Red-Headed

I would like to look at five differing views to the sonnet in a chronological sequence starting with the eighteenth century & finishing in the mid nineteen-seventies. The first two are more traditional in form & metre. The early poems by T.S. Eliot are an early twentieth century attempt at revitalising the sonnet & the final poem by Heaney is a more contemporary take on the form.

Robert Burns (1759-96) was born at Alloway in Ayrshire. To say that he was a genius is an understatement of the highest magnitude. Universally loved, yet he has never really come into his own as a poet, he was a tale teller, satirist & balladeer of extraordinary ability. O My Luve's like a red, red rose often being touted as one of the most well known similes in the English language. It has also been stated that Auld Lang Syne is the national anthem of the entire world.

A Sonnet Upon Sonnets

Fourteen, a sonneteer thy praises sings;
what magic myst'ries in that number lie!
Your hen hath fourteen eggs beneath her wings
That fourteen chickens to the roost may fly.
Fourteen full pounds the jockey's stone must be;
His age fourteen — a horse's prime is past.
Fourteen long hours too oft the Bard must fast;
Fourteen bright bumpers – bliss he ne'er must see!
Before fourteen, a dozen yields the strife;
Before fourteen – e'en thirteen's strength is vain.
Fourteen good years – a woman gives us life;
Fourteen good men – we lose that life again.
What lucubrations can be more upon it?
Fourteen good measur'd verses make a sonnet.

Notice the metre & syllable count are virtually perfect & use quantitative iambic pentameter right up until the couplet where he gives us an eleventh unstressed syllable to give a resolution to the prosody. A similar device being utilised by Shakespeare's famous quote from Hamlet; 'To be or not to be, that is the question'. Mark how Burns uses an English ABAB rhyme for the first stanza, an Italian CDDC for the second, then reverts back to the Shakespearean form.



Because of Keats's perceived presumptuousness in attacking Pope he was labelled “A Cockney mannikin” by Byron who summarily also pronounced a distaste for “Johnny Keats's p—ss a bed poetry”.

I think he was being grossly unfair to the poet. Keats; the son of a Moorfields livery stable manager never really reached his true potential & died at the comparatively young age of twenty-six. This was the poem that Leigh Hunt published in the Examiner & was responsible for bringing Keats's poetry to a wider audience.

Throughout all of the fashions in literature his work has grown increasingly in popularity & his stature as a poet is now beyond doubt. Tennyson considered him to be the greatest of the nineteenth century poets & Matthew Arnold was impressed by his “intellectual & spiritual passion for beauty”.


On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breath its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.


I think it is wrong to compare Keats with more mystical or psychologically intense poets, he didn't really live long enough to become particularly embittered or to question the nature of the cosmos. You cannot help but admire his impeccable metre & flow. This is virtually a perfect standard Italian sonnet (ABBA ABBA CDCDCD) with the volta in the eighth line. The sheer imaginative power of discovering a new ocean is powerfully induced by the narrator in the sestet. The analogy of reading Chapman & discovering a fresh enjoyment of Homer in that translation with this comparison is done with a consummate skill. Of course, it is another book that Keats is alluding to in his poem; Robertson's History of America & for some reason better known to himself has substituted Cortez for Balboa.

On a Portrait

Among a crowd of tenuous dreams, unknown
To us of restless brain and weary feet,
Forever hurrying, up and down the street,
She stands at evening in the room alone.

Not like a tranquil goddess carved of stone
But evanescent, as if one should meet
A pensive lamia in some wood-retreat,
An immaterial fancy of one's own.

No meditations glad or ominous
Disturb her lips, or move the slender hands;
Her dark eyes keep their secrets hid from us,
Beyond the circle of our thought she stands.

The parrot on his bar, a silent spy,
Regards her with a curious eye.


This is an early poem of & follows the ABBA ABBA of the classic Petrarchan perfectly for the first two stanzas. Then it seems to morph into a Shakespearean sonnet stanza with a CDCD scheme in the last, finally ending with a rhymed couplet. Yet another take on combining the two forms. It does not appear to have a volta, all three stanzas describing the statuesque pensive lamia in the painting. Perhaps it is in the couplet with the slightly comic silent parrot!


Circe's Palace

Around her fountain which flows
With the voice of men in pain,
Are flowers that no man knows.
Their petals are fanged and red
With hideous streak and strain;
They sprang from the limbs of the dead.--
We shall not come hear again.

Panthers rise from their lairs
In the forest which thickens below,
Along the garden stairs
The sluggish python lies;
The peacocks walk, stately and slow,
And they look at us with the eyes
Of men we knew long ago.


Another early poem from Eliot before he developed his Imagist influenced free verse. Inspired of course by the tenth chapter of Homer's Odyssey. Although Eliot has used a little poetic licence in the fact that the enchantress Circe had a penchant for transforming shipwrecked mariners into swine as opposed to peacocks.

Is it a sonnet? It certainly has fourteen lines, this time divided into two stanzas of seven lines. The first stanza apart from the penultimate line also has seven syllables in each line & appears to be trochaic in metre. This syllable count seems to have been abandoned somewhat in the second stanza. The volta could be seen to be the start of the second stanza. Although it is essentially a continuation of the narrative. The last three lines almost try to finish & end the subject matter like a traditional couplet & functions in the manner of a Shakespearean sonnet, not unlike the previous poem. If you do indeed decide to categorise this as a sonnet, you can be assured it does in fact include many of the criteria that a traditional sonnet does.

Seamus Heaney was born in Northern Ireland (County Derry) in 1939. His first collection of poetry Death of a Naturalist was published in 1966. Between 1989 & 1994 he was professor of poetry at Oxford university. He was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1995.


The Seed Cutters

They seem hundreds of years away. Breughel,
You'll know them if I can get them true.
They kneel under the hedge in a half-circle
Behind a windbreak wind is breaking through.
They are the seed cutters. The tuck and frill
Of leaf-sprout is on the seed potatoes
Buried under the straw. With time to kill,
They are taking their time. Each sharp knife goes
Lazily halving each root that falls apart
In the palm of the hand: a milky gleam,
And, at the centre, a dark watermark.
O calendar customs! Under the broom
Yellowing over them, compose the frieze
With all of us there, our anonymities.


Heaney has often been seen as a bit of a contradiction in terms, conflating & combining opposites within his work. Much of his early poetry reflects his rural & agricultural formative years. He seems to have an uncanny knack for expressing the almost mythological in the prosaic & the mystical in the everyday speech of working people.

This is really an English sonnet with some partial rhymes as well as rhymes proper. Notice the use of enjambment to move the narrative in a logical progression. The volta is halfway along the eighth line & turns the poem enough to reach its concluding couplet.


Bibliography

The Poems of John Keats: John Keats, Collins.
Byron, The Years of Fame: Peter Quennell, Collins.
The Complete Poems & Plays of T.S. Eliot, Faber & Faber.
Seamus Heaney, New Selected Poems 1966-1987, Faber & Faber.
The Poems & Songs of Robert Burns: Collins.