In Our Time - The Sonnet

Episode Date: June 21, 2001

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Sonnet, the most enduring form in the poet’s armoury. For over five hundred years its fourteen lines have exercised poetic minds from Petrarch and Shakespeare, to Milton, Wordsworth and Heaney. It has inspired the duelling verse of ‘sonneteering’, encapsulated the political perspectives of Cromwell and Kennedy and most of all it has provided a way to meditate upon love.Dante Gabriel Rossetti called it “the moment’s monument”. What is it about the Sonnet that has inspired poets to bind themselves by its strictures again and again? With Sir Frank Kermode, author of many books including Shakespeare’s Language; Phillis Levin, Poet in Residence and Professor of English at Hofstra University; Jonathan Bate, King Alfred Professor of English at the University of Liverpool.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. The sonnets, the most enduring form in the poet's armoury. For four or five hundred years, it's 14 lines of exercised poetic minds from Petrach and Shakespeare

to Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Wilfred Owen and Hini. It's inspired the dueling verse of sonneteering and encapsulated the political perspectives of Oliver Cromwell and J.F. Kennedy, and most of all, it's provided a way to meditate upon love. Dante Gabriel Rossetti called it the moment's monument. What is it about the sonnet that's inspired poets to bind themselves by its strictures again and again? With me to discuss the idiosyncratic allure of the sonnet and the use that it's been put to by poets over the centuries

is the distinguished critic, Professor Sir Frank Commode, author of many books including Shakespeare's language. Also with us is Phyllis Levin, poet in residence and professor of English at Hofstra University, the author of a fourth coming book, the Penguin Book of the Sonnet, and we're joined too by Jonathan Bait, King Alfred Professor of English at the University of Liverpool, author of several books including Shakespeare and Ovid.

Just to start right at the beginning, Jonathan, can you tell us what a sonnet is and define the two main different sorts of sonnets? Yes, I suppose it's one of the first things that school children learn about poetry is that a sonnet is a poem that has 14 lines. There are a few exceptions to that, but the form originated as a 14-line form,

and that is how it stayed all through the centuries. It's a form that began in Renaissance Italy, and Petrarch, the Italian Renaissance poet, was the great early practitioner of it, and the form of his sonnets had an 8-6 division. So an idea would be set up in the first eight lines, where there would be a rhyme running all the way through, that was known as the octave,

and then there would be what's called a turn, a twist of ideas at the end of the eighth line, and the second half called the Cestet, the remaining six lines, would sort of give a kind of counter-argument to the beginning. That form was imported into England in the 16th century by courtier poets, notably a poet called Thomas Wyatt. But in the course of the 16th century, the English form became slightly different, and the typical form that it developed into by the end of that century, and Shakespeare was the great exemplar of this, was with a 4-4-4-2 formation. So it sounds a bit like a football team.

So that's three quatrains, each with their own rhymes, and then a couplet at the end. So more of a 12-2 division rather than the 8-6. Thank you, so we'll unpick that a bit. Phyllis Levin, the sonnet came from Italy, as Jonathan's remarked. Do we know when it first came, how it? Was it invented or did it arrive by this sort of emergence that sometimes happens with things? Actually, we do know the first sonnets were written by Giacomo Dalantino.

He was writing in the early 13th century. The sonnet was probably invented around 1225, somewhere between 1225 and 1230. He was a member of the court of Frederick II, one of 14 notaries, which was an attorney who specialized in dealing with documents. And one of the interesting things is that these notaries, were the first to translate much of law into the vernacular, and they were also the first poets to write in the Italian vernacular. So there's something about the relationship of law and poetry

that's already at its origins. The octave came from Vistromboto, which was an eight-line Sicilian form, that was sung by peasants. The mystery of the sonnet is why these six lines were added on by D'Lenthalentino, and there are a number of theories. about that. I've read someone

that something to do with Arabic mathematics was involved in this. Can you deco... Give us something about that? The members of the court of Frederick II most probably were very familiar with Plato's Temaeus.

And in the Temaeus, there are several theories of proportionality. And one of these theories is a theory that's still used today in the design of buildings, interior decorators, landscape designers. The divine proportion. Fibonacci himself had visited the emperor, the emperor's court. There had been a correspondence. So when I looked into that, I began to think that it's very probable that

Dalantino was exposed to not only the theory of proportionality in the Temeas, but also Fibonacci's theory. Fibonacci in 1202 published a book that we called the Book of the Abacus. That book introduced Arabic numbers into Europe, as well as the decimal system. And the asymmetry of the sonnet is one of the mysteries of the sonnet, and the ratio of the divine proportion, and the ratios of successive numbers, consecutive numbers in the Fibonacci sequence, have that disproportionality.

Now, Frank Komod, why do you think that when it came across to this country we didn't just adopt the sonnet, particularly is it been so outstanding, successful with Petrarch and is one of the wonders of literature of the time. Why did we change it, do you think? There are different pressures. One of them, of course, is the character of the language. The Italian offers an abundance of rhyming words.

English does not. So the business of writing heavily rhyme, poetry of any sort, is more difficult in English than it is in Italian, which is why people try to translate Dante in Tertarimo, his form, often find it extremely difficult, whereas the Italian seems almost too easy. And I think the first sonneteers, I think Jonathan mentioned, did see the Patrarchan or Italian form as a good idea,

whether or no they had all this metaphysical backing that Phyllis has mentioned. But in the end, it seems. seemed to be un-English. It's something very curious about the Italian sonnets. It has an octave, or eight lines, which have only two rhymes, to share among the eight lines. Then it has a Cestet, which has only six lines with three rhyming patterns. So it is distinctly unbalanced. And the other thing I think is, and this is a very crude way of putting it, I think the English sonneteers really wanted that snappy couplet at the end. They wanted the, they wanted the the three quadradiens, and then a self-contained

what's sometimes called a commentary couplet at the end. It's a trap. I think the Shakespeare sonics, which are not very good, are usually not very good, because something goes wrong with the couplet at the end, I think. But it somehow suited the language, not only because of the question of rhyme and so on, but something else, some kind of temperamental quality,

which didn't like this kind of lopsided, a heavy Italian form and wanted something lighter also of course it easier to write I just add there I think sonnets are easy to write there's a certain notion that they're very difficult but any schoolboy can write

Shakespeare-type sonnets it's very easy things if you really want to test yourself you choose other verse forms much more complicated John Lunday can we talk about the fact that the sonnets seem to be put to greatest use in the early century is dealing with love was that

so clearly established by Petrarch in the way, not only in the fact of writing sonnets, but in fact that they were written to Laura, that people felt bound to follow him. Yes, the most influential sonnet sequence ever written was Petrarch's love poems to Loura, and the English sonnets really began as translations of Petrarch, and then English poets began writing in a similar style themselves.

There's a big question, though, about Petrarch and Lauer, or indeed about the English example, Sir Philip Sidney, his sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella, which was very influential in the Elizabethan period, and then Shakespeare's sonnets. And that is, are they really about love, about being in love, or is it more that writing a series of sonnets as exercises on the theme of love is a poet's way of testing himself?

I sometimes think that what we should really think of sonnet sequence is being rather like a composer, writing a set of variations on a theme. It's something you have to do to prove yourself. And Petrarch did it on the theme of love, but we don't actually know what were the real circumstances of his relationship with Lauer, just as we don't know what were the real circumstances

of Sydney's relationship with Penelope Rich, the woman to whom he dedicated his sonnets, or indeed Shakespeare's with the lovely boy for whom he wrote his. So I think that there's something about the idea of love as a testing ground that is crucial to the first. but we shouldn't necessarily go from that to saying all love sonnets of the Renaissance period are about poets being in love. You think it could be not only testing but a form of idealised love as well.

So these names are not chosen at random but just picked as objects on which to fasten and attempt to display this. That's absolutely right. I mean the name Lauerra, the name of Petrax love, is also supposed to be suggestive of the idea of a laurel, which is the wreath of honour that a poet gets for his great achievement. The name's Stella, which Sydney gives to the object of his sonnets, Penelope Devere, suggests a star. There's a sense of reaching for the stars, a sense of the idealised love.

Of course, the intriguing thing about Shakespeare's sonnets is very unusually for an Elizabethan sonneteer. He doesn't name the lovely boy and the dark lady. Nearly all the other Elizabethan sonnet sequences, some sort of classical or idealising name is given to a love object. Shakespeare is strangely reticent to that. Phyllis Levin, why do you think the sonnet was so associated with love poetry? And did that come from, you said the peasant song, the strombotto, the eight-line thing which began. Was that, were those love songs in the other? They often were, and also the province, the love songs of Provence, were being translated by those same poets in the court.

And also, I agree with you very much, Jonathan. It's a way of discovering the self, especially with idealized love. When you look at the sonnet, it progresses more and more toward what seems. to be real, whatever that is. And Shakespeare is the turning point there, maybe because the names are missing, people can imagine the real more. It's paradoxical.

Without the name, we imagine the real, we project the real. That is the great paradox of the love sonnet, that what it depends on is not having the object of your love. The love sonnet is a poem of longing. If you actually had your beloved, then you wouldn't have your sonnet anymore. Well, that's not true of the Dark Lady, after all.

I think the real difference, as you suggested, came when love as narrowly considered as it were in a court ceased to be of interest to a new poetry reading public. The 90s, 1590s in England were time, great outbursts of sonnet writing, and obviously they weren't all by courtiers or about courtly love and so. They spread out much more widely. as in the case of Shakespeare's. And then after that, it soon became clear that you could use the form either in its Italian shape or its English shape for devotional verses.

And John Dunn found, for example, that there was a nice match between an adaptation of the Italian form and the schemes of meditation that he learned as a young Catholic. He used these Jesuit schemes of meditation. It can be built very nicely into the structure of a sonnet. So that opened up a whole new field. And then, of course, there was political use of sonnets. This is when they became memoranda, really,

on the forces of conscience in the long parliament, a purely political sonnet by Milton. Before we get to him, just one more paragraph or two from you, Frank, if you could, on Shakespeare and the sonnet. Do you think he, why do you think he was so attracted to it? Why are we so attracted to his sonnets? and why do they have such a high place, some of them anyway. A lot of different questions.

I know, Frank, but you've been perfectly capable of fielding them on. What was the first? Tell us why you think, what's good about Shakespeare's sonnets, why they are so good, those which you, because I know you have reservations about some of them. I have, yes, yes, I think a lot. I think that, as I said, there in a sense memoranda. I think Phyllis talks in her book

about a modern American poetry, who wrote five sonnets a day, and when he died, had left half a million sonnets, which presumably would never be published. Well, I think people could use them. People who, after all, Shakespeare's writing verses almost every day.

So you go home after a day and say, this time I'll do some complicated rhyming. And they would fit into this sequence about the beautiful young man, or later about the horrible young woman. Or not so young women. Horrible, not so young. Well, he was not so young himself either, as he pointed out.

So they would be a way of annotating your day, if you like. Like a meditative exercise. It focuses the attention. That's right. It's a meditative exercise. Some of them, I think, have all the barrenness that you would expect from coming out of the office and doing one of these exercises. some of them are marvellous

and some of them are actually unintelligible very close to it, I think. That's what makes them interesting. Now, what was the second question? I think that'll do. We'll push on to Milton. Thank you very much. Jonathan Bates, some of the sonnet's Milton writes shifted nature of the

sonnet radically, don't they? As Frank mentioned earlier before I interrupted him with a question, they have become very political. In fact, Cromwell says this has happened in Piedmont, and the massacre in Piedmont, write me a sonnet, and away we go. Can you discuss the way Milton uses the sonnet? Yes, Milton's

highly innovative, both in technique and in subject matter. He really does seem to be the first English poet to turn the sonnet to public account, to write public poetry, political poetry, of course that was predominantly. This is round about the time of

Cromwell, the English Republic, a time of war of great ideological disputes in England, and Milton sees the sonnet as a medium for sort of crystallising some of the political problems of the age. But he's also technically innovative because until Milton, there was always this strong pause at the end of the first unit of the sonnet. But what Milton does is that he runs on the lines. So very often the sentences will actually run across the so-called turn at the end of the eighth line. And so, a Miltonianian is that he runs. And so, a Miltonian is a

sonnet becomes not so much a sort of series of points, but more a single unified whole. And I think when you read a Milton sonnet, it feels very, very different in its movement, in its shape. It's organic. After Milton, though, the sonnet is never the same, because that possibility is so clear. He crystallizes that possibility and because of the way he uses the form. I have the feeling he got some sense of the potential for the sonnet as, being a political vehicle from the Italian 15th century sonneteers who were writing satirical, rather nasty political sonnets. And all of Milton's sonnets are in the Italian form.

He aligns himself with that. And I think that's part of why they feel so organic. And avenge a lord thy slaughter saints whose bones is long vowels. And we know that it's wordsworth's reading of Milton is what changed Wordsworth's relationship to the sonnet. I mean it's very striking that Wordsworth started writing sonnets because he read Milton and it was through that process that he actually turned himself into a public poet and he eventually became poet laureate. So Wordsworth's sonnets, I mean some of them are sort of reflective,

looking at the world around him and Westminster Bridge, I suppose, the most famous of them. But the great majority of Wordsworth's sonnets are deeply political and theme. Sonnets dedicated to national independence and liberty. even a series of ecclesiastical sonnets, the history of Britain through the history of the Anglican Church. We wouldn't immediately think of the sonnet as a medium for that kind of meditation. Are you looking at it, is there any way in which you're surprised that the sonnet can carry this sort of messages,

can have this sort of strength, Frank? It can because, as I think John was saying, the loosening up of the sonic, the feeling there was no longer necessarily to have this sharp break, this turn, this Volta, made the whole proposition a different one. And you get sonnets which are technically of great brilliance and value, which don't have anything like a Volta at all. Thinking of Robert Frost's sonnet, the Silk Intent,

which is my mind one of the most beautiful sonnets ever written, which is a single sentence from beginning to end, and the effect of it does not depend on this primary fracture, as it were, that was born with the sonnets. So that's a big change. And once you've got that, you can have, well, you talk about the sonnets, Phyllis talks about the sonnets written by Wilfred Owen,

which memorialise a point which use different technical resources. So the sense that you could take this little thing and constantly change and adapt it, so that in the silken tantry, it comes back to being loved poem again. It's a very plastic. form, it's elastic. The silk intent is in a way, a paradigm of the way the sign

behaves. Hopkins, you can add bits to it. You can do all, and you don't have to stick to iambic rhythms, you can do anything. Well, the sign is a silken ten, and that it seems to be pinned down, it has these limits, and yet it's flowing in the wind, it's stretching, it keeps moving.

Is there any purchase in discussing a few months, you've talked about Fibon Arche's association with the Sicilian court and the number theory at the time, and you've talked, Phil and Phil and Phyllis, I'm addressing you know, Yes. Lavin, finish Levin. Could you explain why you think there's something in the proposition

that the sonnet somehow picks up out a rhythm which is deep in our sense of number, deep in our minds, deep in our nature? You're related to that, don't you? Could you develop that, as though... Yes. Although, I do believe, though, that poets have more leeway than, say, mathematicians or architects,

and so they can stretch a theory at will. But I think that... Let's think about a seesaw. There are certain things in nature or in the way we play with nature or our nature. We tend toward, we like balance and symmetry, and at the same time we get enormous pleasure from imbalance. And the sonnet encapsulates both of those properties.

When you have the 4-433, you have the symmetry of both, and yet the Volta is never at the midpoint, or if it is, it's an anomaly, we know something is amiss because it's too static. If you look at a C-Soft, two people are completely balanced. Somebody has to use a lot of force for there to be any fun between the two people. So I think there's something about, it's the dynamic imbalance in the form itself, though that itself gets superseded, say, in Milton or in Wordsworth, but it's inside of it.

And it's also knowing that one is working with something in advance that has an end, changes everything, because it has a shape. For Wordsworth says he wants to make it a do-drop, an orbicular form, rather than something more crystalline, as you would have with the Elizabethans. that's, you know, divided at 4-4-4-2. But there's this endless play with the shape so that the shape seems to have an infinity of possibilities inside of itself. But to push you a little further, you think it reflects something profound in our nature,

as I understand it, from what you yourself have written, that it is representative of the way our mind works and embraces life or takes it on. The sonnet is a way of thinking, not only a way of thinking, it not only describes a way of thinking, it is the way we think. Can you just take that a bit further

and then see what Frank and Johnson have to make of it? Well, for example, when we think about something, say there's an image. Often we think about an image, and then we come to a realization. We can't control the realization we come to. That's why I think of the vault as a moment of grace. The vault is the turning point in this moment.

Yeah, as the turning point. And there's the sense of you begin something. It's a kind of a small journey, know you're going to go somewhere and something's going to change and you don't know what or how it's going to happen, but it will happen and you know it's going to end. And normally when we approach an ending, we behave differently. Things speed up in an ending. If someone says you have two more minutes, you're going to think differently and act differently. So I think that's the way we think tends to be we have kind of amorphousness of ideas. They swim around. Then they begin to reach a certain

point, then we reach a conclusion. Frank, would you like to respond to it and then Jonathan or meditate on that order? Yes, I think part of the attraction of the form was, it is that it presents a certain measure of difficulty. And one of the pleasures of

poetry has always been the pleasure of difficulty overcome. It's a tolerable amount of difficulty so that any educated person can do it. It's not like a double sestina, which is a real challenge. And Then, a poet, done, for example, who wrote many sonnets,

also devised stanzas of such outlandish shape. They challenged him to continue exactly doing what he'd done in the first stanza in all the others. Now, that is real difficulty to overcome, and that's what a virtuoso poet would be interested in. I don't think that in the ordinary course, the English sonnet, the Shakespeare and sonnets as we call it is difficult enough, actually. I think we need more pantombs

and what are they called all these other things? Triolets and Villanelles and so, which actually are quite difficult. I think that as the English sonnet was developed in the 19th and 20th century, it became a much more flexible medium. I mean, I agree with Frank, that the problem with 4442

is you have image, image, image, conclusion. Idea, first part, second part, third part, conclusion. It's all a little bit too neat, too much like a legal argument, if you like. What are a little bit hard to get any charge into the last two men? That can be the problem, unless you do a very witty turn on it. One of the poets who particularly interests me in terms of his experimentation with the form was John Clare, the agricultural labourer from Northamptonshire, in the 19th century, who wrote hundreds and hundreds of sonnets, many of them actually not

published until quite recently, in which he experimented with all sorts of different rhymeskins. He tried writing sonnets with a 7-7 division, very, very unorthodox. He writes sonnets about nature, about birds, animals, the world around him. And somehow he seems to be seeking a way in which the sonnet form can answer to the structures of nature itself. And he finds that this 4442 division doesn't work for that. He produces something much more fluid within the form. And certainly as we then go forward to the 20th century, we find a lot of poets who are writing in a much more fluid, relaxed way,

not using rigid rhyme schemes, but still they stick to the 14 lines. One of my favourite 20th century poets, the great American poet Robert Lowell, who wrote this wonderful sequence of sonnets called Notebook, and it's a bit like a notebook, not just of his personal life, but also of the public life, the political life of the time.

Most of these poems are unr rhyming, but he nearly always uses the 14 lines, and somehow there's something about the discipline of that length that makes it ideal for just crystallizing a single idea, whether it's personal or public. Well, the deviations become very meaningful. At the end of Notebook, one of Lowell's most beautiful sonnets is Dolphin, and Dolphin is the Muse, clearly,

and the craft is both the small boat and the craft of poetry. It's a 15-line sonnet, but it's four. 14 lines without any gaps, any white space, and then there's a white space, and then there's this last line, this 15th line, my eyes have seen what my hand did. So that is a comment on what he did. He finished the sonnet. But it's also a poem about self-exposure, about excess, about shame, about conscience. And so his eyes have seen what his hand did in his life. And then, of course, the whole work, the whole book is what he did. The thing is because everybody's written sonnets ever since Petrach,

14 lines is there as the paradigm. So even if you start writing 13 or 16 lines, it will always look to a reader as if the reason you're doing that is not because that is somehow the natural length for your thought, but because you are deliberately shifting from the norm of 14 lines. There's an intimate understanding between the audience and the writer about the model, the ideal. And so any changes from the idea,

deal become a way of codifying information as well. Why do you think Frank Merd, why do you think the sonnet has survived, did survive in the 20th century and is still being written now and is, as it were, working so much harder and better for poets than many of the other

restricted forms, the Sestino and the Villanelles and so on. Is it because, as you have kept reiterating in this programme, because of its simplicity? Well, partly that, I think you needed a very good poet to revive the Villanelle for example. We needed Empson to do that. And I don't think very many people around the country sitting and writing Villanelles

at this moment either. Sestina's, of course, are much more difficult. You occasionally get somebody, like Orden, for example, who is a genuine virtuoso poet, of whom there aren't many, who could do any of these things. And also he wrote the most beautiful Villanelles, for example, and splendid sonnets by the hundred. The appeal of it, as I said before, is, I think, to the quite ordinary person. And it is laid down there. It's a way of doing a certain kind of thinking. And it happens to have been prescribed as a 14-line form.

But it could be prescribed as a 16-line form. I'm not sure that I believe the harmonious principles and so on. Very nice. But once it gets going, just like a limerick, the form exists so people write in it. Can I come back as we come to go back in our endings to our beginnings? Jonathan Bade, can we talk about the... You think that the sonnet can be a looser monster,

a looser and bagier monster than we began this programme with? I think it is, but I think it's still a living form. And if you look at the very best poets writing in English today around the world, a lot of the sonnets. There's a great poem by the Australian poet Les Murray called, Thinking About Aboriginal Land Rights, I Visit the Farm I Will Not Inherit. It's still a sonnet.

Thank you very much. Thank you, Jonathan and Beth. Thank you, Philis Loving. Thank you, Frank Come out. Next week, believe it or not, we'll be talking about existentialism. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.com.