PRESENTATION

BY

CALIDA R.D’SOUZA
 Development of Sonnet Form In
England
• The sonnet is one of the poetic forms that can be found in
lyric poetry from Europe
• The term "sonnet" derives from the Occitian word sonet
and the Italian word sonetto, both meaning "little song"
• Sir Thomas Wyatt who initiated the sonnet tradition in
England, gave the Petrarchan mode a refreshingly new
orientation
• Wyatt introduced the sonnet into English, it was Surrey
who gave them the rhyming meter, and division into
quatrains that now characterizes the English sonnet.
• Wyatt in place of the octave- sestet pattern he
substituted the three quatrains invigorated by the
concluding couplet.
• This form was adapted by Shakespeare later.
• Sir Philip Sydney’s sequence Astrophel and Stella
(1591) that started the English vogue for sonnet
sequences.

• In the 17th century, the sonnet was adapted to other

purposes, with John Donne and George Herbert writing
religious sonnets, and John Milton using the sonnet as a
general meditative poem. Both the Shakespearean and
Petrarchan rhyme schemes were popular throughout
this period, as well as many variants.
• The fashion for the sonnet went out with the restoration,
and hardly any sonnets were written between 1670 and
Wordsworth’s time
• Wordsworth himself wrote several sonnets, of which the
best-known are “The World is too much with us" and
the sonnet to Milton; his sonnets were essentially
modelled on Milton's
• Shelley innovated radically, creating his own rhyme
scheme for the sonnet “Ozymandias".

• Gerald Manley Hopkins wrote several major sonnets,

often in sprung rhythum, of which the greatest is "The
Windhover,"
• This flexibility was extended even further in the
20th century. Among the major poets of the early
Modernist period, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent
Millay and E.E. Cummings all used the sonnet
regularly.
• W.B.Yeats wrote the major sonnet Leda and the
Swan, which used half rhymes. Wilfred Owens's
sonnet Anthem for Doomed Youth was another
sonnet of the early 20th century.
• W.H. Auden wrote two sonnet sequences and
several other sonnets throughout his career, and
widened the range of rhyme-schemes used
considerably.
 Elizabethan Sonnet Tradition

• The harvest of Elizabethan sonneteering is a strange

medley of splendour and dullness. The workers in the
field included Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare, who, in
varying degrees, invested this poetic form with
unquestionable beauty.

• Shakespeare, above all, breathed into the sonnet a lyric

melody and a meditative energy which no writer of any
country has surpassed.
• Surrey contributed to English poetry a certain smooth
and controlled dignity and was responsible for
naturalizing the English sonnet.
• The form went out of vogue for well over a quarter
century after Surrey.
• Sir Philip Sydney initiated a revival of the Petrachan
pattern.
• Sidney’s sense of contemporary reality and technical
efficiency packed his poetry with power that came to
signalize the Elizabethan lyric mode
• Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella generated
a great flood of Elizabethan sonneteering.
• After Sidney the Italian form lost its vitality except for
Spenser and Shakespeare whose sonnets became
popular.
• Amoretti by Edmund Spenser followed Sidney’s
sequence.
• In a Spenserian sonnet there does not appear to be a
requirement that the initial octave set up a problem that
the closing sestet answers, as is the case with a
Petrarchan sonnet. Instead, the form is treated as three
quatrains connected by the interlocking rhyme scheme
and followed by a couplet. The linked rhymes of his
quatrains suggest the linked rhymes of such Italian
forms as terza rima.
• The Petrarchan sonnet and Elizabethan sonnet has one
thing in common . Both the sonnets of Petrarch labeled
fragments by the author and the consideration of
convention rather than by a general principle of
organization.
 SHAKESPEAREAN SONNETS
• The Shakespearean sonnet, the form of sonnet utilized
throughout Shakespeare's sequence, is divided into four
parts.
• The first three parts are each four lines long, and are
known as quatrains, rhymed ABAB; the fourth part is
called the couplet, and is rhymed CC.
• The Shakespearean sonnet is often used to develop a
sequence of metaphors or ideas, one in each quatrain,
while the couplet offers either a summary or a new take
on the preceding images or ideas.
• His sonnets were not literary exercises but personal
communications from the most sensitive poet of the age,
to a friend whom he loved.
• The sonnets deal with Shakespeare’s affection to his
friend : they urge him to marry and immortalize his
beauty.
• They also speak of a rival poet
• Some poems are addressed to A Dark Lady
• There are 154 sonnets.
• Of these 126 are about this friend .
• The remaining 28 are to or about a Dark Lady who
was his mistress and whom he loved.
• Of the 126 sonnets in the 1st group the first 17 urge the
young man to marry and reproduce his beauty.
• The group of sonnets with a 12line poem Sonnet no.126.
• 18 of the sonnets refer to the betrayal by his friend and
Mistress, the Dark Lady.
• Ten of these are in the first group of his friend, eight are
in the second.
• There are 10 sonnets b/w numbers 76 and 97 which refer
to a rival poet. competing for the favors of his friend.
 Who was this Friend?

• There are two leading candidates for

consideration as the friend: Henry
WriothesleyThird Earl of Southampton
• William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke
 Who was the Rival Poet
• Michael Drayton (1563-1631): poet of considerable
talent who wrote sonnets, odes (after the manner of the
Roman poet Horace), and heroic poems.

•
Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593): Elizabethan
playwright of the first rank who helped popularize the
strengths of blank verse. Marlowe's most famous plays
are The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1588), The
Jew of Malta (1589), and Tamburlaine the Great (1587).
Marlowe also wrote distinguished poetry and, like
Chapman, translated ancient literary works. 
 The Dark Lady
• Jane  Davenant: Wife of the owner of The Crown Inn on
Cornmarket Street in at Oxford. (The inn still exists.) Supposedly,
Shakespeare stopped at the inn on trips between Stratford and
London.  Shakespeare was the godfather of her child, William
Davenant (1606-1668), a playwright and poet of some renown in
his day. In 1638, Davenant became poet laureate of England after
the death of Ben Jonson. Rumors abounded that Davenant was
not only Shakespeare's godson but also his biological son.
According to some accounts, Davenant once owned the famous
Chandos portrait of William Shakespeare. 
• Mary Fitton (1578-1647): Woman of dark complexion who
enjoyed a place in the court of Queen Elizabeth I and was
married and widowed twice. She gave birth to three illegitimate
children fathered by three men
 Example for Sonnets Addressed To
A Young Man
• Shakespeare's first 26 sonnets are clearly
addressed to a young man whom the poet
describes as "beauty's rose" (Sonnet 1) and often
refers to as "my love.
•
 FROM fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light'st flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content
And, tender churl, makest waste in niggarding.
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.
•  
 2
When forty winters shall beseige thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,
Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tatter'd weed, of small worth held:
Then being ask'd where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty's use,
If thou couldst answer 'This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,'
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold
 To A Rival Poet
85

My tongue-tied Muse in manners holds her still,

While comments of your praise, richly compiled,
Reserve their character with golden quill
And precious phrase by all the Muses filed.
I think good thoughts whilst other write good words,
And like unletter'd clerk still cry 'Amen'
To every hymn that able spirit affords
In polish'd form of well-refined pen.
Hearing you praised, I say ''Tis so, 'tis true,'
And to the most of praise add something more;
But that is in my thought, whose love to you,
Though words come hindmost, holds his rank before.
Then others for the breath of words respect,
Me for my dumb thoughts, speaking in effect
 The Dark Lady
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.
I have seen roses damask'd, 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.
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:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare
THANK

YOU