centuries. Petrarch imitated Dante's La vita nuova (1292), a story interspersed with sonnets addressed to Dante’s ideal love Beatrice, but for Petrarch it is Laura who inspires the speaker of the sonnets to offer praise and to argue about virtue and vice, spirit and body. The developing sonnet tradition thus embraced not only formal rules, but also specific topics, images, and metaphors that quickly became conventions in English poetry.

Poets Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard introduced the sonnet to England around 1520 through translations from Petrarch’s Canzoniere (Songbook). Wyatt preserved the use of the Italian rhyme scheme in the first eight lines, but varied the Petrarchan model by ending with a closing couplet, two end-rhymed lines.

Surrey’s important formal gift to the sonnet was to change the standard rhyme scheme, adapting to the fact that there are fewer rhyming words in English than in Italian. Surrey’s new model of abab cdcd efef gg came to be known as the Shakespearean sonnet through its beautiful use by Shakespeare in a sonnet sequence he wrote (the sequence was privately circulated, but not published until 1609). The tradition of writing a sequence of many sonnets, based also on the Petrarchan model, was initiated in English by Sir Philip Sidney in Astrophel and Stella (1580), a prolonged argument by the speaker, Astrophel, aimed at overcoming his mistress's indifference and chastity. Another important sequence of the period, Amoretti (1595) by English writer Edmund Spenser, employs similar arguments, though it ends with the possibility that the lovers will unite and eventually marry. In Shakespeare's extraordinary sequence, the beauteous being addressed is most often a young man, rather than an idealized female, who is alternately praised and blamed by the tormented speaker. Shakespeare adds to and varies the Petrarchan model in other ways as well, introducing themes of death and aging and the undying fame poetry lends to the self and the beloved. He also makes both the young man and the Dark Lady of the later sonnets less than perfect a great departure from the conventional picture of the ideal beloved. And in Sonnet 130, he makes fun of Petrachan images of beauty:

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.




Following the popularity of the Shakespearean sonnet, Milton turned back to the Italian pattern of rhyme. This so-called ”Miltonic ”sonnet became the accepted form for two centuries, until Keats's use of the Shakespearean sonnet helped revive that form in the early 1800s. English Victorian poets such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning continued to explore the form. But the most radical innovator in the Victorian era was Gerard Manley Hopkins, who introduced the notion of sprung rhythm, which imitates the strong beats heard in speech rather than following a regular pattern. Hopkins wrote poems of metaphysical celebration and suffering in which the breaking and mending of religious faith were echoed in fractured forms and extremely dense patterns of sound.

Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee,
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but oh thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? Scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruised bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

(“Carrion Comfort,” 1918)



These examples show how a traditional form like the sonnet can move through history both staying the same and changing through the minds and art of poets. Moving into the 20th century, such diverse poets as Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E. E. Cummings, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Seamus Heaney, Marilyn Hacker, and Bill Knott have experimented with the possibilities of the sonnet, the poetic form Dante Gabriel Rossetti called “a moment's monument.”