A Study of Its Strategies

Michael R. G. Spiller
Twayne Publishers
An Imprint of Simon & Schuster Macmillan
New York
Prentice-Hall International
London Mexico City New Delhi Singapore Sydney Toronto
Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Chronology of Poets and Texts Discussed xiii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1
The Sonnet and the Sequence 8
Chapter 2
The Formal Sequence: Folgore da San Gemignano,
Anne Locke, John Donne, and George Macbeth 32
.Chapter 3
The Topographical Sequence: Wordsworth,
The River Duddon, and du Bellay, Les Antiquitez de Rome 46
Chapter4
The Narrative Sequence: Dante, La Vita Nuova,
and Edna St. Vincent Millay 61
Chapter 5
The Lyric Sequence: Petrarch's Rime,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tony Harrison,
John Donne, and William Shakespeare 77
ix
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
Chapter 6
The Philosophical Sequence: Christina Rossetti,
"The Thread of Life," and Rainer Maria Rilke,
Sonnets to Orpheus 123
Conclusion 139
Notes and References 143
Bibliographical Essay 158
Bibliography of Sequences 164
Index 167
X
Chronology of Poets and
Texts Discussed
Writers before the invention of printing have no publication
date, and the reader is referred to the standard edition.
Giacomo da Lentino (dates unknown). Sonnets written
about 1230-1240. See A Critical Edition of the Poems of Giacomo
da Lentino, ed. S. Popolizio (1975 Ph.D. thesis, Ann Arbor:
University Microfilms).
Guittone d' Arezzo (1230?-1294). Sonnet sequences written
about 1255. See Le Rime, ed. F. Egidi (Bari: Laterza, 1940).
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). La Vita Nuova, ea. 1295, first
printed 1576. See Dante: Vita Nuova, ed. D. de Robertis
(Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1980).
Folgore da San Gemignano (pen name of Giacomo da
Michele, dates unknown). Sonnets written 1309-1317. See
Sonnetti, ed. G. Caravaggi (Turin: Einaudi, 1965).
Francesco Petrarca or Petrarch (1304--1374). Sonnets written
1330-1370. These are preserved, uniquely, in the author's
manuscript, now Vatican Library MS. Vat. Lat. 3195, from
which all modern editions derive.
xiii
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
Richard Tottel (?-1594). Editor of Songes and Sonettes (Lon-
don: Richard Tottel, 1557), which contains no sequences, but
has most of the sonnets of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503?-1542)
and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517?-1547).
Anne Locke (ea. 1533-1595). A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner
(London: John Day, 1560), ed. Kel Morin-Parsons, A Medita-
tion of a Penitent Sinner: The Sonnets of An ne Locke (Ontario:
North Waterloo Academic Press, 1997).
Joachim du Bellay (1523--1560). Le Premier Livre des Antiquitez
de Rome (Paris: Federic Morel, 1558).
George Gascoigne (1542-1577). Suites of sonnets in A Hun-
dreth Sundrie Flowres (1573; reprint, London: Scalar Press,
1970).
Edmund Spenser (1552-1599). "Ruins of Rome," in Com-
plaints (London: William Ponsonby, 1591); Amoretti (London:
William Ponsonby, 1595).
William Shakespeare (1564-1616). Sonnets (London: Thomas
Thorpe, 1609).
John Donne (1573-1631). "La Corona" written about 1608;
the Holy Sonnets between 1609 and 1617. Both printed in
Poems by]. D. (London: John Marriot, 1633; 2d ed., 1635).
George Wither (1588-1667). Campo-Musae (London: R.
Austin and A. Coe, 1643); Vox Pacifica (London: R. Austin,
1645).
William Wordsworth (1770-1850). The River Duddon: A Series
of Sonnets (London: Longman, 1820); "Ecclesiastical Sonnets"
first published as Ecclesiastical Sketches (London: Longman,
1822).
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861). "Sonnets from the
Portuguese" in Poems ... New Edition (London: Chapman
and Hall, 1850). The supposed printing of 1847 is a forgery.
George Meredith (1828-1909). Modern Love: And Poems of the
English Roadside (London: Chapman and Hall, 1862).
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894). "The Thread of Life" written
before 1882, printed in Poems (London: Macmillan, 1890).
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). Die Sonette an Orpheus (Lep-
zig: Insel Verlag, 1923).
xiv
CHRONOLOGY OF POETS AND TEXTS DISCUSSED
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950). "Sonnets from an
Ungrafted Tree" in The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (New
York: Harper and Brothers, 1923); Fatal Interview (New York
and London: Harper and Brothers, 1931); "Epitaph for the
Race of Man" in Wine from these Grapes (New York and Lon-
don: Harper and Brothers, 1934).
John Berryman (1914-1972). The "Sonnets to Chris" first
appeared as Berryman's Sonnets (New York: Farrar Straus,
1967), and then slightly altered as "Sonnets to Chris" in Col-
lected Poems, 1939-1971, ed. C. Thornbury (London: Faber
and Faber, 1989).
George Macbeth (1932-1992). "A Christmas Ring," in The
Burning Cone (1970) and subsequently in Collected Poems,
1958-1970 (London: Macmillan, 1971); "Thoughts on a Box
of Razors" in Poems from Oby (1982) and subsequently in Col-
lected Poems, 1958-1982 (London: Hutchinson, 1989).
XV
INTRODUCTION
O
n 6 April1348, a rich merchant's wife died suddenly of the
plague in a house in Avignon, in the south of France. One of
her friends knew that she had long been admired by one of the
most celebrated poets of the age, Francis Petrarch, and wrote to
him in faraway Parma, in northern Italy. The news reached
Petrarch on 19 May and from then until the end of his long life in
137 4, he ceaselessly wrote and revised and rearranged sonnets in
praise of her. Added to what he had written between the time he
first saw her, in 1327, and that disastrous plague year, his poems
in herpraise amounted to 366 lyrics, 317 of which are sonnets.
Together they make up the sonnet sequence usually known as
the Rime Sparse, or "Scattered Poems." But they are not scattered:
though they are not all, indeed, about his Laura, the woman
whom he praised so often, they have a miraculous coherence
that makes Petrarch's Rime one of the world's greatest sonnet
sequences.
1
Almost six centuries later, a young girl died in Munich of a
wasting illness. Wera Knoop, then only 18, had as a child been
the playmate of Ruth Rilke, daughter of the man who was then
one of the most famous poets of Europe, Rainer Maria Rilke, and
Wera's mother wrote to him at his retreat in Switzerland, giving
an account of her daughter's death. A month after receiving the
letter on New Year's Day, 1922, Rilke began, and in three weeks
finished, a set of 55 sonnets inspired by Wera' s death, the Sonnets
1
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
to Orpheus, the greatest sonnet sequence of the twentieth century,
and one of the most profound in European lyric poetry.
2
The sonnet sequence did not begin with Petrarch, and it has
not ended with Rilke; but these two collections, so alike in the cir-
cumstances of their creation and so very different in execution
and length, may serve to point at some truths about this unusual
and unstable genre, the sonnet sequence. Arising out of the
invention of the sonnet itself, the sonnet sequence, over more
than seven centuries in Western Europe and America, has
engaged the attention of some of the greatest poets-as well as a
host of others. These poets, among them Dante, Petrarch, Shake-
speare, Donne, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Rilke, and Berryman,
have used the sequence to explore intense conflicts of feeling and
thought, apparently finding satisfaction in the unique combina-
tion of fragmentariness and cohesion that the genre offers.
Mostly love, or worship of a loved one, is the thread, keynote, or
motif of a sequence, and some sort of struggle to know or under-
stand the self is one of the animating forces. Other poets have
used the sonnet sequence for other purposes, such as landscape
description or philosophizing or political agitation; but its major
glories seem to come in the hands of those who use it as the locus
of a quest for understanding of the self in a world where a pow-
erful and compelling Other offers a vision of disturbing beauty. It
is not fanciful to suppose that if Dante read his Vita Nuova in
some Paradisal Mermaid Tavern to Shakespeare, Petrarch, and
Rilke, all of them would nod in sympathy and understanding,
though otherwise from worlds unimaginably far apart.
The sonnet and the sonnet sequence were born into European
literature at the same time, for the first writers of sonnets, a group
of courtiers and civil servants employed by the Emperor Fred-
erick II of the Two Sicilies (1208-1250), wrote sonnets to one
another in groups of two, three, and more, and these tenzoni, as
they are called, are the first sonnets in sequence, appearing in
Southern Italy about 1235 C.E. They appear to have been linked
by repetitions of rhymes or words, but because they survive to us
only in manuscript collections made at the end of the thirteenth
century in northern Italy, in which replies have often become
detached from what they replied to, we cannot be sure. The first
known sequences by a single author are by the Italian poet
Guittone d' Arezzo (1230?-1294): a six-sonnet tenzone that is a fie-
2
INTRODUCTION
tional argument between a "donna villana" (a low-born woman)
and her lover, and an ''Art of Love," a 26-sonnet sequence on the
features of courtly love. It is not known which of these was writ-
ten first, but they are thought to be prior to 1263.
3
The growth of literacy in the cities of the north of Italy at the
end of the thirteenth century fostered the compilation, by scribes
working to order, of canzonieri (poetry collections), which assem-
bled the sonnets (and other lyrics) of contemporary authors.
From that point on, authors responded by themselves producing
collections of their verses, including such highly organized ones
as Folgore da San Gemignano's "Sonnets on the Months" (ea.
1310; discussed in chapter 2). The first to show awareness of itself
as a sequence is Dante's Vita Nuova (ea. 1295; see chapter 4),
which takes as its starting point a tenzone that Dante had orga-
nized, sending out a sonnet to about eight friends and asking
them to reply in kind (three replies survive).
Thereafter the tenzone, the categorical sequence, and the can-
zoniere (as a loose collection of sonnets by one author) continued
throughout European literature. In the Italian municipal acade-
mies, or learned societies, of the sixteenth century, a highly
developed form of the tenzone, called the catena (chain), involv-
ing strict rules of repetition, was practiced by groups of friends.
One particular group in Siena, the Intronati (founded 1525), is
credited with the invention of the corona sequence, in which
each sonnet starts with the last line of its predecessor.
4
This is the
most highly patterned of all kinds of sequence, and has survived
to the present day, though rare (see chapter 2).
Throughout the centuries in Italy to the end of the sixteenth,
there is no attempt to develop a theory of the sonnet sequence,
and except where a set of sonnets is linked by category or by pat-
terning, authors are content to present sonnets in loose groups,
calling them simply sonetti or rime or canzonieri. Any author may
indicate in a set of sonnets that he or she regards the set as a set;
the model canzoniere sequence in this respect is the Rime Sparse
of Petrarch (compiled from about 1330 until his death in 1374).
The extensive adulation of Petrarch as a master of the rhetoric of
passion, both in Italy and in France and Britain and Spain, meant
that after the invention and spread of printing (from about 1470
onward), editions of his sonnets appeared carrying not only
numbers (which aids sequential thinking) but also expositions of
3
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
the Rime as autobiographical. This practice popularized the idea
that a loose collection of sonnets could function as a whole, giv-
ing an account of either the sufferings of a self or of a set of cir-
cumstances, such as a love affair. This concept, originating in
Italy, entered the literatures of Britain, France, and Spain in the
mid-sixteenth century (Germany in the early seventeenth) as a
template for native poets to follow, and the sonnet sequence
thereafter became a European literary genre, even if the word
sequence was not yet used.
The sonnet was brought to Britain in about 1527 by Sir Thomas
Wyatt, who developed the couplet ending in the sestet, and
quickly taken further by his younger fellow courtier, Henry
Howard, Earl of Surrey, who pioneered the divided octave, with
a change of rhymes after the first quatrain. Neither produced
sequences, but their sonnets were collected into what in Italian
terms would be a canzoniere, Richard Tottel's Songes and Sonettes
of 1557, generally known as Tottel's Miscellany, the most influen-
tial anthology of the century in Britain. The first British sonnet
sequence was written by a writer outside the courtly ambit, Anne
Locke, whose Meditation of a Penitent Sinner (1560; discussed in
chapter 2) offers 26 faultlessly crafted sonnets sequentially
arranged as meditations on the verses of Psalm 51; however, she
does not appear to have had any imitators. Instead, Edmund
Spenser and others in the 1560s were reading and working from
the French sonnet sequences of the Pleiade, the first of which was
Joachim du Bellay's I.:Olive (1549), a work whose prefaces made it
clear that the sonnet sequence was now associated with national
prestige. After a certain amount of experimentation with small
suites of sonnets in the 1570s (the decade in which the word
sequence was first used, by George Gascoigne in 1573),
5
single
author sequences began to app.ear in print in the 1580s, and the
Elizabethan sonnet-sequence craze was launched with the publi-
cation in 1591 of Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella (written
about 1581).
The last sequence in this phase of sonnet writing was Fulke
Greville' s Caelica, published in 1633, though written earlier; it
contains 40 sonnets out of more than a hundred poems. Most of
the sequences of this period are amatory and a very few devo-
tional. The amatory sequences commonly are titled by the name
of the lover addressed, and it is rare to find a title that uses a col-
4
INTRODUCTION
lective term, such as Barnabe Barnes' s A Divine Centurie (1595).
The widespread Italian practice of issuing raccolte (anthologies) of
sonnets containing sets or sequences by a variety of authors, imi-
tated in France, was not followed in Britain.
In Britain, the sonnet and sonnet sequence fell into neglect
and even contempt at the end of the seventeenth century, and
had it not been for the accident that Milton, who gave English lit-
erature its rival to Virgil and Homer in his epic poetry, wrote a
number of meditative and civic sonnets, it might well have disap-
peared-eighteenth-century worship of Shakespeare was mainly
of his dramatic works. As it was, the gentlemanly, or ladylike,
sonnet of reflection, friendship, or scenic beauty remained a
minor and fairly constant form, producing about 3,000 sonnets in
the Augustan age
6
but very few sequences-the first is a collec-
tion of Miltonic praise sonnets by Thomas Edwards in 1758.
Then with the Europe-wide vogue for "sentiment" in litera-
ture, the sonnet sequence returned, with a dozen sequences in
the last two decades of the eighteenth century, including, for
example, two sets of Sonnets from 'Werter', Goethe's fashionable
novel of suffering and unrequited love-by Alexander Thomson
(1793) and Ann Bannerman (1800). The Petrarchan sonnet
(known as the "legitimate" sonnet) returned in sequences,
together with renewed interest in Petrarch and Dante and even
(from Wordsworth) Michelangelo, whose sonnets are extremely
difficult and mostly homosexual in orientation. It is from
Wordsworth, in one of his earliest sonnets, that we have the
famous definition of the sonnet as a "scanty plot of ground":
In truth, the prison, unto which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.
("Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room," 1807, 8-14)
There is even an embryo theory of the sequence there-"pas-
time, sundry moods, brief solace." Wordsworth' s steady, intelli-
gent, and impressive devotion to the sonnet and the sonnet
sequence helped to reestablish it in Britain and America, and
5
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
there is then an explosion of sonnet sequences after 1830, an out-
put sustained until World War I. That longer sequences were not
written by Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Longfellow, Browning,
Whitman, or Dickinson-the major poetic talents of the cen-
tury-does not seem to have impaired the devotion of minor
writers, and the latter half of the nineteenth century in English
and American literature has remained the high point of the son-
net sequence. Its popularity in French, German, and Italian litera-
ture was also great-even so iconoclastic a poet as Baudelaire
produced a sonnet sequence-and though the range of subject
matter is now much wider, and the amatory sequence has ceased
to dominate, the Petrarchan template, as I have called it, still
functions, offering the appealing combination of particular
moods, impressions, or reflections with a larger accumulated
experience of a subject. Wordsworth, presenting his last major
sonnet sequence, the Ecclesiastical Sonnets in 1822, described its
operation with his usual clarity:
For the convenience of passing from one point of the subject to
another without shocks of abruptness, this work has taken the shape
of a series of sonnets: but the Reader, it is to be hoped, will find that
the pictures are often so closely connected as to have jointly the effect
of passages of a poem in a form of stanza to which there is no objec-
tion but one that bears upon the Poet only-its difficulty?
The favoring by Milton and Wordsworth of the Petrarchan son-
net over the Shakespearean and the high cultural standing of
Italian art in the nineteenth century probably encouraged son-
net-sequence writers to prefer the Petrarchan octave and sestet
over the Shakespearean three quatrains and a couplet. But
though there was passionate debate in the nineteenth century
about the merits of the two forms and their subvariants, no one
seems to have commented in a sequence on the effect of choos-
ing one or the other upon a sequence. But whether from some
self-persuaded sense of harmony with the Italian masters and
with Milton, or from a genuine preference for the flow of the
Petrarchan form, most practitioners of sequences, in America and
in Britain, have favored the "legitimate" sonnet, or, like Auden in
his Sonnets from China, chosen a Shakespearean octave with a
Petrarchan sestet.
6
INTRODUCTION
The sonnet sequence still seems a promising form: there is a
short overview in John Fuller's The Sonnet (London: Methuen,
1972, 45-49), which leads him to the conclusion that there is a
"wealth of structural possibilities inherent in the very notion of
the sonnet sequence, and still largely unexplored." Most major
modern poets have written sonnets, including such apparently
anarchic figures as e. e. cummings, but it seems that after the fad-
ing out of a rather tired romanticism in British and American
sequences between the two world wars, writers of sequences are
either ironically erudite-Auden and Berryman-or unusually
interested in game playing and pattern making-the corona
sequences of George Macbeth or Jose Weinheber (Spate Krone,
1936) and the postmodernist sequence of Jacques Roubaud (e,
1967). Tony Harrison's reintroduction of Meredith's 16-line son-
net in his ongoing project, The School of Eloquence (1978), seems
likely to keep the sonnet sequence in good literary heart. We still
have no satisfactory theory of it, from either critics or practition-
ers, but we have the thing itself, and Petrarch's cry still hangs in
our modern air:
0 anime gentili et amorose,
s'alcuna a l'mondo, et voi, nude ombre et polve,
deh, ristate a veder quale e il mio male! (Rime. 161.12-14)
(0 gracious and loving souls,
if there be such in the world, and you, bare shadows and dust,
ah! stay to see what my suffering is!)
What follows, then, is an attempt to develop, if not a full theory,
at least a classification of sonnet sequences according to the ways
in which poets seem to have tried to assemble them.
In the text, a number of sonnet sequences are discussed using
the texts given in the bibliography. Because it is not possible in
this book to reproduce entire sonnet sequences, it is assumed
that the reader will have a text of each sequence available when
reading the critical analysis of it.
7
Chapter 1
THE SONNET AND THE SEQUENCE
B
ecause the sonnet has changed very little over the seven cen-
turies of its life, the sonnet sequence also has kept certain fea-
tures, even where there has been no direct imitation of an earlier
poet by a later. If a poet respects the integrity or as one might say
the sonnetness of the individual sonnet, then what he or she can
do with a collection of them is limited. For example, poets who
write many sonnets almost never use the sonnet form for long
narrative poems: there is no formal reason why a long poem
should not be in 14-line stanzas, rhyming as sonnets do, but it
has happened only two or three times in 700 years, and we con-
clude that anyone who wants to write a poetic narrative avoids
sonnets, and anyone who gathers sonnets together stops short of
making them tell a story. What we might call "a sonnet narra-
tive," such as Sir Philip Sidney' s Astrophel and Stella, is not a nar-
rative in the sense in which his Arcadia is one, nor does Elizabeth
Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese narrate the story of
a courtship as, for example, does ]ane Eyre, with a speaker just as
passionate. The sonnet has been used for a great variety of pur-
poses, but it has always preserved its internal structure and
dynamics and that seems to have prevented poets from subdu-
ing its small shape to the merest unit of a long tale.
8
THE SONNET AND THE SEQUENCE
To suggest what the sonnet has that makes it resistant to being
pure narrative, it will be necessary to discuss the rise and devel-
opment of the sonnet itself. At the same time, we shall explain the
terms that are useful in describing its structure, terms that can
then be used freely in the rest of this book.
The Structure of the Sonnet
The sonnet is a stanza of 14lines arranged in two parts, an octave
(8 lines) and a sestet (6 lines). The octave usually rhymes ABBA
ABBA, but at an early stage, in the thirteenth century, it com-
monly rhymed ABAB ABAB, and this form persists to the pre-
sent. Each four lines is called a quatrain. When the sonnet first
appeared in English, in the sixteenth century, a new form of
octave also appeared, rhyming ABAB CDCD or sometimes ABBA
CDDC. When the second quatrain repeats the rhymes of the first,
the octave is called an Italian, or Petrarchan, octave; when the
rhymes are different, it is an English, or Shakespearean, octave.
Similarly, the sestet usually rhymes CDECDE or, especially at
the early-thirteenth-century stage, CDCDCD. Other arrange-
ments are possible, but the way the sentences of the sestet are
phrased always suggests that the rhymes should be read in two
threes, or tercets, CDE CDE or CDC DCD. This arrangement
makes an Italian or Petrarchan sestet, whether there are two
rhyme sounds or three and however they are arranged. The one
arrangement that almost never occurs in sonnets written in the
Italian language is CDCDEE (or CDDCEE). This variation made
its appearance in England in the sixteenth century, and the sen-
tences of the sestet are usually written so that the rhymes read as
a quatrain plus a couplet. This form is accordingly called an
English, or Shakespearean, sestet. The French poets of the six-
teenth century often reversed the order of the couplet and qua-
train (e.g., ABBA ABBA CC DEDE), but English writers have
always preferred to associate the couplet with closure.
Since an "Italian" sonnet can mean either a sonnet written in
Italian or a sonnet that rhymes ABBA ABBA CDECDE (or vari-
ants as noted previously), I prefer to use the terms Petrarchan and
Shakespearean for the forms and retain Italian and English for the
respective languages. Today, as in the nineteenth century, it is
quite possible to mix Petrarchan octaves with Shakespearean ses-
9
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
tets. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the term legiti-
mate sonnet had a brief vogue in describing Petrarchan sonnets
written in English.
It is possible, of course, to arrange the rhymes of a sonnet, and
its length of line, and indeed its number of lines, in any way one
likes-no Inspector of Sonnets will arrive to take away one's pen
and paper for transgressions. What has kept the sonnet so consis-
tent a form is simply that its essence is to have 14 lines rhyming
in octave and sestet: if one decides to write a sonnet, then one
must respect that pattern or no one will know that a sonnet is
what was intended.
That is the point of Austin Dobson' s witty lyric:
I intended an ode,
But it turned out a sonnet;
I intended an ode:
It began a la mode,
But Rose crossed the road,
In her new Sunday bonnet;
I intended an ode,
But it turned out a sonnet.l
The point of the poem would be entirely lost if the reader did not
know that ABAAABAB is the pattern not of an ode, nor yet of a
sonnet, but of a triolet.
Variants arise (and there have been many) where the essential
pattern is departed from, but from reading distance, as it were, it
must still be recognizable. As poets always know what a sonnet is
before they write their own, they know also how far they can
depart from the standard form while leaving it still visible on the
horizon.
An example may help. In the fourteenth century in Italy, poets
began to write sonnets with three lines added, a short line
rhyming with the fourteenth, followed by a couplet: ABBA ABBA
CDECDE + EFF. The extra snap that the FF couplet gives made
this form popular with satirical writers, and a subgenre, the
sonetto caudato, or tailed sonnet, became recognizable. Then, of
course, multiple tails appeared, threatening to become longer
than the original sonnet: ABBA ABBA CDCDCD DEE EFF FGG
from Antonio Cammelli about 1500. Thus when John Milton felt
particularly satirical, as when he composed "On the New Forcers
10
THE SONNET AND THE SEQUENCE
of Conscience under the Long Parliament," he reached for a
tailed sonnet (one may suppose, since it is the only one he
wrote), precisely because its variation was by then a generic sig-
nal of satirical intent, and produced a sonnet rhyming ABBA
ABBA CDE DEC CFF FGG.
2
And when in 1862 George Meredith
produced his sequence of 16-line poems, Modern Love, rhyming
ABBA CDDC EFFE GHHG, and called them sonnets, an antholo-
gizer made sense of the variation by calling them "essentially
caudated sonnets."
3
The Development of the Sonnet
Happily for students of genres, the human urge to seek out and
try various patterns is persistent, and poets' repeated attempts to
test themselves against preexisting patterns or forms give genres
their history and continuity. However, before we come to the
sonnet sequence, one question about the sonnet itself has still to
be answered: why was this particular pattern so successful?
During the sonnet's development and up to today, there have
been plenty of other short poems with fixed patterns, but none
has been so much followed as the sonnet, and no other form has
been attempted so consistently by major poets. In 1549, Joachim
du Bellay, the poet who introduced the sonnet sequence to
France, gave the sonnet pride of place and urged his fellow com-
patriots to
scrap all these old French forms ... like rondeaus, ballades, virelais,
chant royal, chansons and other sweet-shop rubbish ... but compose
these fine sonnets, the Italian invention which is as learned as it is
pleasing, like the ode, but differing in that the sonnet has limitations
and rules for its lines, whereas the ode can run on as it will in any sort
of verse.
4
Perhaps the grass was simply greener on the other side of the
Alps; but du Bellay's comment that the sonnet is "non mains docte
que plaisante" (as learned as it is pleasing) credits the 14-line son-
net with a kind of gravity or weightiness that needs further
explanation. Clearly this quality in the single sonnet, if sustained
throughout the centuries, would have much to do with the
appeal of collections of sonnets, for both writers and readers.
11
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
The sonnet was indeed invented by a learned, or at least edu-
cated, man about 1230 C.E. in southern Italy: Giacomo da Lentino,
a lawyer or notary in the service of the Holy Roman Emperor
Frederick II, who reigned from 1208 to 1250 over the southern
half of what is now Italy. Nothing is known of him beyond his
name, his occupation, and the attribution to him of 35 sonnets
out of about 125 poems that survive from the mid-thirteenth cen-
tury; but before that, the sonnet does not exist, and there seems
no reason to deny him its invention. Since he was legally trained,
probably at the University of Bologna, he would have been
accustomed to writing in Latin; what is remarkable is that he
should have troubled to invent a new kind of poem in Italian, or
at least in the southern dialect of it spoken in his region. He
would have known the vernacular poetry written in Proven;al
by the troubadours, whose verse and reputations spread well
beyond the south of France, and it is not inconceivable that the
cultural hospitality of Frederick' s courtly circle also welcomed
the verse of the trouveres of northern France.
5
In any event, it
seems that that circle encouraged poetry in the vernacular and
that da Lentino invented the 14-line stanza that became known
as the sonnet (the word sonet exists in Proven;al but just means
"a short poem") as a local contribution.
Since among the sonnets from this period and circle we have
sonnets written to da Lentino by named figures who were pre-
sumably friends, it is clear that the sonnet was used from the start
as a complete poem, and among the long poems of the period,
known as cansos or canzoni, not one uses the 14-line sonnet form
as a strophe. The sonnet has had from the start two unequal
parts, the octave and the sestet, however these are each inter-
nally arranged. It also has 11 syllables to a line (which became 10
in English), and 11 or 10 syllables is just about right, in most
European languages, for "making a point" -indeed, a later son-
neteer said (in 11 syllables) that "each point should take up
eleven syllables."
6
But because there is a turning point between
octave and sestet (often called the volta in Italian), the poet must
do something with his or her points that goes with the structural
change at the ninth line; and further, because the poem ends at
line 14, the poet must produce some sort of a conclusion. The
sonnet is, in other words, a dialectic instrument and seems to
have been so from the start.
12
THE SONNET AND THE SEQUENCE
An example from Giacomo da Lentino himself may show
what this meant in early sonneteering:
Lo basilisco a lo speclo lucente
traggi a morire con isbaldimento;
lo cesne canta plu gioiosamente
quand' e plu presso a lo suo finimento;
lo paon turba, istando plu gaudente,
poi eh' a suoi piedi fa riguardimento;
1' augel fenise s' arde veramente
per ritornare i' novo nascimento.
In ta' nature eo sentom' abenuto,
eh' allegro vado a morte, a le belleze,
e 'nzforzo il canto presso a lo finire;
estando gaio torno dismaruto,
ardendo in foco inovo in allegreze,
per voi, piu gente, a cui spero redire.
(The basilisk is drawn rejoicing
to its death in the polished mirror;
the swan sings most joyfully
when nearest to its end;
the peacock is perturbed, just at its most joyful,
when it beholds its feet; the phoenix really burns
in order to return in a new birth.
These natures I feel I have adopted
for I joyfully go to my death, towards beauty,
and I urge my song when near my end;
being joyful, I change to dismay;
burning in fire, I am reborn in joy,
because of you, noble lady, to whom I hope to return.f
The rather strange list of animal habits from medieval lore
occupies the octave: then, though it could continue through the
rest of the sonnet, da Lentino senses that he has to do something
with his bestiary and "turns" the sonnet to himself, making
point-by-point comparisons until the very last line, when some
sort of conclusion has to be reached to explain all this-it is all, of
course, "for you, noble lady."
The pattern is difficult to complete neatly, and a number of
comments from practitioners down the centuries attest to the
13
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
challenge and satisfaction of completing a poem that might be
thought too long for lyric and too short for complex argument.
Samuel Daniel (1562-1619), himself a very fine sonneteer (Delia,
1592), stresses the appeal, for the practicing writer, of the sonnet's
distinctive structure, in a metaphor that anticipates Words-
worth's "scanty plot of ground":
Is it not most delightfull to see much excellently ordered in a small
roome, or little gallantly disposed and made to fill up a space of like
capacitie, in such sort, that the one would not appear so beautiful in a
larger circuite, nor the other do well in a lesse .... And these limited
proportions, and rests of Stanzes consisting of 6, 7 or 8 lines are of
that happiness, both for the disposition of the matter, the apt planting
of the sentence where it may best stand to hit, [that] the certain close
of delight with the full body of a just period well carried, is such as
neither the Greekes or La tines ever attained unto.
8
The sonnet is a happy compromise, and when the lyrical
("delight") and the argumentative ("a just period well carried")
come together, the modern poet may well feel that he or she has
a rhetorical instrument finer than those of the ancients.
Even for ages not so inclined to see poesis as rhetorical and
competitive, the sense of achievement still registers: Gabriele
d' Annunzio said that finishing a sonnet made him feel like
Benevenuto Cellini working in gold.
9
Whether by happy acci-
dent or after various trials, Giacomo da Lentino hit upon a form
with unique properties; this testing combination of lyrical
impulse with dialectic continuity passes over into the sonnet
sequence and is writ large there as the combination of the imme-
diate experience of each sonnet with the cumulative awareness
of the whole series.
The Sequence
The Tenzone
The kind of persona shown in the basilisk sonnet of Giacomo da
Lentino-one arguing a case to, or before, another party-might
be called forensic, and it is in forensic mode, usually on the subject
of love, that most of the sonnets of da Lentino and his contempo-
14
THE SONNET AND THE SEQUENCE
raries were written. Now if the structure of the sonnet pushes its
writer into a kind of argument, it is not surprising that others
should argue in their turn; and, indeed, the first sonnet
sequences emerged in the circle of da Lentino exactly in this way,
as an exchange of sonnets connected by an argumentative
thread. These sequences are called tenzoni and may consist of as
few as two sonnets, one replying to the other, or 10 or 20 involv-
ing a number of writers. They were written throughout the thir-
teenth and fourteenth centuries in Italy, and Dante Alighieri
(whose sonnets in the book called La Vita Nuova we examine in
chapter 5) shows us how one could be organized:
Thinking over my experience, I thought I would pass it on to
many of those who were well-known poets at that time ... and pro-
posed to write a sonnet, in which I would greet all Love's faithful ser-
vants, and ask them to judge my experience. So I began the sonnet, "A
ciascun alma presa" ["To every faithful soul"]. Replies came in to this
sonnet from a lot of people, judging it in various ways, among whom
was one whom I reckon first among my friends ... and this was the
foundation, as it were, of the friendship between him and me, when
he realised that it was I who had sent the poem to him.
10
If Dante preserved all the replies, we do not have them now:
only Dante's sonnet and three of the sonnets in answer survive.
11
This early kind of sequence, in which various authors contribute
to a collection on a common theme, which may be reinforced
further by making one sonnet echo the rhymes of another, is
actually quite rare in literature, not because it wasn't common
practice, but because of the way in which literary texts are trans-
mitted in our culture. Since well before the invention of printing,
the most powerful template for organizing a collection of poems
has been the personality of the single author. Even anthologies,
which by their very nature propose to collect from a large num-
ber of authors, tend to use subgroupings in which a single
author's poems appear together; in this kind of arranging, the
tenzone is an editorial inconvenience. There is good scholarly
evidence to suggest that many early tenzoni have simply been
dispersed, the individual sonnets being regrouped by scribes
under single authors;
12
since a sonnet is always a poem in itself,
there is often nothing to show that X' s sonnet was originally a
reply to a sonnet by Y. Group authorship of sequences reappears
15
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
in the Italian and French literary academies and associations of
the sixteenth century as a kind of literary game but has no mod-
ern equivalent, unless one counts those occasional detective sto-
ries in which successive chapters are written by different authors.
Tenzoni, then, are almost the only exception to the rule that
sonnet sequences are the work of a single author. The other
exception, apart from literary games among friends, is the collec-
tion of dedicatory sonnets often found at the beginning of a
Renaissance volume, when friends contribute to praise an author
in the front of his or her new book, something that might be
regarded as a kind of tenzone but is not, for our purposes, really
any kind of sonnet sequence.
The Definition of Sequence
At this point, before returning to the development of the sonnet
sequence, we should consider the problems of defining sequence.
A working definition is "a collection of poems, dominantly son-
nets, linked together intentionally by something other than sin-
gle authorship." Clearly that covers the tenzone. If we turn to the
sonnets of a single author, we may accept that even if an author,
such as John Milton, publishes all his sonnets together in a vol-
ume, that does not of itself make a sequence. If, however, the
author not only places them together but says, or indicates, that
they are connected-something a little stronger than "col-
lected" -then the statement of intention creates a sequence.
Normally, an author's intention is manifested by the display
of a linking device. This may be formal, as when in what is called
a corona sequence the first line of each sonnet is a repetition of
the last line of the previous one (John Donne, "La Corona" ea.
1607), or when the syntax of one sonnet leads into the next, or
when each sonnet deals with one item in a series, such as the
months of the year (Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, The Idler's Calendar,
1889). Common sense tells us that these things do not happen by
accident. The linking may be narrative, as when successive son-
nets are given related titles (George Macbeth, The Patient, 1992),
or when the same characters appear in successive sonnets (Edna
St. Vincent Millay, "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree," The Harp
Weaver, 1923). When the aggregation of sonnets is much looser,
the author may signal a sequence simply by saying that it is one
16
THE SONNET AND THE SEQUENCE
(Petrarch, Rime Sparse, ea. 1365) or by giving it a connective title
(Wordsworth, The River Duddon: A Series of Sonnets, 1820).
Here we come to the edge of a distinction between collecting
sonnets and connecting them. An author may of course think that
a collection of sonnets has gTeater unity than appears to the
reader. Often, however, when an author's sense of connection is
genuine and not merely the impulse of publication, one or more
sonnets appear, often at the beginning or the end, in which the
speaker takes an overview and uses a word or an image that
shows his or her sense of connection: a collection that is called, in
the collection itself a story, an account, a book, a poem, a journey, or a
memorial is also likely to show some kind of serialism or sequen-
tiality. Elizabeth Barrett Browning entitled her sequence Sonnets
from the Portuguese (1850), which leaves the question open, but
her final sonnet uses a striking image of presenting a bouquet of
mixed flowers to her lover, which affirms her view of the unity of
her Sonnets (see chapter 5).In the absence of specific mention, we
may know from biogTaphical evidence that the author wrote, or
treated, the aggTegation of sonnets as a unity. A chance remark
preserved in a letter of 1818 by Mary Wordsworth tells us that
"William ... has written 21 sonnets (including 2 old ones) on the
River Duddon-they all together compose one poem" (de
Selincourt 506). This sentence would prompt us, even if the River
Duddon sequence were not otherwise signaled as one, to read it
as a unity, however complex.
Formally or narratively linked sequences are unproblematic,
generally speaking. But in what are often called lyric sequences,
where nothing connects the sonnets beyond the presence of a
speaking or meditating /I/, the reader's desire to find patterns
and sustain connections may be powerfully contributory-some-
thing on which the poet can rely. So, for example, George
Macbeth, in The Patient (1992), offers a series of 18 sonnets, loosely
based on his own terminal hospital care, which are linked in a
kind of narrative by their titles, such as "The Healthy Wife," "The
Sick Driver," "A Miracle," and "The Consultant." Yet the last son-
net, titled "Shotts" (the name of a Scottish mining village, his
birthplace), if read on its own, would seem to have nothing to do
with hospitals or death; however, the contextual pressure of the
previous 17 sonnets compels a reading that absorbs it into the
theme of the sequence. Once we have the hint given by the titles,
17
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
we can ourselves construct thematic and metaphorical links
between and among the poems.
This connectiveness supplied by the reader is really all that
makes Shakespeare's Sonnets a sequence, if indeed they are, for
they have no links demonstrably provided by the author and
seem to be a sequence only because of an enterprising pub-
lisher, Thomas Thorpe. Apart from small subgroups linked by
syntax or topic, the Sonnets of Shakespeare are probably the
extreme case: a highly miscellaneous group of sonnets in no
chronological, stylistic, or thematic order, with no evidence
whatever of authorial intention, welded into a sequence mainly
by the fierce determination of readers to see in them a kind of
occulted autobiography.
Finally, where there is no attempt to respect the individuality
of each sonnet, the term sequence would not normally be appro-
priate: such cases are rare, given the customary tact that stops
poets using the sonnet form simply as a stanza. Nevertheless
William Wordsworth wrote a narrative poem, "The Widow on
Windermere Side" (1842), in three sonnet-form stanzas, that it
would be capricious to call a sonnet sequence. Similarly in
Vikram Seth's interesting verse novel, The Golden Gate (1986), the
14-line stanzas (which are not in any case in normal sonnet
rhyme scheme) are so entirely narrative that they have no sepa-
rate identities. A sonnet sequence, whether formal, narrative, or
lyric, has to be a collection of sonnets, poems that retain a func-
tioning internal structure and are capable of standing alone-as,
for example, when anthologized.
Sequence Length and Arrangement
What of length? In the section that follows, we examine sonnet
sequences of very different lengths: John Donne' s "La Corona"
has only seven sonnets, and a tenzone need involve only two
sonnets, which are undoubtedly in sequence. At the longer end,
Petrarch' s Rime Sparse has 317 sonnets, with an additional 49
poems, and there are sequences with even more, though few
authors have actually written a longer sequence than Petrarch's
366 poems. If we set aside the special (and rare) case of the two-
sonnet tenzone, then we can say that a sonnet sequence in prac-
tice has anywhere from 3 to 400 sonnets or sonnets combined
18
THE SONNET AND THE SEQUENCE
with other poems. Indeed, the first use of the word in 1573 de-
scribed a set of three sonnets as "in sequence."
1
3
It often happens within a sequence that subgroups of sonnets
appear connected: where a second sonnet follows syntactically or
thematically from its predecessor, we might simply call them a
pair; but larger groups often occur, and French criticism gives us
the useful term suite for this. So, for example, in Petrarch' s Rime,
we find a suite of three sonnets, numbers 41 through 43, succes-
sively rhyming ABBA ABBA CDC DCD I BMB BMB DCD CDC I
ABBA ABBA CDC DCD. It is not clear why Petrarch should have
created this sonnet sandwich, but the notion of suite allows the
reader to treat these three as belonging more to one another than
to what surrounds them. Suites of sonnets generally are short by
comparison with the sequences in which they occur, and it may
often be unclear whether the suite is the creation of the author or
of the reader.
\
In the long history of the sonnet sequence, authors occasion-
ally have attempted to use stanzas longer or shorter than the 14-
line sonnet proper. The first love-" sonnet" sequences in both
France and England were irregular in this way: Maurice Sceve's
Delie, published in France in 1544, began a French vogue for son-
net sequences about love but is itself written in a complicated
native French stanza called a dizain (10 lines rhyming ABABBC-
CDBD). Similarly, Thomas Watson' s Hekatompathia of 1582 comes
at the start of the English vogue but is written in 18-line stanzas.
Since these works were produced in advance of the craze, they
can be treated as experiments that had no imitators; more chal-
lenging is the work of George Meredith (Modern Love, 1862) and
of Tony Harrison (from The School of Eloquence, 1978), both of
whom used a 16-line stanza and made it clear that they consid-
ered these to be sonnets. What one might call noninnocent varia-
tions such as these direct the reader to recall the normal sonnet
and its sequence while reading the variant, rather as one can
hold a rhythm in one's head while clapping off the beat.
The terms formal, narrative, and lyric, used earlier, seem to
describe, even over the long period of the sonnet's development,
the range of approaches used by writers of sequences. It is partic-
ularly interesting to see that when the sonnet sequence returned
in large numbers to English and American literature in the nine-
teenth century, after a century and a half of disuse, the things
19
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
that authors try to do with it are very much like those of their
Renaissance predecessors. There is, as we shall see, plenty of
scope for originality. However, one problem always presents
itself, in any age or place, because of the nature of the sonnet: the
problem of aggregation into a whole of items that are also mean-
ingful separately-a difficulty no other genre, in prose or verse,
presents.
To give an analogy from outside literature, most readers will at
some time have faced the task of putting accumulated pho-
tographs into an album. Each photograph is a formal discrete
item, has its own meaning and justification, and may also be
framed and viewed on its own. An album unites them all, but in
doing so poses problems of aggregation. Certainly, photographs
are usually taken by one person (the "author" of the album-few
people consistently put photographs taken by others into their
albums) and have a viewpoint, both literal and metaphorical.
However, their separateness challenges the album compiler to
become aware of his or her principles of aggregation. There is
formal organization: photographs of the same size tend to
appear together, or mixed sizes are found in balanced arrange-
ments; black-and-white photographs usually are separated from
calor ones. There are special suites of photographs, such as the
sets in which a group is photographed in turn by each member of
it, and there are paired photographs, as when a panorama is cre-
ated by cutting and splicing two shots, roughly equivalent to
making a second sonnet carry on the syntax of the first.
Most people who take photographs and preserve them are
aware of the need to compose within the frame, and photo-
graphs may enter the album because they are formally well (or
comically badly) composed. Then there is narrative organization
where, either by good luck or because the photographer thought
of it at the time the photographs follow a person or group
through a sequence, such as that in a wedding or a first day at
school. Some amateurs may produce categorical sequences: just
as there are sonnet sequences on the months of the year and the
seven deadly sins, so a suite of photographs can be assembled by
following, say, a garden through the year or a person through
various antics representing different kinds of behavior.
But along with these formal or narrative/thematic kinds of
aggregation, there is the lyric. Few amateur photographers do
20
THE SONNET AND THE SEQUENCE
not at some time try to take a "picture," that is, a photograph that
has aesthetic value-collections of vacation snapshots contain
many taken because the scene pleased or moved the photogra-
pher. (The importance of the personal response is indicated by
the habit on vacation of taking one's own pictures of scenes that
are available a few yards away on professionally superior post-
cards.) Events that are already emotionally charged-a honey-
moon or leaving a well-known place for the last time-are partic-
ularly likely to impel the taking of "lyrical" photographs. The
gathering together of these, often in combination with narrative
snapshots, produces a kind of disjointed coherence familiar to
anyone who has had to explain a run of photographs to an out-
sider, in which each photograph can be admired on its own but is
also related to its context.
If the reader will grant that the photograph has in some mea-
sure replaced the letter in our culture, then the suggestion that a
sonnet sequence is a kind of album of meditations and responses,
such as once would have been recorded in letter form for preser-
vation at home, may not seem outrageous. The kinds of connect-
edness that a sequence may have, over and above the connection
to a single author, are very much like those that organize other
kinds of albums. No other literary genre, except that of personal
letters, is in that sense an album.
Formal and Narrative Sequences
Because of the historical circumstance that a lyric sequence,
Petrarch' s Rime, provided the most powerful and frequently imi-
tated model for later sonnet writers, the formal and narrative
sequences are less common. In this overview, it will be convenient
to deal with them first before considering the lyric sequence as
generically the most complicated and rewarding kind.
It is impossible to write any poem without being conscious of
pattern, but because the sonnet is a prescribed form, its parame-
ters laid down before one starts to write, one is particularly con-
scious of pattern completion when writing sonnets. The sense
that one is playing a game is strong, and within the single sonnet
writers have attempted all sorts of challenges, writing sonnets
with only one rhyme word, for example, or beginning each line
with the word that ended the previous one. In linking sonnets in
21
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
a sequence, close repetition becomes much more difficult and
even tedious if long sustained, which may explain why formal
linking between sonnets rarely is carried on for more than a
dozen sonnets.
Some evidence suggests that in Dante's time, poets writing
tenzoni picked up and repeated each other's rhymes, but there
are few tenzoni in which such repetitions are unambiguously
clear.l
4
Petrarch tried it himself in Rime 41 through 43, using the
rhymes -ove and -ana in the octave and -arte and -ato in the ses-
tets, and wrote two further sonnets, 100 and 101, with the same
rhymes (-ede, -ana, -ore, -anno, -aghe); but the rarity of this in
Petrarch and his contemporaries' work suggests that it was not
valued. However, in the middle and late sixteenth century, along
with the popularity in Italy of "academies" -small gatherings of
literati in the main towns, often under the protection of the local
bishop or duke-there was a flurry of sonnet sequences in highly
ingenious patterns, sometimes with multiple authorship, com-
municated through the raccolte, or anthologies, fashionable at the
time. These sequences, or catene (chains), appear to have pro-
duced also the strict corona sequence, in which the last line of one
sonnet becomes the first line of the next, and the last of all ends
with the first line of the first, completing the circle, or garland, or
corona. Some corona sequences of this late-sixteenth-century
vogue add a sonnet called the magistrale (master sonnet) in which
after 14 sonnets in corona all the repeated lines are united in a
single sonnet. (One suspects that the magistrale normally was
written first, and the other 14 devised to use its lines.
15
)
The first sonnet sequence to be printed in the English lan-
guage, written by Anne Locke in 1560, is a religious sequence,
which will be mentioned again later: the second and third, how-
ever, come out of a courtly ambience of game playing where
poems were written as tests of skill, often in response to topics (or
"devises") set by social superiors, and are worth noticing as early
attempts to join sonnets. George Gascoigne (1542-1577), law stu-
dent, novelist, dramatist, critic, and poet, published in 1573 an
anthology of his works, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, which
declares on its title page that the contents are
gathered partely (by translation) in the fyne outlandish [i.e., exotic]
Gardins of Euripides, Ovid, Petrarke, Ariosto and others: and partely
by invention, out of our owne fruitefull Orchardes in Englande.
16
22
THE SONNET AND THE SEQUENCE
-It was perhaps in this spirit of native emulation of the exotic
that he inserted into his romantic novella, The Adventures of
Maister El., what he called "this sequence" -the first appearance
of the term in English in relation to sonnets:
Of thee deare Dame, three lessons would I learn,
What reason first persuades the foolish Fly
(As soone as shee a candle can discerne)
To play with flame, till shee bee burnt thereby?
Or what may move the Mouse to byte the bayte
Which strykes the trappe, that stops hir hungry breath?
What calles the Byrd, where snares of deepe deceit
Are closely caught to draw hir to hir death?
Consider well, what is the cause of this,
And though percase thou wilt not so confesse, [percase: perhaps]
Yet deepe desire, to gayne a heavenly blisse,
May drowne the mynd in dole and darke distresse:
Oft is it seene (whereat my heart may bleed e)
Fooles play so long till they be caught indeed.
It is a heaven to see them hop and skip,
And seeke all shiftes to shake their shackles of:
It is a world, to see them hang the lip
Who (earst) at love were wont to skorne and skof.
But as the Mouse, once caught in crafty trap,
And then
May bounce and beate agaynst the boorden wall, [boorden: wooden]
Till shee have brought her head in such mishape,
That doune to death hir fainting lymbes must fall:
And as the Flye once singed in the flame,
Cannot commaund hir winges to wave away,
But by the heele she hangeth in the same
Till cruell death hir hasty journey stay.
So they that seeke to breake the linkes of love
Stryve with the streame, and this by payne I prove.
I first beheld that heavenly hewe of thyne,
Thy stately stature, and thy comely grace,
I must confesse these dazled eyes of myne
Did wincke for feare, when I first viewd thy face:
But bold desire did open them agayne,
And bad mee looke till I had lookt to[o]long,
I pitied them that did procure my payne,
And lov' d the lookes that wrought me all the wrong:
And as the Byrd once caught but woorks her woe,
23
For when
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
That stryves to leave the lymed wings behind:
[lymed: limed, i.e., with birdlime]
Even so the more I strave to parte thee fro,
The greater grief did growe within my minde:
Remediles then must I yeeld to thee,
And crave no more, thy servant but to bee.[but: except]
Gascoigne, while not a genius, was a fluent and intelligent
poet, and this little sequence shows a good grasp of the basic
problems of aggregation. The sonnets are in regular Shake-
spearean form, ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, but are linked by two
small tails, 'And then" and "For when," which also rhyme. The
rhythmical effect is curious, like a little hop or skip, and did not
appeal to later writers. The fondness for animal imagery that
Giacomo da Lentino' s sonnet showed is here a means of holding
three together: the Fly, the Mouse, and the Bird recur as compar-
isons, but not in any remorselessly logical way. In spite of that,
each of the three sonnets can stand on its own (if one allows the
conjunctive adverb when to go into the third sonnet from the tail)
and be read as a self-contained unit. Each sonnet is concluded
with an epigrammatic couplet, but the final couplet of the third is
also the conclusion of the sequence.
Gascoigne is also responsible for the first corona sequence in
English, a little later in the same volume. By this date, corona
sequences had been published in Italy, and Gascoigne may well
have seen a model among his Italian reading. His sequence on
the moral tag "Good enough is fast enough" consists of seven
sonnets
17
and varies from the model Donne followed only by
having the last sonnet repeat its own first line at the end. Because
of its audible iteration, as well as its tendency to go on at some
length, the corona sequence fits well with a ceremonial or philo-
sophical persona and has usually been employed for that kind of
subject. Torquato Tasso' s much imitated corona sequence of 12
sonnets, beginning "Era piena l'Italia e pieno 'I Mondo," is in
effect a long praise poem, and George Macbeth's modern corona
sequence, 'A Christmas Ring" (1970), with 14 sonnets and a
sonetto magistrale, retains the traditional sense of ceremony and
solemn game.
18
Linked with less contrivance, but still formally structured, are
sequences one might call categorical, in which the number of son-
24
THE SONNET AND THE SEQUENCE
nets corresponds to the number of items in a set of objects: the
months of the year (Folgore da San Gemignano, ea. 1310), the
seven deadly sins (Guittone d' Arezzo, ea. 1265), the planets
(James VI of Scotland, 1585), or notable figures (Martin Tupper,
1839, subtitled "A Septuagint of Worthies"). The set of objects may
of course be the lines of the sonnet itself: the Italians of the late
sixteenth century appear also to have invented the 14-sonnet
sequence, subsequently practiced by Christina Rossetti in 1882 in
"Monna Innominata-A Sonnet of Sonnets" and "Later Life-A
Double Sonnet of Sonnets" (28 sonnets).The 14-sonnet sequence,
at the author's discretion, can mimic the structure of the single
sonnet, having breaks in thought at the fourth and eighth and
possibly at the eleventh verses. Such, for example, is George
Macbeth's "Thoughts on a Box of Razors" (Poems from Oby, 1972).
The first sonnet sequence written in Enghsh, mentioned previ-
ously, is of this categorical kind: Anne Locke's Meditation of a
Penitent Sinner, published in 1560 and written shortly before that
date. Anne Locke (ea. 1533-1595) was a devout Protestant and
friend of John Knox and for a short period was in Geneva, a
Marian exile from her home in London. On her return to London,
she published, no doubt from her luggage, a translation of one of
Calvin's sermons, but remarkably appended to it 26 sonnets in
sequence, 5 prefatory and 21 making up the "meditation."
Following established devotional practice, she meditated on
the text of Psalm 51, one of the greatest Protestant penitential
texts, and hit on the idea of keying each sonnet to a verse of the
psalm (it has 19, but she split the two longest verses). The result-
ing sequence has unity of mood from the psalm and variety and
progression from the different stages of the psalmist's vision. But
Locke herself had an extraordinarily good ear for meter, as well
as a firm grasp of syntax and enjambment that must have come
from her own native ability and education; there were no English
sonnet sequences before hers, and those that existed in French
(which she could certainly read, if not speak, fluently) were of a
wholly secular kind that she would not have troubled to
encounter. She chose the Shakespearean sonnet form as devel-
oped by the Earl of Surrey, ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, and gener-
ated from the voice of the psalmist a very powerful penitential
persona, intense, inward looking, but also active. Locke's sonnets
move with a fluency unmatched till Sidney began to write some
25
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
20 years later. It is also worth noticing that the first two of her five
prefatory sonnets are a single 28-line sentence-a remarkable
and as far as I know unique achievement in the sonnet game.l
9
Psalm 51 is not a narrative, and Locke's technique of medita-
tive expansion would in any case destroy any narrative line. Real
narrative sequences, that is, sequences in which the sonnet sim-
ply functions as a stanza to tell a story, are very rare, as I have
already suggested: nearly all writers prefer to use the sonnets to
give glimpses of moments in a narrative that remains mostly con-
cealed; the point of view is usually that of a single character
whose thoughts and feelings are foregrounded, making the
sequence lyric rather than narrative.
One exception has already been mentioned: Vikram Seth' s
verse novel The Golden Gate (1986), though its stanza form is not
that of a regular sonnet;
20
another, Edna St. Vincent Millay' s
"Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree" will be discussed at length in
chapter 4. That leaves only a few curiosities: the earliest narrative
sequence is from the thirteenth century, an unfinished or incom-
plete Italian sequence of 232 sonnets freely translating and adapt-
ing a large part of the long French narrative poem Le Roman de la
Rose, by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, 1237-1277. Even
here, though the sequence is a version of a French narrative poem
with an entirely different formal structure (continuous rhymed
verse organized into episodes), individual sonnets tend to offer
encounters between the persons of the narrative, responding to
the sonnet's capacity to dramatize instants of time or perception.
The authorship of the sequence, known as Il Fiore (The Flower), is
often assigned to Dante Alighieri, and the text referred to in this
book forms part of an edition of Dante's works.
21
About 1570, a Neapolitan poet, Ferrante Carrafa, is alleged to
have been the first to write a heroic poem in sonnets, called
Dell'Austria (Napoli: G. Cacchi, 1572);
22
interestingly, a later bio-
graphical notice of him comments that "each sonnet of the poem
could also stand on its own," emphasizing what I have already
drawn attention to, the sonnet's quality of retaining its own
internal structure against the flow of continuous narrative. In
English, one of the few poets to attempt to use the sonnet as a
simple stanza in a long poem is George Wither (1588-1667) who
in Campo-Musae of 1643 and Vox Pacifica of 1645 produced two
long and rambling political and moral commentaries, hardly
26
THE SONNET AND THE SEQUENCE
narratives, in which the sonnet certainly begins to lose its dis-
tinctness. Even Wither, however, calls his poems "musings,"
acknowledging the fragmenting effect that the unity of 14 lines
introduces into larger structures:
My Vessell stirreth not, till that Wind blowes
Which never blowes but when, and where, it list:
Drie is my Cisterne, till that Fountaine flowes,
Whose flowings-forth, I cannot then resist.
Somtimes, in me, so low the Waters lie,
That every Childe and Beast is trampling on me;
Somtime againe, they rise, they swell so high,
That Princes cannot make a Bridge upon me.
Had King, and Parliament, the other day,
Commanded from me that which now I write,
To save my life, I knew not what to say
Of that, which was inspired yesternight:
And being, now, as full as I can hold,
Though none they please, my Musings must be told.
Mistake not tho, as if it should be thought,
That by Enthusiasme now I write;
Or, that the matter which to me is brought,
By GODS immediate dictates, I indite.
Far is that Arrogancie from my pen:
The Objects of my Contemplation, be
The same which GOD affords to other men,
Who use aright, the Guifts bestow' d on me.
The Muses challenge a peculiar phrase [peculiar: distinctive]
And freedomes, not so well becoming those,
Who are confined to observe the lawes
Of common speech, and tell their minds in prose:
For, whereas these have but one worke to do,
I have, in my Intentions, often two.
23
Wither is a tedious talker, but though he has little to say, he has
inherited from the verse writers of the early seventeenth century
a relaxed and fluent conversational mode to say it in. However, I
suggest that Wither's is the limiting case for what I earlier called
"sonnetness": the distinct structure of the sonnet is just percepti-
ble here in the clinch of the final couplet, and everything else
becomes continuous verse. This is not a sonnet sequence, but a
27
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
long poem using sonnet-form stanzas. The same might be said of
Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate and of John Fuller's verse fiction
The Illusionists (1980), with the qualification that both Seth and
Fuller take care not to use a traditional sonnet rhyme scheme-
Fuller's comic Byronic verse narrative uses tetrameters rhyming
ABAB CCDD EFFE GG.
After Wither's time, and during most of the eighteenth cen-
tury, the demands of the age for wit (which drives for brevity)
and on the other hand for expository verse (which makes for
length and continuity) sent the sonnet and its sequences into dis-
favor, and sonnet sequences did not reappear in English until the
1780s,2
4
when British writers responded to the flow of European
romanticism. The sonnet sequence had not similarly disappeared
in French and Italian poetry but had become much less popular
and reflected the increasingly baroque and later rococo fondness
for extravagant patternings-a feature beyond the scope of this
work.
The Lyric Sequence
When the sonnet sequence came into its second vogue in English
at the end of the eighteenth century, the most powerful influ-
ences were first, the generation of Elizabethan Petrarchist sonnet-
sequence writers including Spenser and Shakespeare; and sec-
ond, Milton, who though he wrote no sonnet sequences, was
typical of the moralist/philosopher sonneteer. These made cultur-
ally acceptable-and indeed desirable-a lyric sonnet voice
inherited from the European Renaissance, and congenial to
European romanticism, that one might call"the passionate spec-
tator." The sequence (and also, of course, single sonnets) was pro-
jected from the persona of someone who stood slightly outside
or above the society that he (or she-many sonnet sequences
were written by women) commented on: he or she might be dis-
appointed in love and thus outside the sphere of the beloved, if
not an actual outcast. This feature is a readily recognizable
Petrarchan persona. On the Miltonic side, the speaker might be a
figure of Wisdom, trying to teach social or moral truths from the
vantage point of achieved serenity-or in a more satirical vein,
perhaps anger or bitterness. This combination of emotional fer-
vor with a kind of sage distancing can be found readily in Dante,
28
THE SONNET AND THE SEQUENCE
Petrarch, Spenser, Shakespeare, or Milton by a Romantic reader.
Since these admired authors had all (except Milton) produced
sonnet sequences, a considerable number of sonnet sequences in
this mode appeared between 1780 and about 1930.
25
The eighteenth century, notably short on sonnets and sonnet
sequences, nevertheless produced an enormous amount of
philosophical landscape poetry. When sonnet sequences came
back into favor, one of the things the passionate spectator was
likely to spectate upon was topography. The topographical sonnet
sequence emerged as a distinct subgenre at this time; indeed,
there are more sonnet sequences (and more sonnets) on natural
objects and places than on any other single subject. If these had a
distant ancestor in the various sonnets of Petrarch composed on,
or to, the landscape of the Vaucluse, their subgenre was really a
new kind of sequence, pioneered by Wordsworth, whose 34 son-
nets regarding the River Duddon (1820), if not the earliest in
English, were certainly the most influential topographical medi-
tative sequence.
The idea of using the sonnet sequence to meditate on a succes-
sion of objects is a development of the categorical sequence
already mentioned and had been strikingly anticipated by
Joachim du Bellay (1532-1560) in his sequence of 32 sonnets, Les
Antiquitcz de Rome (1558?
6
devoted to the ruins of Rome. Though
not topographical in the modern sense, since he does not look at
individual landmarks, du Bellay shows what Wordsworth also
grasped: that the passage from sonnet to sonnet is a movement
in space that is the analogy of a movement in time, while each
sonnet is a place in which one can look back or forward in histor-
ical time. The comparison can be made again with snapshots,
each sonnet functioning as a starting image for a lyrical or medi-
tative response; there is also a parallel with the guidebook, well
developed in the humanist sixteenth century and the constant
companion of the tourists of Wordsworth's age.
Given the powerful and pervasive nature of Romantic nature
symbolism, it is often difficult to be sure whether a sequence
deals with a real or symbolic landscape: some sequences, such as
Words worth's, have strong links with the guidebook, while oth-
ers, such as Longfellow' s "The Two Rivers," deal with landscapes
wholly of the mind and are entirely lyrical. This might be said of
Petrarch's sonnets on landscape: it is not accidental that Petrarch
29
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
returns in the nineteenth century .as one of the most admired
authors for writers of sonnets and sonnet sequences. That almost
any external object can now be the symbol of an internal state, or .
that without losing its identity it can exhibit what Coleridge
called "the translucence of the general in the special," means that
in the sonnet sequence as in verse in general it becomes harder
and harder to separate the topographical from the lyrical, the
external snapshot from the internal meditation, and the album of
scenes from the diary of the soul.
The other kind of sequentiality that became prominent in the
nineteenth century was that of the novel. It might be argued that
the arrival of the modern novel, and particularly of the Bildun-
gsroman, would displace the sonnet sequence, and so it seems,
since only one major novelist, George Meredith, also wrote a
major sonnet sequence. George Eliot's short sequence, "Brother
and Sister" (1874), of only 11 sonnets, is a curiosity, overshad-
owed by The Mill on the Floss (1860) and her other novels. It was
not that prose was preferred to verse as a narrative medium
(though that might be true today), for the major lyrical talents of
the century-Wordsworth, Tennyson, the Brownings, and
Longfellow-also wrote massive amounts of narrative verse.
However, a reading of sonnets and sonnet sequences does sug-
gest that the importance of what we now call mood, the emergence
or dominance of one feeling or state of mind through which to
look at the world, and the special cultural value given to intensity
of mood after about 1780 in Europe and America-one thinks of
the parallel development of the impromptu and the nocturne in
music-favored a medium that could present moods without the
wrapping of events that a novel requires but that yet retained the
dignity of long discourse (as in the song cycle in music).
This nineteenth-century emphasis is not as much of a break
with the past as it might seem, because a large number of sonnet
sequences before the eighteenth century dealt with love,
whether of an earthly lover or of God. Taking Petrarch' s Rime as
their model, sometimes several times removed, these sequences
image love and desire as an oscillation between frustration and
satisfaction, or despair and hope, such that particular sonnets
register continuously varying moods in the speaker, held
together by an underlying devotion to or search for the Other,
the object of desire beyond the self. The Petrarchan pattern
30
THE SONNET AND THE SEQUENCE
proved durable and was imitated by many nineteenth-century
and later sonneteers, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti in The House
of Life (1881) or Robert Bridges in The Growth of Love (1898).
Looking back over the sonnet sequence's long career, one can
see that it has always been associated with, and used for, the reg-
istration of what I am now calling mood-a word etymologically
close to mode in both general and musical senses. Expressing
human moods or (as the Renaissance would have called them)
passions and tracing their connection with identity and self-con-
struction has always been one of the functions of literature and
particularly of certain genres within it, such as lyric and tragedy.
Different cultures legitimize, or as one might say in this context,
authorize, the expression of mood in different ways, according to
their medical knowledge, religions, or discursive practices: so
Guittone d' Arezzo, about 1350, put the socially recognizable
gamut of human moods into a sequence of 24 sonnets on the
vices and the virtues, in obedience to a theologically centered
notion of human personality.
27
Shakespeare and Spenser, in their
sequences, expose the variety of their own moods as responses to
the moods or gestures of a feudal superior (one male, one
female), reflecting the notion so widespread in the Renaissance
of personality as constructed by systems of allegiance and
responsibility (whether to divine or earthly superiors). Words-
worth, believing that personality was formed by environment (as
offered by a benevolent Nature), saw mood as embodied in the
objects and landscapes of the River Duddon, as if the entire land-
scape extended in space were, potentially, the collectivity of his
self varying in time. Rilke' s mystical identification of the self with
the world spirit does not lend itself easily to cultural assimilation,
but for a modern sequence writer, such as Tony Harrison, how-
ever, the notion of mood is beginning to give way to the notion of
sign, by which the varying nature of the self is imaged through
the constant change, or deconstruction, of meanings in the uni-
verse of signs around the self (from The School of Eloquence, 1978).
Thus, more importance is given to fragmentation and less to
coherence; yet the sonnet sequence still copes admirably with the
urgency of the deconstructive moment set into a chain of contin-
uous change. Dante and Petrarch, both of them familiar with the
intense moment that undoes previous meanings, would have
sympathized.
31
Chapter 2
THE FORMAL SEQUENCE:
FOLGORE DA SAN GEMIGNANO,
ANNE LOCKE, }OHN DONNE,
AND GEORGE MACBETH
Formal Linking
T
he first sonnet sequence to be written in English, as men-
tioned in chapter 1, was Anne Locke's Meditation of a Penitent
Sinner, published in 1560. Because this is an unfamiliar text, it is
worth reproducing two of her sonnets here to show a particular
kind of connectedness that is relevant to the two sequences to be
discussed at length in the next section, John Donne's "La
Corona," from his Holy Sonnets, published in 1633 but probably
written about 1607; and George Macbeth' s ''A Christmas Ring"
from The Burning Cone, 1970. M0st sequences work with some
kind of I 1/ as the speaker of all the sonnets, however varied the
moods or passions of the individual sonnets. If the sequence is a
dialogue, as in Guittone d' Arezzo' s six-sonnet "Tenzone con la
Donna Villana" ("Conversation with a Low-Class Lady"), written
before 1260,1 then the notion of personality applies to two char-
acters instead of a single speaker. This is not the place for a gen-
32
THE FORMAL SEQUENCE
era! discussion of personality in literature, but it must be stressed
that well before the rise of the novel the sonnet sequence was act-
ing, like Cicero' s Letters, as the means of presenting the continu-
ity and discontinuity that is the paradox of personality. Dante's
Vita Nuova will be discussed in chapter 4; here we look at
sequences in which continuity is preserved by formal connec-
tions.
One of the earliest ways, in European culture, in which the
supposed chaos of human thoughts and feelings could be given
coherence was meditation: the individual fixed his or her
thoughts on something having either an intense quality (Christ's
agony) or a number of discrete stages (the seven joys of Mary).
Each stage focused a particular awareness or idea or feeling in
the speaker, which given utterance, produced a sense of emo-
tional or intellectual progress. This technique, applied to the son-
net, produces a sequence of the type I have called categorical, in
which each sonnet marks a stage and all the sonnets together
record the development of an I 1/. The categorical sequence can
be secular, and the /I! in that case is likely to be a detached
observer, meditative only in the sense that he or she is the source
of the thoughts expressed; here, for example, is Folgore da San
Gemignano, writing about 1310, on two of the months of the
year:
D' agosto si vi do trenta castella
in una valle d' alpe montanina,
che non vi possa vento de marina,
per sitar sani, chiari come stella;
e palafreni da montare 'n sella,
e cavalcar la sera e la mattina:
e I' una terra e 1' altra si vicina,
ch'un miglio sia la vostra giornatella,
tornando tuttavia in verso casa;
e per la valle corra una fiumana,
che vada notte e di traente e rasa;
e star ne! fresco tutta meriggiana:
la vostra borsa sempre a bocca pasa,
per la miglior vivanda di Toscana.
Di settembre vi do deletti tanti:
falconi, astori, smerletti, sparvieri,
lunghe, gherbegli, geti con carnieri,
33
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
brachette con sonagli, pas to e guanti;
bolz' e balestre dritt' e ben portanti,
archi, strali, ballotte e ballottieri;
sianvi mudati guilfanghi ed astieri
nidaci e di tutt'altri uccel volanti
che fosser buoni da snidar e prendere:
e l'un a l'altro tuttavia domando,
e possasi rubar, e non contendere,
quando con altra gente rincontrando;
la vostra borsa si acconcia a spendere,
e'n tutto abbiate 1' avarizia in bando.
(I give to you in August thirty towers
within an Alpine valley mountainous,
where never the sea-wind may vex your house,
but health as clear as starlight shall be yours.
And horses shall wait saddled at all hours,
That you may ride at morning or at eve:
Each place so near the next one you'll perceive,
A one-mile trip that doesn't tax your powers
Will always get you back to home and bed.
A valley, parted by a rivulet
Which day and night shall flow sedate and smooth,
Will let you pass your middays in the shade,
And there your open purses shall entreat
The best of Tuscan cheer to feed your youth.
I give you in September great delight:
Falcons and merlins, every kind of hawk,
With jesses, laces, game bags all in stock,
Hounds with their bells, and gauntlets strong and tight;
Crossbows with bolts that hurtle out of sight,
And bows and arrows, bullets and shot-cases;
Your falcons have been managed through their paces,
With hand-reared goshawks, skilful in their flight,
And every kind of bird for hunting down.
Let everyone be free in their requests,
And if you're robbed, it shouldn't raise a frown;
When meeting strangers, courtesy suggests
Your purse must flow as if it were their own:
Let meanness be what everyone detests.)
2
Folgore' s 12 sonnets on the months (very readably translated
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti) were addressed to a group of Sienese
34
THE FORMAL SEQUENCE
nobles, as his dedicatory sonnet says, and the speaker thus takes
on the role of a host welcoming guests of leisure and means.
Even as early as the late thirteenth century, it is plain that the cat-
egorical sonnet sequence is close to other genres that combine
descriptions of single items with an overall persona, including
the guidebook, the tourist brochure, and the diary (particularly
the diary of the seasons, as in Edith Holden's Country Diary of an
Edwardian Lady [London: Michael Joseph, 1977]). In all of these,
as in Folgore' s sequence, the reader is conscious of a subtle rela-
tionship with a speaker who is not merely knowledgeable about
the area (whether of time or space) but is also offering it with cer-
tain assumptions about how it will be used, and even advice on
how to behave. The figure of the wise (and here also genial)
observer will recur in sonnet sequences ever afterward.
Here the formal linking of the sonnets categorically-one per
month-is reinforced by the use of the name of the month in the
first line, and in all except the first sonnet, in the first three words.
This kind of linkage has the effect of assuring the reader that he
or she is getting somewhere: a display of goods or a process of
teaching is under way. As the reader jumps the gap from sonnet
to sonnet, he or she will tend to look for connections, categorical,
syntactic, or thematic, and receive impetus to move on to the
next stage.
Folgore da San Gemignano, though he has ambitions to be the
guide, philosopher, and friend of those he addresses, could
hardly be called meditative; Anne Locke's sequence of 1560 is
designed for spiritual guidance and points toward the more intri-
cately connected sequences of John Donne and George Macbeth.
Her title, A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner: Written in maner of a
Paraphrase upon the 51 Psalme of David, announces her stance and
method: she is the first writer in English, and the first that I know
of in Europe, to key the sonnets of a sequence to the verses of
another text. This can be regarded as the first use of titling mater-
ial-material that goes above or alongside the sonnet-to guide
the reader. The following pair of sonnets, in reasonable type fac-
simile, will show her approach:
Loe prostrate, Lorde, before thy face I lye
With sighes depe drawne depe sorrow to expresse,
0 Lord of mercie, mercie do I crye:
Dryve me not from thy face in my distresse,
35
Cast me
not away
from thy
face and
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
Thy face of mercie and of swete relefe
The face that fedes angels with onely sight,
The face of comfort in extremest grefe
Take not away the succour of thy sprite,
Thy holy sprite, which is myn onely stay,
The stay that when despeir assaileth me,
In faintest hope yet moveth me to pray,
To pray for mercy, and to pray to thee.
Lord, cast me not from presence of thy face,
Nor take from me the spirite of thy grace.
But render me my wonted joyes againe,
Which sinne hath reft, and planted in theyr place
Doubt of thy mercie ground of all my paine.
The tast that thy love whylome did embrace
My cheerfull soule, the signes that dyd assure
My felyng ghost of favour in thy sight,
Are fled from me, and wretched I endure
Senselesse of grace the absence of thy sprite.
Restore my joyes, and make me fele againe
The swete retorne of grace that I have lost,
That I may hope I pray not all in vayne.
With thy free sprite confirme my feble ghost,
To hold my faith from ruine and decay
With fast affiance and assured stay.
3
take not
thy holy
spirit from
me.
Restore to
me the cam-
forte of thy
saving hel-
pe, & sta-
blishc me
with thy
free spirit
This pair of sonnets, linked antithetically in a "not-A-but-B" pat-
tern, are of course prayers to God, but uttered, as prayers often
are, to be overheard by the reader, just as David' s psalms were
intended. Locke fixes the reader's mind, along with the speaker's,
on a text rather than an image or conceptual item such as a month
of the year and then develops a response to that text. But the text
is itself sequential in that each reader is likely to have a copy of
Psalm 51 at hand (it was one of the best known and most trans-
lated Protestant texts) and will read Locke's sonnets in a process
of departing from and returning to David' s, verse by verse. This is
an analogue of the meditative method, which involves both the
regard of an external object and a movement into one's mind.
The reader will notice that although the two sonnets deal with
separate feelings, Locke linked them to create a pair. Formal link-
ing is one solution to the problem of interweaving one's sonnets
without losing the identity of each, and the corona sequence takes
this formal intricacy to an extreme, as we see in John Donne' s
36
THE FORMAL SEQUENCE
devotional sequence, "La Corona" (ea. 1607). Like Locke's, these
sonnets are prayers, addressed to God, the Virgin Mary, Christ,
and fellow worshipers by a single 11/, and are keyed, not certainly
to a quoted text, but to the gospel narratives of Christ's life,
alluded to in the six titles of sonnets 2 through 7: 'Annunciation,"
"Nativitie," "Temple," "Crucifying," "Resurrection," and
'Ascention." This series is a meditation on Christ's life. However,
because it is also an utterance directed to God and to the Holy
Family, it acknowledges and praises them at the same time as it
reveals the anxieties of the speaker-and praise requires art.
In Renaissance writing, the strategies of praise literature were
many and various, but they almost always involved the speaker
in offering his or her art as a gift in addition to the content of that
art. This creates the speaker, in the midst of his or her poetry, as a
self-conscious artist, aware of the patterns he or she creates. Anne
Locke does not show this awareness: because of her strong
Calvinist conviction of sin, she maintains the fiction that her
utterance is "confused crye" and "oft repeted grone," and her
speaker is simply not allowed to be aware that what she says is
being said in fluent rhyme. Because it is impossible for an author
writing sonnets (or any kind of verse) not to be aware that he or
she is doing so, Locke's speaker is just as much a fictional creation
as Donne's but is one that does not draw attention to the art of
the sonnet sequence while uttering it.
The Formal Sequence
John Donne, "La Corona"
Donne, by contrast, begins his sequence by drawing attention to
his art. The sequence is titled "La Corona," and the first line (itali-
cized, like the first and last lines of each sonnet in the 1633 text) is
"Deigne at my hands this crown of prayer and praise." The sequence
thus begins with the lines "Deigne at my hands this crown of prayer
and praise I Weav' d in my low devout melancholie" and ends
'And if thy holy Spirit, my Muse did raise, I Deigne at my hands this
crowne of prayer and praise." The unusual reference to "weaving" a
crown both reminds the reader of the etymology of text and
directs him or her to examine its construction (we shall see
George Macbeth similarly draw attention to his art) as an inter-
37
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
lacing of items-in this case, lines. As is necessary in a corona
sequence, the last line of each sonnet is the first line of the next,
with the last line of all, as shown previously, being the first line of
the first. It is as if the sonnets, like plaques of gold in a crown,
slightly overlap, coming full circle at the end.
The speaker of Donne' s sequence, like the speaker of Anne
Locke's, adopts a position not uncommon in religious poetry,
known as abjection, in which the speaker represents himself or
herself as disabled or incapable or insecure, to be rescued only by
the grace of God (or, in a secular context, by the grace of the
beloved). This crisis of selfhood is voiced appropriately in single
sonnets or lyrics that can be regarded as "sighs" or cries or
groans, as can be seen in Locke's sonnets. But in a sequence, and
particularly in a corona sequence, the foregrounding of art and
artifice required to continue and sustain the sequence also estab-
lishes the speaker as someone capable of construction and thus
not abject insofar as his or her art exists. This is exactly what
Donne draws attention to: if he manages to complete his
sequence, he says in the last sonnet-which of course is proof
that he has completed it-it will be because the Holy Spirit has
raised his muse from its "low devout melancholie." An intricate
sequential art form here becomes the visible proof of the effec-
tiveness of imputed righteousness:
0 strong Ramme, which hast batter' d heaven for mee,
Mild lambe which with thy blood, hast mark' d the path;
Bright torch, which shin'st, that I the way may see,
Oh, with thy owne blood quench thy owne just wrath,
And if thy holy Spirit, my Muse did raise,
Deigne at my hands this crow ne of prayer and praise.
4
A strong sense of trying to overcome is perceptible in Donne' s
writing: his /I/ is a persona for whom resistance to chaos means
preservation of self. In the corona sequence, one sign of such
resistance is successful reworking of the last line of each sonnet:
for as the reader reaches it, he or she knows by the rules of the
game that it must begin the next, and looks to see how it is done.
Donne is not always successful in reworking his lines, but the
transition between "Crucifying" and "Resurrection" is neat, and
gives a strong sense of a positive step forward (because what
looks like a repeat is not a repeat, but a new beginning):
38
THE FORMAL SEQUENCE
Now thou art lifted up, draw mee to thee,
And at thy death giving such liberall dole,
Moyst, with one drop of thy blood, my dry soule.
Moyst with one drop of thy blood, my dry sou le
Shall (though she now be in extreme degree
Too stony hard, and yet too fleshly,) bee
Freed by that drop.
5
Because repetition (including puns) is a feature of Donne's
mature style, it happens that the repetitive element of a corona
sequence reinforces the kind of lexical doubling he is so fond of,
and the movement from sonnet to sonnet on the same line is mir-
rored inside each sonnet by the movement from phrase to phrase
on the same (or the antonymic) word:
Ere by the spheares time was created, thou
Wast in his minde, who is thy Sonne, and Brother,
Whom thou conceiv'st, conceiv'd; yea thou art now
Thy Maker's maker, and thy Father's mother,
Thou'hast light in darke; and shutst in little roome,
Immensity cloysterd in thy deare wombe.
6
The extravagant artifice of the corona sequence here is integrated
'into the persona of the speaker, whose obsessive repetitions and
replayings of words are part of his or her attempt to order the
world and the text and art at the same time.
Donne once referred to his own writing as "my verse, the strict
Map of my misery," and though this was not said in respect of his
sonnets, it is observable that when the speaker of a sonnet or son-
net sequence notices himself or herself as the contriver of the
poetry, a metaphor of mapping or arranging or mastering often
appears. Donne is a weaver or a goldsmith in his sequence; Edna
St. Vincent Millay, whom we shall encounter later, sees herself as
something between a sorceress and an alchemist:
I will put Chaos into fourteen lines
And keep him there; and let him thence escape
If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape
Flood, fire and demon-his adroit designs
Will strain to nothing in the strict confines
Of this sweet Order, where, in pious rape,
39
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
I hold his essence and amorphous shape,
Till he with order mingles and combines.
Past are the hours, the years of our duress,
His arrogance, our awful servitude:
I have him. He is nothing more nor less
Than something simple not yet understood;
I shall not even force him to confess;
Or answer. I will only make him good?
The problem of aggregation, mentioned in chapter 1, is particu-
larly likely to force itself on the attention of the writer of a sonnet
sequence and make him or her metaphorize the narrative voice
in some metapoetic way, as we shall see from time to time in exam-
ining sequences in detail. When this happens, it reveals what the
writer thinks about the poet's task of controlling experience.
George Macbeth, "A Christmas Ring"
For George Macbeth (1932-1992), the corona sequence "A
Christmas Ring" offered a challenge and a game, and like Donne,
his speaker draws attention to Macbeth's artifice in the course of
the sequence:
Then, I envisaged these sonnets, in a mode
Intricate as mahjong. (1.3-4)8
Macbeth had a strong interest in pattern and randomness and
made several verse and prose experiments in pattern construc-
tion. He wrote two other sequences, "Thoughts on a Box of
Razors," in Poems from Oby (1982), and the sequence already
referred to in chapter 1, an untitled group of 17 sonnets written
with great bravery and humor about his own terminal motor-
neuron disease (The Patient, 1992). His later poetry became sim-
pler; in his earliest sequence, 'A Christmas Ring" (The Burning
Cone, 1970), he opted for the most difficult sequence pattern: the
corona with sonetto magistrale, a 14-sonnet sequence ending with
an extra sonnet made up of the 14 first lines of each one, which
are also the last lines of the previous sonnet. These lines are itali-
cized in Macbeth' s printed text, as they are in Donne' s.
Since in an increasingly secular society the practice of meditat-
ing on one's sins has lost cultural endorsement, Macbeth creates
a speaker representing himself not in abjection but in idleness,
40
THE FORMAL SEQUENCE
snowed in at Christmas, aware of all the moral problems of the
world in the embarrassed way we are at that season, but still
writing "only for Chinese pleasure, to pare time I In a warm
room" (1.10-11). The sequence's pattern is thus first seen as pas-
time, mere game, a notion reinforced by the use in_ each sonnet
up to the twelfth of the refrain "On the ... day of Christmas"
from the well-known (and itself highly patterned) song "The
Twelve Days of Christmas." (In the same spirit of leisured pas-
time, Folgore di San Gemignano had used the refrain "in ...
month, I give you .... ") However, as in Donne' s sequence, each
sonnet also has a title, keyed to episodes of Christ's life, begin-
ning with "The Conception" (1) and ending with "The Glory"
(15). Only three do not obviously belong: "The Milk'' (4), "The
Waste" (5), and "The Visitor" (6), but the meditative purpose of
the sequence is signaled clearly, just as by the cotext in Locke's
sequence and the titles in Donne' s.
But Macbeth inhabits a culture in which, by long familiarity
with Romantic poetry, poets are expected to revalue the world
around them, and one in which, also, signs and meanings are
problematic, deconstructed by the poet's vision. (We think this
very postmodern, but it is probable that all great poets intuit the
instability of signs, though they may not always choose to
emphasize that in their writing.) The device of the sonetto magis-
trale then acquires a new possibility: formally, it must (in any
sequence) accomplish a reassigning of meaning, as each line that
had two meanings by virtue of ending one sonnet and also by
beginning another has a third time to enter into meaning in a
final recombining. As it ends the sequence, however, it also
shows by recombining the 14 lines that final meaning is provi-
sional; that these lines have already meant something else, twice,
undermines their capacity to be conclusive at the end. The
"teaching sonnet" is actually the least possessed of sure meaning,
and we are not certain whether its intense difficulty is due to its
meaning a great deal or its inability to mean much at all:
The Glory
On the first day of Christmas, when it snowed,
Strafing each flake, immigrant to his beak,
A blackbird scattered his incense in the road,
Max leapt to extol him, with a grief-hewn cheek, [Max, Tabitha: his cats]
41
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
Extending paws by water, where some flowed
Hard by the drain-cope. Red specked from a leak,
Where the tired crab-apple cleared its load,
I heard Christ's agony in the garden shriek.
Above his fur, snow-grey, the New Year crossed,
As, near its child, that nail-bright star by night,
Over the ice. On crisp leaves, Max trod light
Across a bald earth, graved in pewter frost
Near to where Tabitha strayed, smokily neat
Under chrysanthemums. I heard Christ's wings beat.
This difficult sonnet shows signs of strain, understandable when
one realizes that given Macbeth' s choice of the Petrarchan sonnet
(ABBA ABBA CCD EED), each of the rhyme words must have a
minimum of 9 and a maximum of 19 rhymes in the sequence.
Although rhymes can be repeated, Macbeth is diligent in avoiding
this repetition.
9
One noticeable consequence of this is that almost
all Macbeth' s rhymes are monosyllables, as easiest to work with,
which give a certain concreteness to the verse. Again, the sheer dif-
ficulty in English of finding so many rhymes for a given word
forces odd or unusual words into prominence at the ends of lines.
For example, the curious phrase "grief-hewn cheek" (1.4) has been
prompted by the appearance of the word beak, originally ending
the last line of sonnet 1 and the first line of sonnet 2, which is also
tied to leak (sonnets 5 and 6) and shriek (sonnets 7 and 8).
The lexical pressure that this exerts happened to suit
Macbeth' s mode of working. He examined his own conflicts and
anxieties through an often violent resymbolizing of the outer
world, in which hyperbolic words of intense local effect are
pressed into service. Here the violence of lexis passes from son-
net to sonnet, linking them in mood, via a repeated line that is
itself twisted violently to re-mean, both in transition between
sonnets and in the sonetto magistrale:
Max hunched, then sprang at leaves,
Leaving me shaking blood-stock from my sleeves,
Hard by the drain cope, red-specked from a leak.
Hard by the drain-cope, red-specked, from a leak
A spider staggered. Along snow-swept stones
42
THE FORMAL SEQUENCE
He stalked, circled in glory, as a freak
Ordained by nature. (5.12-6.4)
The sequence takes reader and speaker on a progress through
the house and garden and surroundings of Macbeth' s home, a
progress that is also a song ("On the first day of Christmas") and
a puzzle ("intricate as mah jong") and a process of surrealization,
as the titles of the sonnets and the images convert Max, the cat,
into the Devil, a blackbird into Christ, and Macbeth's other cat,
Peter, who died, a surrogate Christ, perhaps St. Peter. There are
also a spider, a hedgehog, and Max's sister, Tabitha. Each sonnet
is a moment of vision or an incident with symbolic meaning, all
of which add up to a recognition of Christ's sacrifice and pres-
ence as, "like a round, I I felt my poem snarl towards its end,
swallowing Christ's wings" (14.8-10).
Crabbed, oblique, and occasionally clumsy, Macbeth' s sequence
can stand alongside Donne' s as an example of the creative use of
the most formal of formally linked sonnet sequences. The repeti-
tion that is the essence of the corona form can be simply sonorous
and ceremonial, as in Joshua Sylvester' s corona sequence of 11 son-
nets to the Muses prefaced to his translation of Du Bartas' s Divine
Weeks and Works (1605); and both Donne and Macbeth are indeed
concerned with praise. But the curious refashioning of meaning
that repetition involves can be seized by a poet questioning identity
or anxious for assurance and made to contribute to a more insistent
taking apart and refashioning of words and ideas, as both Donne
and Macbeth do. Finally, unless the repetitions are incompetent or
inert, as in George Gascoigne' s sequence (1573) or that by Lady
Mary Wrath (1621),
10
there will be a sense, in ending where one
began, of coming home, as Donne well knew. In the last sonnet of
his sequence, Macbeth declares that "on the first day of Christmas
... I heard Christ's wings beat" -an achievement he was far from
when the sequence began. As Rilke said in the nineteenth of his
Sonnets to Orpheus, "Einzig das Lied uberm Land I heiligt und
feiert." ("Song alone circles the land, I hallowing and hailing.")
The reader will have noticed that in Macbeth' s sequence,
unlike Donne's, there are narrative elements. Donne's sequence
alludes to a narrative (or narratives, since he is referring to more
than one gospel) but is not itself one. Macbeth' s sonnets each
contain a narrated event (e.g., "I set the pierced Yale to the jagged
lock, I And coughed indoors" (3.9-10), and these events are con-
43
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
secutive on the 12 days of Christmas at least; however, it is clear
that the events in the sonnets are there as occasions for the expe-
rience the sonnet presents and not because they explain or con-
nect with each other. Indeed, the reader will have considerable
difficulty "finding out what happened." The speaker's primary
focus is on his own developing perceptions, both as perceiver
and as poet (lyric), and not on recording events as circumstances
or as the experience of others (narrative).
The modernist and postmodernist novel, with its deter-
minedly disjunctive and fracturing approaches to the continu-
ities of time, place, and character that were so important to the
nineteenth-century realist novel, has at any rate made us all
aware that there is no easy distinction between narrative and
lyric, objective and subjective, external and internal, meaning
and signing. The sonnet sequence, by its very nature an aggrega-
tion of discrete poems that are themselves poised between lyric
and dialectic, has from its inception as a genre deconstructed the
clarity of the antitheses in the preceding sentence and, in particu-
lar, that between narrative and lyric.
I have already drawn attention in chapter 1 to the fact that
poets who want to tell stories hardly ever use the sonnet to do so,
even if they are themselves sonneteers; but poets who write son-
net sequences, and in doing so make some metapoetic remark
about their own endeavor, curiously often try to represent the
sequence as some kind of narrative. Half a dozen examples will
show the gestures that typically occur:
I am not I; pity the tale of me.
(Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella, 1581)
Here I unclasp the book of my charged Soul,
Where I have cast th' accounts of all my care.
(Samuel Daniel, Delia, 1592)
Not Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory. (Shakespeare, Sonnets, 1609)
Thus in my love, Time calls me to relate
My tedious travels, and oft-varying fate. (Michael Drayton, Idea, 1619)
Look forth! that Stream behold,
That Stream upon whose bosom we have passed,
44
THE FORMAL SEQUENCE
Floating at ease while nations have effaced
Nations. (Wordsworth, Ecclesiastical Sonnets, 1822)
None now would mock my penning, could they see
How down the right it maps a jagged coast.
(Robert Bridges, The Growth of Love, 1876)
However, four of these-Daniel, Drayton, Wordsworth, and
Bridges-manage to combine with the idea of continuous narra-
tion the feeling of varying or rapidly altering content-" a jagged
coast." The sense from poets separated by centuries that a
sequence is somehow one thing and yet many different things at
odds with one another is at the heart of its attraction.
45
Chapter 3
THE TOPOGRAPHICAL SEQUENCE:
WoRDSWORTH, THE RNER DvDDON,
AND DU BELLAY, LES ANTIQUITEZ
DE ROME
T
he topographical sequence, already referred to in chapter 1
as one of the most popular nineteenth-century kinds of son-
net sequences, poses a problem of ordering between that of the
categorical sequence and the lyric. Faced with a landscape,
whether natural or made by human hand, the poet does not
often have a determinate number of objects to describe, such as
Folgore da San Gemignano' s months of the year or Guittone
d' Arezzo's deadly sins; but at the same time he or she will sense
that there are different things to be described, or different view-
points, literal and/or metaphorical, to be adopted. The sonnet
sequence is the formal analogue of variety in unity, beloved as an
aesthetic principle of pictorial composition since the sixteenth
century. The examples of Words worth's The River Duddon
sequence (1820) and Joachim du Bellay's Les Antiquitez de Rome
(1558) show the sonnet sequence adapted to the problem of
imposing a unified personal vision on an external multiplicity of
things. The program, as it were, of the sequence comes from out-
46
THE ToPOGRAPHICAL SEQUENCE
side, from the variety of the world, just as in the rather more
mechanical categorical sequences; the unity of the sequence
comes from the imposed single vision.
Wordsworth thought much and increasingly about the sonnet
and its sequences as he matured, and his remark (apropos of his
Ecclesiastical Sonnets of 1822) that a series of sonnets gives "the
convenience of passing from one point of the subject to another
without shocks of abruptness"
1
points to exactly what a good
topographical sequence should do. In declaring that "Duddon,
long-loved Duddon, is my theme!" (1.14), Wordsworth chose an
external object that, much more than the Church of England or
the Italian landscapes of his "Memorials of a Tour in Italy" (1837),
had the power to unify: for a river needs only the slightest ges-
ture from the poet to become a symbol of human life or of time or
of mutability or, indeed, of the flow of poetry itself. "Pure flow
the verse, pure, vigorous, free and bright, I For Duddon, long-
loved Duddon, is my theme!" (1.13-14).
The way in which, in the first sonnet, the Duddon is preferred
to Horace's Blandusian spring, as well as to "Persian fountains"
and '1\Ipine torrents thundering," establishes the speaker as one
familiar with geographical space and literary time. As he moves
down from the source of the river to its mouth, moving also from
the "morning light" of the first sonnet to a kind of evening tran-
quillity in sonnet 33, he will also move about in time and space,
constantly linking human life to the stream with that musical
regret for the flux of things that we call elegiac. In the lovely fifth
sonnet, the speaker makes the river almost conscious of the
growth along its banks of human life-and by implication, a
watcher over its fleeting, which the children in their innocence
cannot know:
Sole listener, Duddon! to the breeze that played
With thy clear voice, T caught the fitful sound
Wafted o'er sullen moss and craggy mound-
Unfruitful solitudes, that seemed to upbraid
The sun in heaven!-but now, to form a shade
For Thee, green alders have together wound
Their foliage; ashes flung their arms around;
And birch-trees risen in silver colonnade.
And thou hast tempted also here to rise
'Mid sheltering pines, this Cottage rude and grey;
47
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
Whose ruddy children, by the mother's eyes
Carelessly watched, sport through the summer day,
Thy pleased associates:-light as endless May
On infant bosoms lonely Nature lies.
The wonderful sense of movement in this very skillfully
enjambed sonnet enacts the sense of a wanderer moving through
the foliage along the river until he spies the children, on whom,
from a distance of age as well as space, he speaks the last line and
a half in wistful benediction.
As noted, in a proper sequence there is a need to respect the
sonnetness of each sonnet; in a topographical sequence, this
almost compels the speaker to stand still while he or she speaks,
or looks, or thinks about, its subject. The problem of aggregation
of sonnets into a sequence makes the move from one sonnet to
the next occur between sonnets, with at the most a back reference
from one sonnet to its predecessor-Wordsworth himself does
this four times, at the start of sonnets 10, 16, 23, and 33. The
corona form is one formal way of chaining sonnets together, so
that the movement through the sequence is highly visible; other-
wise, poets find considerable difficulty in giving a reader the
sense that each sonnet develops from its predecessor. Indeed,
numbering of sonnets in a sequence is popular from the sixteenth
century onward, whether decided by the publisher or by the
author, precisely to assure the reader that each sonnet, so clearly
bounded in its own form, is also part of a larger whole. But
Wordsworth's almost instinctive dynamic sense, which informed
all his renderings of what (dynamically) he called "the goings-on
of the universe," is visible not only as movement within each
sonnet, as in the fifth sonnet quoted previously, but as a perpet-
ual onward thrust.
At the start, it seems that the sequence will be organized by the
development of the Duddon--from spring to rill (4), from rill to
brook (9), from brook to stream (12); but after that, though the
river clearly increases, its stages to the estuary are not itemized,
perhaps because though English has many words for small flows
of water, it does not distinguish kinds or sizes of rivers. What
instead unrolls is a pageant of human activity along the banks of
the Duddon: as the speaker moves on, different kinds of habita-
tion appear and suggest images of different phases of human life,
from the cottager and her children in sonnet 5, past the young
48
THE TOPOGRAPHICAL SEQUENCE
lovers of sonnet 10 to the hamlets of Donnerdale (13), prehistoric
sites (17), a chapel (18), a shepherd community (23), a ruined
house (27), a church (31), and finally the modern world of "ham-
lets, towers and towns" (32). There is a strong sense of the
onward growth of humanity, from childhood by the youth of the
river, to maturity and eventual death "where all his unambitious
functions fail," at the point of union with the sea.
This movement of the speaker downstream, with a rest in the
midday heat from sonnet 24 to sonnet 28, is a maturing of his
experience just as it is a widening and deepening of the river.
Movement, indeed, physical both through the day and through
the 25-mile course of the river, and rhythmic and syntactic from
sonnet to sonnet, is what unifies the sequence. In the third son-
net, the speaker presents his verse as a more traditional "paint-
ing" or" monun1ent"-
How shall I paint thee?-Be this naked stone
My seat, while I give way to such intent;
Pleased could my verse, a spe&king monument,
Make to the eyes of men thy features known. (3.1-4)
-but abandons this in the following stanza in favor of a view
(both literal and metapoetic) of the stream as analogous to the
chain of sonnets itself:
A Protean change seems wrought while I pursue
The curves, a loosely scattered chain doth make. (4.3-4)
Despite the constant presence in the lexis of Miltonic and eigh-
teenth-century gestures and stances, this is a Romantic way of
organizing a sequence. It is tempting to think (in the absence of
contemporary comment on the theory of sequences? that the
new popularity of the sonnet sequence at the beginning of the
nineteenth century had much to do with the gradual preference
for a meditative persona over an argumentative one: the kind of
"loosely scattered chain" of thought for which the eighteenth
century had used blank verse found a new embodiment in the
sonnet sequence.
Wordsworth accentuates the looseness of his thinking by giv-
ing titles to particular sonnets within the sequence: 14 of them
(including the '"After-Thought") are titled, and the effect is to sug-
49
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
gest, typographically, a sudden shift of attention to a new object:
"The Stepping Stones" (9), 'American Tradition" (16), "Seathwaite
Chapel" (18). This reinforces the presence of the outside world,
maintaining the discreteness of the sonnets in tension with the
unity of the speaker's presence. (It may be noticed here that titles
for individual sonnets, especially when, as here, they also carry
numbers, are rare, possibly because of their disjunctive effect.)
But against this outer world Wordsworth uses a metapoetic
voice, the device that reasserts the presence of the speaking I 1/ as
controller or fashioner of the sequence: again and again a sonnet
begins with a reference to the utterance itself, so that the reader is
reminded that the speaker is in the midst of a process of speak-
ing:
How shall I paint thee? (3.1)
On, loitering Muse-the swift Stream chides us-on! (12.1)
Such fruitless questions may not long beguile
Or plague the fancy. (16.1-2)
Sad thoughts, avaunt! (23.1)
And sonnet 33, titled "Conclusion," with its explicit identification
of the river at the end as a leader and a wanderer, brings the
m eta poetic and topographical voices together-the poet becomes
like the river, and his verse like the stream, as he requested at the
start:
And may thy Poet, cloud-born Stream! be free-
The sweets of earth contentedly resigned,
And each tumultuous working left behind
At seemly distance-to advance like Thee;
Prepared, in peace of heart, in calm of mind
And soul, to mingle with Eternity! (33.9-14)
Although the poet cannot actually enact a meeting with eter-
nity-unless, like Gray in his Elegy, he wrote an epitaph for him-
self-his final sonnet, entitled 'After-Thought" and italicized in
its published form looks back on both the river and his previous
speaking self from a vantage point not unlike that of Petrarch in
the last great canzone of his Rime, sub specie aeternitatis:
50
THE TOPOGRAPHICAL SEQUENCE
39
AFTER-THOUGHT
I THOUGHT of Thee, my partner and my guide,
As being past away.-Vain sympathies!
For, backward, Duddon! as I cast my eyes,
I see what was, and is, and will abide:
Still glides the Stream, and shall for ever glide;
The Form remains, the Function never dies;
While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise,
We Men, who in our morn of youth defied
The elements, must vanish;-be it sol
Enough, if something from our hands have power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour;
And if, as toward the silent tomb we go,
Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower,
We feel that we are greater than we know.
This powerful sonnet, with its resonances of Milton, Moschus,
Burns, and Shelley,
3
not only gathers together all the themes of
the sequence but metapoetically evaluates it: its form, of course,
of which the reader is now fully conscious, remains, and is some-
thing from Words worth's hands that lives and acts. If the reader
has enjoyed it, he or she may even feel that the sequence has
glided past and communicated some of its greatness. The close
symbolic identification throughout of water and verse makes this
not fanciful, and as far as the concerns of this present book go,
raises the River Duddon sonnets above the level of the average
topographical sequence: its combination of the discrete and the
continuous is one of the most satisfying in the run of English son-
net sequences.
Du Bellay: Les Antiquitez de Rome
The pioneer of topographical sequences, however, is not a
Romantic poet at all: Joachim du Bellay's Les Antiquitez de Rome
appeared in 1558, a compact sequence of 32 sonnets with a dedi-
catory sonnet to Henri 11 of Prance--one less than Wordsworth's
River Duddon sequence. Du Bellay (1523-1560) had written the
first French sonnet sequence, I.:Olive (1549), closely modeled on
Petrarch' s Rime, and in the wake of a journey to Rome he com-
posed the first French sequence on a nonamatory subject and the
51
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
first topographical sequence in European literature. It was
accompanied by what the title page calls "Un Songe ou Vision sur
le Mesme Subject" (''A Dream or Vision on the Same Subject"), a
set of 15 sonnets, each of which recounts a vision of a fantastic
object or person, emblematic of the fall of Rome. (Fascinating
though this latter sequence is for the student of Renaissance liter-
ature, my interest here is in the nature of sequences, and this dis-
cussion will be confined to Les Antiquitez.)
I have chosen to discuss du Bellay after Wordsworth, because
although du Bellay precedes the English poet by nearly three
centuries, his sequence actually seems to take further than
Wordsworth's the loosening of the categorical structure beloved
of the Renaissance encyclopedic mind. Indeed, it could be
argued that du Bellay's sequence is simply lyrical, in that no sin-
gle "antiquity" of Rome is described clearly even to the extent
that Wordsworth describes, say, Seathwaite Chapel or the Plain
of Donnerdale. Instead a more generalized, elegiac, meditative
voice, alert like Wordsworth' s to the passage of time, the fleeting-
ness of human affairs, and the decay of grandeur, talks in a vari-
ety of ways about the ruins of Rome collectively.
To hold this diffuseness together, du Bellay used a formal
device that, though it must now be reckoned a literary curiosity,
reveals much about the way the sonnet sequence presented itself
to one of its earliest users. After a dedicatory sonnet to King
Henri 11, the sequence alternates sonnets of 10-syllable lines with
sonnets of 12. This pattern, 10-12-10-12, is the pattern of a well-
known Latin and Greek verse form, elegiac meter, which alter-
nates 10- and 12-syllable lines (allowing for the fact that Latin
and Greek verse was quantitative, not syllabic, and that we
should more properly talk of lines of five and six feet). Now du
Bellay on his title page declared that the Antiquitez de Rome con-
tained "une generale description de sa grandeur et comme une
deploration de sa ruine" ("a general description of Rome's
grandeur and a kind of lament for her decay"), and the associa-
tion in the humanist mind of elegiac meter with elegiac subject
matter strongly suggests that he meant his 32-sonnet sequence to
be thought of as a long poem in which each sonnet functioned
like a line of Latin elegiac meter.
This sense that a sonnet can be regarded as a single line of a
macropoem surfaces again in sequences that contain 14 sonnets-
52
THE TOPOGRAPHICAL SEQUENCE
a sonnet of sonnets, as Christina Rossetti titled one of her
sequences-and is also implicit in the corona sequences, a six-
teenth-century humanist invention, in which each sonnet con-
tributes a line to a concluding sonnet, as in George Macbeth's ''A
Christmas Ring," discussed in chapter 2. Recent scholarship has
pointed out that in the 1558 edition, readers would have seen the
sonnets laid out four to an opening of the book, 10 above 12 faced
by 10 above 12, actively encouraging the pairings of 10 and 10, 12
and 12.
4
The extreme artificiality of the construction of the sonnet
itself tends to generate playfulness of this kind in sequence
writing.
Like Wordsworth, du Bellay also inserts a metapoetic presence
into his sequence, though for purposes appropriate to humanist
rather than Romantic poesis. We noted earlier that Wordsworth
allows his speaker to become conscious of the parallel between
writing or speaking poetry and the flow of the stream that is the
subject of his sequence; similarly du Bellay lets his speaker show
awareness, in the presence of the ruined monuments of Rome, of
the similarity between a poem and a museum or gallery: as the
Forum of Rome contains its ruins, so his poem will contain them
for display:
AuRoy
Ne vous pouvant donner ces ouvrages antiques
Pour vostre Sainct-Germain ou Fontainebleau,
Je les vous donne (Sire) en ce petit tableau
Peint, le mieux que j' ay peu, de couleurs poetiques:
Qui mis sous vostre nom devant les yeux publiques,
Si vous les daignez voir en son jour le plus beau,
Se pourra bien vanter d' a voir hors du tu m beau
Tire des vieux Romains les poudreuses reliques
Que vous puissent les Dieux un jour donner tant d'heur,
De rebastir en France une telle grandeur
Que je la voudrois bien peindre en vostre langage:
Et peult estre qu'alors vostre grand'Majeste,
a mes vers, diroit qu'ilz ont este
De vostre Monarchie un bienheureux presage.
(Not being able to present to you these antiquities
For your Saint-Germain or Fontainebleau,
I give them to you, Sire, in this small picture,
Painted, as best I can, in the colours of poetry:
53
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
And it, issued under your name for public scrutiny,
If you graciously look on it in its finest hour,
May well boast that it has brought out of the tomb
The dusty relics of the old Romans.
May the Gods one day grant you so much time
That you rebuild in France a like magnificence
For me to paint in your native tongue:
And perhaps then your gracious Majesty,
Thinking back on my poems, may say that they have been
A happy presage of your Monarchy.)
5
The Renaissance did not develop any effective theory of the son-
net sequence, despite writing many of them: the sonnet was usu-
ally regarded as a low- or middle-ranking form in the hierarchy
of genres,
6
a valuation reinforced, as Petrarchan love sequences
proliferated, by the fact that amatory verse, in whatever form,
was also low or middling.
Du Bellay does not anywhere in this sequence refer to his
verse as sonnets, and his use of the term tableau (1.3) with its
accompanying singular verb ("pourra"), following the title page
references to "une generale description ... une deploration" [my
italics] strongly suggests that the notion of sequence was much
less important than that of collectivity. Like a large painting, in
which a number of classical antiquities are seen in detail, his
"poem" will serve instead of the actual objects in the corridors of
Henri' s royal palaces: the era of the collector monarchs was
beginning, but it was still more usual to assert the grandeur of
one's reign by huge tapestries or frescoes-such as can be seen in
Fontainebleau to this day-depicting the ancient world than by
the assembly of actual fragments of it. It is into this matrix of
"magnificence" that du Bellay wishes to insert his own "petit
tableau," "small" because of deferential modesty and also
because it is obviously not an epic or a long ode, the ceremonial
poems that took highest place in Renaissance literary ranking.
It is worth pointing out here, following du Bellay's presenta-
tion, that while all sonnet sequences have a public function if the
authors publish them, the topographical or "guide" sequence has
perhaps a more ostensible public role: to introduce strangers to a
site, and point out its features, is implicitly (and maybe explicitly)
to glorify that place. Even Wordsworth, who meditates in his
poetry usually as a private man, presents his River Duddon se-
54
THE TOPOGRAPHICAL SEQUENCE
quence as "a speaking monument" that will "make to the eyes of
men thy features known" (The River Duddon, 3.2-4), and in his
first sonnet prefers the Dud don to the waters of Horace' s Latium,
Persia, or the Alps. There was a nascent tourist industry in Rome
in du Bellay's time, and he used some of the contemporary guide
materiaf for his sequence; Wordsworth's age similarly used the
sonnet sequence as a kind of tourist album (later to be reinforced
by Victorian topographical photography).
But of course du Bellay was not describing a native French
site, but Rome, and this fact connects with the meditative loose-
ness of his sequence, a feature in tension with its strict "elegiac"
patterning. Reading it along with Wordsworth's, one notices the
remarkable continuity of the meditative persona, which the sub-
ject of Rome produces in du Bellay's sequence rather as the
ruined house, the disused chapel, the prehistoric sites, and the
flow of the river itself do for Wordsworth.
As we have noticed in discussing the corona sequence of
Donne, the formal tension between the separateness of each son-
net and the wholeness of the sequence-what I have called the
problem of aggregation-shows itself when the speaker of the
sonnets becomes conscious of the fashioning of the whole
sequence. This does not have to happen (see Anne Locke, chap-
ter 2), but given that a sonnet sequence is essentially both discrete
parts and a unified whole, like no other literary genre, this dou-
ble consciousness is in practice constant throughout sonnet-
sequence writing, though it is up to the poet to decide how far to
develop it. Du Bellay's sequence shows this duality in a relatively
straightforward way: later writers, such as John Berryman or
Tony Harrison (discussed in chapter 5) develop it into a crisis of
identity.
Du Bellay's subject, the ruins of Rome, is seen through the
eyes of a speaker intensely responsive to its fallen grandeur, and
because of his sense that he beholds an obliteration first and fore-
most, no single building or antiquity is identified in the entire
sequence. Only by an effort of imagination can the visitor see "de
ce qu'on ne void plus qu'une vague campaigne" ("in what seems
now only a waste prospect") (33.1) what used to rise there:
Toy qui de Rome emerveille contemples
Lantique orgeuil, qui menassoit les cieux,
55
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
Ces vieux palais, ces monts audacieux,
Ces murs, ces arcs, ces thermes et ces temples,
Juge, en voyant ces ruines si amples,
Ce qu' a range le temps injurieux,
Puis qu'aux ouvriers les plus industrieux
Ces vieux fragmens encore servent d'exemples. (27.1-8)
(Thou that at Rome astonisht dost behold
The antique pride, which menaced the skie,
These haughtie heapes, these palaces of olde,
These wals, these arcks, these baths, these temples hie;
Judge by these ample ruines vew, the rest
The which injurious time hath quite outworne,
Since of all workmen held in reckning best,
Yet these old fragments are for paternes borne. [tr. Spenser])
This invitation from a wise guide to make a comprehensive judg-
ment links the aesthetic value of the ruins of Rome firmly to the
humanist vision of the modern world as the successor to Rome:
the palaces of Saint Germain or Fontainebleau will use Rome as a
pattern but will supersede it. The guide has a view of Rome as
embedded in the flow of time: its decay does not make its previ-
ous grandeurs and achievements futile but reminds us that
human life is cyclic and that reconstruction is always necessary.
The fragments pass to later ages as patterns, or as seed corn:
Comme le champ seme en verdure foisonne,
De verdure se haulse en tuyau verdissant,
Du tuyau se herisse en epic florissant,
D' epic jaunit en grain, que le chaud assaisonne:
Et comme en saison le rustique moissonne
Les ondoyans cheveux du sillon blondissant,
Les met d' ordre en javelle, et du ble jaunissant
Sur le champ despouille mille gerbes f a ~ o n n e :
Ainsi de peu a peu creut I' empire Romain,
Tant qu'il fut despouille par la Barbare main,
Qui ne laissa de luy que ces marques antiques,
Que chacun va pillant: comme on void le glaneur
Cheminant pas a pas receuillir les reliques
De ce qui va tumbant apres le moissoneur. (30)
(Like as the seeded field greene grasse first showes,
Then from greene grasse into a stalke doth spring,
56
THE TOPOGRAPHICAL SEQUENCE
And from a stalke into an eare forth-growes,
Which eare the frutefull graine doth shortly bring;
And as in season due the husband mowes
The waving lockes of those faire yeallow heares [i.e., ears/hairs]
Which bound in sheaves, and layd in comely rowes
Upon the naked fields in stackes he reares:
So grew the Romane Empire by degree,
Till that Barbarian hands it quite did spill,
And left of it but these olde markes to see,
Of which all passer by doo somewhat pill; [destroy]
As they which gleane, the reliques use to gather
Which th'husbandman behind him chanst to scatter. [tr. Spenser])
The meditative speaker uses the single sonnet's structure to mir-
ror the flow of seasonal time-the smooth rhythms of the long
12-syllable lines (in French) and the reiteration of words and
rhymes chaining the octave together suggest the inevitability of
the process, controlled by the steady deliberateness of the com-
parison-" comme ... ainsi" I "like as ... so." Spenser' s translation
of the final two lines weakens du Bellay' s force: the gleaners pick
up, not what the husbandman scatters, but "the remains of what
kept falling behind the mower." The mower is time, and the bar-
barians its agents, and the modern poet and his readers-among
whom is the King of France-the gleaners.
If that is how the universe works-and the massive rhetorical
assertiveness of each sonnet, sympathetic to the past glory of
Rome but enforcing the lessons of its fall, suggests that it is-then
the poet who shapes the sequence is like any other builder of
structures, fated in his turn to be obliterated. The usual humanist
response to the metaphors and symbols of mutability was to take
refuge, with Horace, in having built in verse a "monument more
lasting than bronze."
8
This can have the effect of introducing an
ironizing of the speaking subject, whose utterance thus becomes
the one exception to the universal laws the utterance is designed
to demonstrate. It is noticeable in Shakespeare's Sonnets that an
uncomfortable oscillation exists between faith in the permanence
of verse and despair over its inadequacy, fragmenting badly the
unity of the sequence, if sequence indeed it is.
9
Du Bellay, like Wordsworth in his 'After-Thought" (quoted pre-
viously), unifies his sequence with a concluding sonnet, in which
the constructor of the sequence looks back on it in the light of all
57
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
that, as speaker, he has experienced. In answering, tactfully, exactly
the question about the immortality of verse that any reader must
now be asking, he links his own poetry with the poetry of the past
through the synecdoche of Apollo's lyre and reinforces the cyclic
theme of rise and fall by concluding that as Roman glory crumbles,
he begins the process of marking the new glory of its successor,
France. The meditative, elegiac speaker of the sonnets is thus
framed by the metapoetic speaker of the dedication and the last
sonnet (33), who takes up his perceptions and his concerns with a
modest, but definite, gesture of self-endorsement:
Esperez-vous que la posterite
Doive (mes vers) pour tout jamais vous lire?
Esperez-vous que l'oeuvre d'une lyre
Puisse acquerir telle immortalite?
Si sous le ciel fust quelque eternite,
Les monuments que je vous ay fait dire,
Non en papier, mais en marbre et porphyre,
Eussent garde leur vive antiquite.
Ne laisse pas toutefois de sonner,
Luth, qu' Apollon m' a bien daigne de donner:
Car si le temps ta gloire ne desrobbe,
Vanter tu peux, quelque bas que tu sois,
D' avoir chante, le premier des Fran<;ois,
I.:' antique honneur du peuple a longue robbe.
(Do you hope that posterity
Will [my poem] read you for all time?
Do you hope that the work of one single lyre
May acquire such immortality?
If under heaven anything endures,
The monuments of which I have made you speak
Would have kept their antique worth alive
Not in paper, but in marble and porphyry.
Yet do not cease to sound,
My lute, whom Apollo deigned to give me,
For if Time does not strip away your merit,
You may well boast, humble though you are,
That you were first among the French to sing
The renown of the nation of the long robe.)
10
This beautifully judged sonnet closes the frame around the
whole sequence, yet by questioning rather than asserting re-
58
THE TOPOGRAPHICAL SEQUENCE
spects the meditative insights within the frame. Like Words-
worth's 'After-Thought," which pays homage to and calls on the
strength of Milton in its last line, this sonnet resonates with the
poetry of Virgil (whose permanence is unquestionable): in
the first book of the Aeneid, Jupiter prophesies the future rise of
the Roman state, itself to rise as the successor to fallen Tray, and
in lending the authority of Olympus to the next cycle of human
empires, concludes that even the vengeful Juno will think better
of her wrath and
mecumque fovebit
Romanos, rerum dominos, gentemque togatam. (1.281-82)
(with me will cherish
The Romans, lords of the world, the people of the toga.)
In echoing this sonorous and famous line, du Bellay's poet-
speaker aligns himself, modestly but unmistakably, with the
poet-prophet of imperial Rome and gathers up his "antiquitez"
as a finished work to present to the new monarch of the new
empire. By treating his work as a single poem, and offering it to
his king, du Bellay might have turned the sonnet sequence into a
much more public and ceremonial genre, "excelling all, that ever
went before" as Spenser said of him in his own sonnet appended
to his translation of du Bellay' s poetry.
11
His early death probably
prevented the appearance of a second book, but du Bellay's 33
sonnets, while retaining the meditative persona at their center,
make one of the stateliest and most public of sequences, lyrical in
impulse, topographical in subject matter, but national and cere-
monial in a way that no other poet has managed.
Had Milton written a sonnet sequence, there might have been
an English rival: formally at least, if not on poetic merit,
Wordsworth' s Ecclesiastical Sonnets make the attempt. This mas-
sive sequence, first published in 1822, contained 132 sonnets in its
final form in 1850 and is one of the longest English sonnet
sequences. Its opening sonnet makes it clear that Wordsworth
thought of it as a progression from his River Duddon sequence,
and as a kind of historical narrative tracing the history of religion
in Britain from those Druids whose presence he had noticed in
the seventeenth River Duddon sonnet up to his own day. For our
purposes, the Ecclesiastical Sonnets probably constitute the most
59
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
convincing demonstration of the unaptness of the sonnet
sequence to work other than lyrically, except over short stretches:
Wordsworth, who is one of the greatest lyric poets in the world,
and a superlative narrative poet in the free blank verse form of
the Prelude and the Excursion, fails almost entirely to impose
unity on the combined lyric and narrative contents of the
Ecclesiastical Sonnets. The tension between his determined
attempt to write as a historian, with proper use of historical
sources, and his maintenance of his own powerful reflective per-
sona is too great, and the whole sequence fragments, both the-
matically and formally.
Petrarch, wisely, it might seem, chose not to attempt any kind
of narrative of his love for Laura in his Rime; Spenser, a narrative
poet of extreme sophistication, avoided it in his Amoretti (1595);
Sidney, who was a formidably clever novelist, likewise made no
attempt at coherent narrative in Astrophel and Stella (written
1581); Shakespeare (though his intentions are admittedly not
known to us) avoided sequential narrative in his Sonnets; and
though it is rash to argue that something is impossible simply
because no major author has succeeded with it, it does seem that
the discrete sonnet maintains a lyric or meditative persona so
strongly that aggregating a large number of them along.narrative
lines poses insuperable problems.
60
Chapter 4
THE NARRATIVE SEQUENCE:
DANTE, LA VITA NVOVA, AND
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
W
e can now move further from the narrative sequence
toward the lyrical by looking at two sequences that narrate
in different ways and lie at opposite ends of the narrative/lyric
spectrum: Dante Alighieri's Vita Nuova, written about 1292, and
Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree,"
published in The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems in 1923, the year in
which she received the Pulitzer Prize. The first is a collection of
wholly separate first-person lyrics not originally intended to
form a sequence, which have been wrapped as it were in a narra-
tive packing; the other is a severe and short third-person narra-
tive with no explanations at all, like a fragment of a short story.
Almost all they seem to have in common is their use of sonnets.
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), like John Milton, is much more
celebrated for his epic poetry than for his sonnets; but he was a
very capable sonneteer, as a number of tenzoni involving him
show, and engaged in sonnet exchanges with a group of friends,
mostly Florentines like himself, who are collectively known as
61
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
the stilnovisti (New Stylists). Since in praising the "new style" in
his Divine Comedy Dante mentions Guittone d' Arezzo, he may
well have known the older poet's sonnet sequences, even if he
did not think much of Guittone' s style; but in gathering together
his own sonnets for circulation in the 1290s, he evidently decided
to do something quite different from Guittone's categorical
sequences on the arts of love, the vices, and the virtues. To under-
stand what he did, and the impact of it on the sonnet-sequence
genre, we need to know something of the stilnovisti' s use of the
sonnet.
1
Dante's Vita Nuova
Although they continued to use sonnets for letters, arguments,
and satire as their predecessors had, the stilnovisti developed a
theory of idealized love according to which the Lady acted as a
kind of divine messenger, though retaining her earthly reality:
she could by her glance or her greeting transform the nature of
her lover, who became her worshiper and through her the wor-
shiper of the Divine radiance. This idea has connections both
with the concept of fin' amors , the devotion owed to a
high-born lady by her lover, and the Christian idea of superve-
nient grace, by routes that it is beyond the scope of this book to
trace.
2
In northern Italy at the end of the thirteenth century the
stilnovisti produced a new kind of poetry alongside the old, in
which, and particularly in sonnets, the speaker as lover recorded
the moment of epiphany, the moment when his vision of the
world was transformed by a look or a gesture from his lady. It
was not necessary to speak to the lady herself: the emphasis was
on the instant, and internal, transformation of the lover:
Tanto gentil e tanto onesta pare
la donna mia quand' ella altrui sal uta,
eh' ogne lingua deven tremando m uta,
e li occhi no 1' ardiscon di guardare.
Ella si va, sentendosi laudare,
benignamente d'umilta vestuta;
e par che sia una cosa venuta
da cielo in terra a miracol mostrare.
Mostrasi si piacente a chi la mira,
62
THE NARRATIVE SEQUENCE
che da per li occhi una dolcezza al core,
che'ntender no la pub chi no la prova:
e par che de la sua labbia si mova
un spirito soave pien d' amore
che va dicendo a 1' anima: 'Sospira!' (Dante, Vita Nuova, 26)
(My lady looks so gentle and so pure
when yielding salutation by the way,
that the tongue trembles and has nought to say,
and the eyes, which fain would see, may not endure.
And still, amid the praise she hears secure,
she walks with humbleness for her array,
seeming a creature sent from Heaven to stay
on earth, and show a miracle made sure.
She is so pleasant in the eyes of men
that through the sight the inmost heart cloth gain
a sweetness which needs proof to know it by:
and from between her lips there seems to move
a soothing essence that is full of love,
saying for ever to the spirit, "Sigh!" [tr. D. G. Rossetti])
This sonnet shows neatly how the octave/sestet division is
used to move from observation to rationalization but, more
importantly, shows how the stilnovistic sonnet tends to concen-
trate on a single intense moment, even if philosophically backed
up: "Sigh!" The stilnovisti were fond of emphasizing the reaction
to the lady's greeting as lack of speech, a kind of dumb wonder-
ment, so that, paradoxically, the sonnet itself becomes the record
of a failure to be able to speak.
For anyone contemplating a sonnet sequence, then, as Dante
did in the 1290s, the normal kind of connectedness that operated
in what I have called the forensic sonnets of Guittune d' Arezzo
and others before him-the connectedness of argument, expla-
nation, and debate-could not be supplied by the sonnets them-
selves without altering their essential function, that is, to testify
to an epiphanic moment in all its luminousness. The first sonnet
in the Vita Nuova, indeed, originally was used by Dante as the
basis of a tenzone, as noted previously: he sent it out to friends
with an invitation to them to write back with an explanation of
the sonnet. This would have made a suite, or small sequence, of
debate sonnets; but that was not, finally, what he chose to do.
Instead of making his sonnets part of social interaction, Dante
63
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
made them records of moments in his own personal develop-
ment and then wrote a prose commentary from the vantage
point of his older, maturer self to enclose and explain them.
It has to be said that this was not an experiment that later writ-
ers repeated-for various reasons, Dante's Vita Nuova was not
well-known to later European poets, but even after the revival of
interest in Dante in the nineteenth century in France and Britain
and America, no one attempted a self-development sequence
with a prose commentary, and the peculiar achievement of the
Vita Nuova belongs to the history of the genre of autobiography
more than to the sonnet sequence. However, the history of auto-
biography intersects with that of sonnets because of Petrarch,
who knew Dante's Vita Nuova and also its two great predeces-
sors, the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius (which combines
prose and verse) and the Confessions of St. Augustine (prose).
3
By
creating a chain of sonnets (and other kinds of lyric) that were
narrated as stages in the creation of a self, Dante influenced
Petrarch to insert into the European consciousness a developed
form of the sonnet sequence as a way of expressing the tension
between coherence and incoherence in the /1/. This was, and has
remained, a central kind of narrative of self, through Baudelaire' s
Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) to John Berryman's Sonnets to Chris (1947,
1966) and Tony Harrison's The School of Eloquence (1978). And
Dante's Vita Nuova directly influenced later Romantic poets, such
as the Rossettis, in the same direction.
The work consists of 26 sonnets (two irregular), one shorter
poem called a ballata, and three longer, more philosophical
poems called canzoni, together with one canzone stanza. (Though
there is no proof of this, it may be from this mixture that Petrarch
in his turn obtained the notion of combining sonnets with can-
zoni and shorter lyric forms, thereby offering a model for the
sonnet sequence that some later writers chose to follow.) Each
poem is either preceded or followed-sometimes both-by a
prose comment explaining its circumstances and its meaning.
The specific circumstances of each sonnet are part of the longer
prose narrative that relates how Dante saw and fell in love with
Be a trice, how his love progressed, and the effect of Be a trice's
death on him.
To say Dante is to raise by implication the question of who that
Dante was, for Dante's prose commentary brings into plain view
64
THE NARRATIVE SEQUENCE
what is always present, but often hidden, in a lyric performance:
the two /1/s of the narration (cnonce) and of the narrating (enonci-
ation). The /1/ who speaks in a sonnet (or any lyric) is always
potentially aware of another I 1/ at a small distance, a past self or
another aspect of the self, but it is unusual to find the two distin-
guished as clearly as they are here, in, for example, the introduc-
tion to the sonnet "L:amaro lagrimar che voi faceste" ("The bitter
tears you used to shed"), in Vita Nuova 37:
After I had spoken thus to myself, addressing my own eyes, the most
huge and wrenching sighs assailed me. And so that this struggle that
I was having should not remain known only to the wretch that felt it,
I decided to compose a sonnet, and to express in it this terrible condi-
tion. So I wrote this sonnet, which begins, "The bitter tears ... "
The /1/ in the last two lines, the composer of the sonnet, is
already at some distance from the person who so distressingly
sighed, and whose speech to his own eyes is the subject of the
sonnet. This person is even objectified by Dante the poet by
another name: "the wretch that felt [this struggle]." (The prose
commentary then provides a third /1/, the author/editor who is
arranging these poems and commenting on them.)
In this poetic duality, the uttering /1/, the one writing the
poem, who may at any time by metapoetic intrusion draw atten-
tion to his or her creative role, is the constructor of the uttered
/1/, and any pretense that the utterance is spontaneous is exactly
that, since what is being said, however immediate it seems to the
reader, is always in the past with respect to the I 1/ who writes the
poem. This is true of all lyric verse, not just of sonnets; but since
the sonnet sequence has a unique capacity to present the frag-
mented, intense, momentary experiences of the /I/ in the context
of a progress through an assemblage of separate parts, the ten-
sion between the ordering, continuing /I-who-speaks/ and the
fragmented, past I 1-who-was/ is particularly evident, even when
the poet does not explicitly foreground his or her creative role.
Though many of the sonnets have narrative elements as they
recreate a particular moment, the main task of narration is under-
taken by the prose commentary. Dante has in fact tackled the
problem of organizing the lyrical elements into a narrative whole
by using verse for the first and prose for the second. By putting
65
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
his sonnets within a commentary, Dante makes himself (as
author/editor) and his readers continuously aware of both
aspects of the sonnet: its integrity and sonnetness, as a registra-
tion of the intense experience of I 1-who-was/, a poem on its own;
and second, its place in an unfolding Bildungsroman, the Vita
Nuova itself. Since the stilnovistic sonnet was concerned charac-
teristically with inner transformation (though social sonnets for
all sorts of occasional purposes continued to be written), Dante
clearly felt, as his commentary makes plain, that each sonnet was
in the nature of an esoteric experience that required glossing-
some more easy of access than others. The Vita Nuova begins with
a sonnet so obscure that Dante felt able to use it as a way of
attracting like-minded friends. The verse portions of the Vita
Nuova are unmistakably private, or at the most intended for close
friends, and it is the Dante of the commentary who reveals them
or sends them out.
The narrative construction of the Vita Nuova thus has the odd
effect of making the sonnets (and the other poems) intensely
nonnarrative: confessional, intimate, even esoteric. Narrative has
to come from outside, to surround and gloss them. Even at the
end of the work, when Dante writes a sonnet specifically at the
request of two ladies, he makes it partly withhold its meaning:
Oltre la spera che piu larga gira,
passa'l sospiro eh' esce del mio core:
intelligenza nova, che 1' Am ore
piangendo mette in lui, pur su lo tira.
Quand' elli egiunto la dove disira,
vede una donna, che riceve honore,
e luce si che per lo suo splendore
lo peregrino spirito la rnira.
Vedela tal che, quando'l mi ridice,
io nolo in tendo, si parla sottile
al cor dolenta, che lo fa parlare.
So io che parla di quella gentile,
pero che spesso ricorda Beatrice,
si ch'io lo'ntendo ben, donne mie care. (Vita Nuova, 41)
(Beyond the sphere which spreads to widest space
Now soars the sigh that my heart sends above;
A new perception given by grieving Love
Guideth it upward in untrodden ways.
66
THE NARRATIVE SEQUENCE
When it is come where it desires to be,
It sees a lady who is honoured there,
And shines so brightly in her splendour fair,
The pilgrim spirit gazeth wonderingly.
It sees her such that, when it tells me this,
I cannot grasp what subtly it doth teach
To the heart's grief, that causes it give speech.
I know that of my Lady it doth tell,
Because it oft recalleth Beatrice:
So that, my ladies, I do know that well. [adapted from D. G. Rossetti])
This is the great vision of Beatrice in glory that Dante was to real-
ize fully in his Paradiso (Canto 31.70-93); here, in the shorter
form of the sonnet, he offers his experiencing self, imaged as a
sigh infused by Love with intelligence, as a kind of messenger
back to his poetic self, the one who records, who fails to speak
clearly enough to be fully understood. This semiotic blockage,
the sliding of the signified I 1/ under its signifier, is the force that
fragments the sonnets into their separate parts but also the force
that drives the organizing I 1/ to go on speaking until, as George
Macbeth says, his poem "snarls towards its end" -or as Donne
puts it, the muse raises him enough to complete the crown of
praise.
For poets writing after the mid-nineteenth century, Dante's
model was available for a sonnet sequence dealing with suffering
and insight;
4
up to that time, Petrarch (as we shall see) provided
the principal European model for the sequence, developing and
sophisticating its capacities on the basis of the stilnovistic experi-
ment. However, Petrarch did not provide a prose commentary,
but used only lyrics-sonnets and other varieties of poem-in
sequence. The problem of narrating, of providing continuity, had
to be solved in other ways.
It can be said here that one interesting result of suppressing, or
eliminating, a prose commentary is that readers seem to want to
construct what one might call a ghost narrative: picking up
metapoetical signs from the author, they will begin to surround
his or her text with commentary and speculation, as if the funda-
mental lyrical strength of the sonnet were read as a narrative
deficiency. This happened in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
to Petrarch, whose editors published his sonnets in editions that
often contained lengthy conjectural biographies of himself and
67
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
Laura and surrounded each sonnet with complicated glosses
"explaining" its meaning in biographical terms. The enormous
biographical attention paid to Shakespeare's sonnets is well-
known; Spenser' s Amoretti, Meredith' s Modern Love, Elizabeth
Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, and many others
have attracted critical commentary that (legitimately or not) rein-
states what is felt to be a missing narrative.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Unless they are used merely as stanzas, as mentioned in chapter
1, sonnets are not well fitted for narration: there is simply not
enough space in a sonnet for the circumstantiality that the realis-
tic novel has trained readers to expect, and if a sonnet is narrat-
ing, it is not using the structural features that make it what it is.
The obliqueness and compression of the twentieth-century short
story offers a more congenial model, and it is perhaps in that area
that we should look for analogues to the narrative sonnet
sequence. One of the best in this rare subgenre is Edna St.
Vincent Millay's "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree" published in
The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (1923).
Millay (1892-1950) wrote many sonnets in her poetic career
5
and produced three sequences, each in a different mode:
"Epitaph for the Race of Man," in Wine from These Grapes (1934), a
sequence of 18 sonnets of a philosophical/meditative kind;
shortly before that, Fatal Interview (1931), 52 Shakespearean son-
nets in which a female speaker recounts the growth and decay of
her love; and earliest of the three, "Sonnets from an Ungrafted
Tree" (1923), 17 almost Shakespearean sonnets in third-person
narrative mode, again focused on a woman's experience.
To understand this last sequence, as well as the other two, it is
relevant to recall that Millay in her New England childhood was
brought up to be both a poet and an independent woman: her
mother educated all her three daughters in literature and music,
and Millay as a Vassar student (AB 1917) wrote and acted in plays
with the expectation of earning her living by her pen and her act-
ing. She was able to spend some time after graduating in the
Bohemian life of Greenwich Village, with the American intellec-
tual's expected visit to Europe (1921-1923). Not only did the
68
THE NARRATIVE SEQUENCE
work of these years gain her the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, with a
popular reputation that she never lost, but it also brought her
several love affairs, a close sympathy with and admiration for the
women's rights movement, and, through the premature death of
one of the leading suffragettes, Inez Milholland, marriage in the
same year to her widower, Eugene Boissevain, Millay' s husband
until his death in 1949.
Sometimes poets who are successful early in their own life-
times gain success and recognition at the price of innovation: and
Millay, though intellectually radical and a feminist, was stylisti-
cally quite conservative. In that respect her two later sequences
are perhaps less interesting than her early narrative attempt but
still have something to show about narrative. "Epitaph for the
Race of Man" is a post-Spengler survey of the rise and fall of
humanity, suffused by a Romantic evolutionary vocabulary that
owes much to Tennyson's "In Memoriam." But the tightness of
the sonnet form makes Millay conduct her survey in glimpses of
moments, and the necessity of summing up or judging within
the small space of the sonnet calls forth an Augustan wit and
rhythm. The result is securely in a poetic mode anchored in med-
itative verse from Spenser through Milton to Tennyson but apt to
seem a little archaic and sonorous rather than profound:
xvi
Alas for Man, so stealthily betrayed,
Bearing the bad cell in him from the start,
Pumping and feeding from his healthy heart
That wild disorder never to be stayed
When once established, destined to invade
With angry hordes the true and proper part,
Till Reason joggles in the headsman's cart,
And Mania spits from every balustrade.
Would he had searched his closet for his bane,
Where lurked the trusted ancient of his soul,
Obsequious Greed, and seen that visage plain;
Would he had whittled treason from his side,
In his stout youth and bled his body whole,
Then had he died a king, or never died.
Compare with that a sonnet from W H. Auden' s not dissimilar
reflective philosophical sequence, Sonnets from China (1938):
69
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
Our global story is not yet completed,
Crime, daring, commerce, chatter will go on,
But, as narrators find their memory gone,
Homeless, disterred, these know themselves defeated.
Some could not like nor change the young and mourn for
Some wounded myth that once made children good,
Some lost a world they never understood,
Some saw too clearly all that man was born for.
Loss is their shadow-wife, Anxiety
Receives them like a grand hotel, but where
They may regret they must: their doom to bear
Love for some far forbidden country, see
A native disapprove them with a stare
And Freedom's back in every door and tree. (Sonnets from China, xvi)
6
Without losing generality or sonorousness, Auden' s sonnet is
also colloquial, precise, and rhythmically alive, creating a democ-
ratic, rather than archaic, speaker. The problem of stance and
viewpoint-and hence of the style that creates them-is more
acute in a philosophical sequence, because the speaker is created
by his or her subject matter as a wise observer, a teacher; it is
rarely successful, since at least the mid-nineteenth century, to
teach from a stance well back in time. To deconstruct previous
stances and work from there, as Yeats (not a sonneteer) and
Auden did, is admissible and even desirable, but Millay's rather
mannered acceptance of neoclassical syntax and Romantic lexis is
pleasing rather than powerful.
This combination is what in British literature is called Georgian,
and it appears again in her amatory sequence, Fatal Interview. We
shall return to this problem of amatory language in discussing
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, because
they both belong to a subgenre of sonnet sequences in which a
woman addresses her lover, to complain or to praise or to do
both-what after Thomas Hardy's sequence in that kind we
might call the "she-to-him" sequence? Since here Millay is follow-
ing the progress of a failed love, from illusion to disillusion, the
changes in the woman's view of herself and her lover explain the
sonnet-to-sonnet discontinuity. This time the mixture of inherited
70
THE NARRATIVE SEQUENCE
styles is serviceable: the speaker is able to articulate romantic pas-
sion, pastoral idealism, and witty or satirical disillusion as differ-
ent aspects of her single personality, reflecting Millay' s interest in
and sympathy for the woman enslaved by her own passion but
intelligent and strong enough to break free of it.
One superb and funny sonnet images the woman's perception
of herself as a Jane Austen heroine wronged: Elizabeth Bennet,
perhaps, after being seduced by Mr. Darcy:
I, being born a woman, and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body's weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity-let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.
Beneath the wit lies Millay's empathy with "the spirit, inde-
pendent and sometimes disillusioned, of the modern woman,"
8
and it was this empathy that impelled her to speak for the inartic-
ulate in her narrative sequence, "Sonnets from an Ungrafted
Tree." In these 17 sonnets, the speaker, nominally third-person
omniscient, and not marked by gender, tells part of the story of a
New England woman who had married a childhood sweetheart,
only to find in married life that she loved him "not at all": she
leaves him, and then, when he falls sick, returns to be with him
until he dies. The sequence opens when "she came back into his
house again, I And watched beside his bed until he died, I Loving
him not at all" (1.1-3) and ends when she looks upon his body
after the doctor's last visit. Events before her arrival are given
through her reminiscences or the speaker's omniscient recall.
There is nothing spoken, except a single sentence to the doctor.
In a sense, this is a nonlove story, which has as its raison d' etre
the compassionate revealing of the woman's state of mind-in
71
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
that it closely resembles D.H. Lawrence's "Odour of Chrysan-
themums." As in Lawrence's story the miner's wife is not articu-
late about her feelings, Millay's narrative contains much patient
observation of symbolic detail by the narrator, who can suggest
awareness by juxtaposing things in time or space:
So she came back into his house again
And watched beside his bed until he died,
Loving him not at all. The winter rain
Splashed in the painted butter-tub outside,
Where once her red geraniums had stood,
Where still their rotted stalks were to be seen;
The thin log snapped; and she went out for wood,
Bareheaded, running the few steps between
The house and shed; there, from the sodden eaves
Blown back and forth on sodden ends of twine,
Saw the dejected creeping-jinny vine,
(And one, big-aproned, blithe, with stiff blue sleeves
Rolled to the shoulder that warm day in spring,
Who planted seeds, musing ahead to their far blossoming). (I)
This masterly sonnet is almost a microversion of the technique of
the whole sequence and a brilliantly compact piece of sonnet nar-
ration. As far back as Dante, the lesson had been learned that the
sonnet was particularly fitted for the epiphanic moment: the
octave to record a circumstance and the sestet to unwrap its inner
meaning. And since for the stilnovisti the meaning was meaning
for the individual perceiver (usually the /1/ of the sonnet), the
sonnet should focus from the viewpoint of that individual.
Here, the octave gives the circumstances, including, since this
is the first sonnet of all, the introductory who/when/where/
why, compactly achieved in eight lines. Because we know that
this is a sonnet and that we may expect a sestet to tell us what it
means, we respond to the shift in time in ll.S-6 ("Where once ...
I Where still") as if it were a meaning shift, between two states of
being, as indeed it is. The contrast of times and states that the ses-
tet reveals is thus anticipated in the octave.
The sonnet turns at the ninth line, but with casual skill, Millay
lets the movement made by the woman, running, carry the sen-
tence itself across the end of the eighth line into the ninth, as if
she ran without quite seeing where she was going. Then, sud-
72
THE NARRATIVE SEQUENCE
denly, she does see, "there," both herself as she is (dejected, creep-
ing) and as she was, pregnant in spring, planting seeds, and look-
ing ahead where now she can only look back. The parentheses in
Millay's text indicate the speaker's first access to the mind of the
woman. Henceforward the speaker may at any time represent
the woman's thoughts in free indirect speech.
The sonnet is complete in its representation of two states of
being held in the woman's mind; at the same time, the warm
optimism of the last line demands some sort of answer, and it
comes with the opening of the next sonnet, so that the contrast
between the two is progressive. The sonnet also announces the
narrative strategy of the whole sequence, by starting as it plainly
does in medias res: this narrative will work through flashbacks
and symbolism. Millay had probably learned this skill from a
sonneteer whom she much admired, George Meredith, whose
own narrative sequence, Modern Love (1862), opens in the same
way:
By this he knew she wept with waking eyes:
That, at his hand' slight quiver by her head,
The strange low sobs that shook their common bed
Were called in to her with a sharp surprise.
It was probably also Meredith who suggested to Millay the use of
the pronouns he, she, they, and so forth instead of names: in a nar-
rative sequence in which the circumstantiality is much reduced,
withholding names gives a representativeness to the figures that
in its turn encourages the reader to accept less realistic detail.
Millay declined, however, to try to imitate Meredith' s embedding
of a first-person narrative (Modern Love, 3-48) inside a third-per-
son one (Modern Love, 1-2, 49-50), a daring but disorienting
innovation in the sonnet sequence.
9
The sharply observed details that exist are evocative of a rustic
and indeed New England setting (Millay herself lived at
Steepletop, a farm in New York State), and many critics have seen
Millay as an imitator also of Robert Frost. She acknowledged a debt
to Meredith, but not to Frost. Similar sharp observation of natural
detail, in the mode of Tennyson' s Mariana, from two poets who
were both New Englanders might be expected: but there is some-
thing in Frost's distinctive manner of narrating that Millay appears
73
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
to have adopted, whether consciously or unconsciously, inside her
sonnets. Frost was a fine sonneteer, though he wrote no sequences,
but he was more often a narrative or dramatic poet, specializing in
vignettes of New England life that yielded some emotional or
philosophic insight. Many of these, including "Home Burial,"
begin in the sudden manner of Meredith or Millay:
He saw her from the bottom of the stairs
Before she saw him. She was starting down,
Looking back over her shoulder at some fear.
She took a doubtful step and then undid it
To raise herself and look again.
But in his narratives and monologues Frost developed a tech-
nique of meandering and colloquial syntax, sharpening now and
then into epigram, that gives the illusion of a laconic but wise
country speaker, a favorite urban myth that begins with Virgil' s
Eclogues:
Hyla Brook
By June our brook's run out of song and speed.
Sought for much after that, it will be found
Either to have gone groping underground
(And taken with it all the Hyla breed
That shouted in the mist a month ago,
Like a ghost of sleighbells in a ghost of snow)-
Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed,
Weak foliage that is blown upon the bent
Even against the way its waters went.
Its bed is left a faded paper sheet
Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat-
A brook to none but who remember long.
This as it will be seen is other far
Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.
We love the things we love for what they are.
10
This almost-sonnet (15 lines, rhyming ABBA CC ADD EEF GFG)
is close in stance and viewpoint and procedure to Millay' s, as in
the fifteenth sonnet of her sequence:
There was upon the sill a pencil mark,
Vital with shadow when the sun stood still
74
THE NARRATIVE SEQUENCE
At noon, but now, because the day was dark,
It was a pencil mark upon the sill.
And the mute clock, maintaining ever the same
Dead moment, blank and vacant of itself,
Was a pink shepherdess, a picture frame,
A shell marked Souvenir, there on the shelf.
Whence it occurred to her that he might be,
The mainspring being broken in his mind,
A clock himself, if one were so inclined,
That stood at twenty minutes after three-
The reason being for this, it might be said,
That things in death were neither clo\ks nor people, but only dead. (15)
The meandering and slightly dazed nonsense logic of this sonnet
is sympathetically following the mental movements of the
woman: the octave of the sonnet follows her gaze and the sestet
interprets what she sees. There is a continuing narration not just
of things and movements around the house but also of con-
sciousness and feeling. Millay altered the sonnet very little-all
are Shakespearean sonnets rhyming ABAB CDCD EFFE GG (xi
has EFEF)-but her use of an fourteener at the end emphasizes
the dreariness and bewilderment of the central character, whose
only spoken words are in the fourteener of the second-last son-
net: "She said at length, feeling the doctor's eyes, I 'I don't know
what you do exactly when a person dies.' "
Like Tennyson' s Mariana, which it often recalls, the sequence is
a triumph in the realization of atmosphere and feeling; but
unlike Mariana, this heroine has a changing consciousness as she
moves about, and each sonnet offers a variation on her percep-
tion of her predicament, using frequently the "turn" of the son-
net to move from description to explanation. The narrator rarely
intrudes, and since the focalization and viewpoint of the
sequence is invariably the woman's, the narrated comments pass
as the heroine's thoughts. Progression, even if bewildered, and
development require a conclusion, and the last sonnet takes her
farewell of the dead man with a detachment and independence
that the ambiguous last word only slightly ironizes:
Gazing upon him now, severe and dead,
It seemed a curious thing that she had lain
Beside him many a night in that cold bed,
75
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
And that had been which would not be again.
From his desirous body the great heat
Was gone at last, it seemed, and the taut nerves
Loosened forever. Formally the sheet
Set forth for her today those heavy curves
And lengths familiar as the bedroom door.
She was as one who enters, sly and proud,
To where her husband speaks before a crowd,
And sees a man she never saw before-
The man who eats his victuals at her side,
Small, and absurd, and hers: for once, not hers, unclassified. (17)
This is not a long narrative poem, nor is it a collection of son-
nets: it is a proper narrative sonnet sequence, not as sophisticated
as Meredith's but making full use of the sonnet form in a loose,
modern way, relaxing it sufficiently to track the movement of the
character's mind without letting it cease to be a sonnet. Not as
powerful as Auden or as innovative as Berryman, Millay still has
the distinction of having carried the sonnet narrative successfully
on into the twentieth century.
Millay' s "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree" is almost alone in
being spoken by a third-person narrator, and even that narrator,
as we have seen, uses a form of free indirect speech to render the
experiences of the "she" whose actions are being narrated. In
Meredith's Modern Love, the first-person speaker, a man in a state
of considerable mental distress and excitement, is introduced in
the third sonnet (a "sonnet" of 16lines) as breaking into a narra-
tive in which he has constructed himself as "he," and thereafter,
until the forty-eighth of the SO sonnets, this I I/ is a constant pres-
ence, both narrating and narrated. In the long history of the son-
net sequence, and whatever the thread that holds it together-
topography, religion, praise of famous people, love, political
reform, a life story-the presence of a passionate speaker whose
thoughts and feelings alter from sonnet to sonnet is constant.
76
Chapter 5
THE LYRIC SEQUENCE:
PETRARCH'S RIME,
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING,
TONY HARRISON, }OHN DONNE,
AND WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Petrarch's Rime and the Unstable /I/
W
ith the exception of the anonymous narrator of the se-
quence Il Fiore (mentioned in chapter 1), a compassionate
speaker has been a component of all the sequences mentioned so
far, but in what is properly called the lyric sequence, the most
common of all, the nature of the speaker tends to become part of
what he or she is speaking about, providing an intricate dance of
subject and object about each other that has a lot to do with the
way we have learned to think about personality. That the lyric
sequence was, and still is, the most common of all in European
literature is due to one man, Francis Petrarch, whose own
77
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
sequence, the Rime Sparse or simply Rime, provided the bench-
mark and the template (if a sequence can be both at the same
time) for European sonneteering and sequence writing from his
own time to the twentieth century. Across 600 years, John
Berryman in his own sequence pays Petrarch homage:
Swarthy when young; who took the tonsure; sign,
His coronation, wangled, his name re-said
For euphony; off to courts fluttered, and fled;
Professorships refused; upon one line
Worked years; and then that genial concubine.
Seventy springs he read, and wrote, and read.
On the day of the year his people found him dead
I read his story. Anew I studied mine.
Also there was Laura and three-seventeen
Sonnets to something like her ... twenty-one years ...
He never touched her. Swirl our crimes and crimes.
Gold haired (too), dark-eyed, ignorant of rimes
Was she? The old brume seldom clears.
Two guilty and crepe-yellow months, Chris! be our surviving
actual scene.
(Sonnets to Chris, 75)
1
And (apart from the extended last line), this is of course a
Petrarchan sonnet, ABBA ABBA CDE EDC. Berryman' s biogra-
phy of Petrarch-a model of its kind!-also shows the Petrarchan
sonnet in action: first the observation of experience in the octave,
and then reflection upon it in the sestet, with particular relevance
to the I I/ who speaks-in this instance, Berryman in an adulter-
ous affair ("two guilty and crepe-yellow months") with the golden-
haired woman to whom he wrote Sonnets to Chris, paralleling the
adulterous love of Petrarch for his Laura (he was not married, but
Laura was).
Though the forms and the cultural renderings of human love
and sexual desire have changed a good deal over 600 years, that
Berryman in 1947 used Petrarch as a precursor suggests one rea-
son for the persistence of the sonnet sequence: poets have always
wanted to write about love, going right or going wrong, and ever
since Petrarch wrote his "three-seventeen sonnets" (and 49 other
poems) of the Rime in Laura's praise, he was the miglior fabbro of
the amatory sequence. After his death in 1374 (found by hisser-
vants dead at his desk, as Berryman says, in the upstairs room of
78
THE LYRIC SEQUENCE
his high house in Arqua among the Eugenean Hills), Petrarch's
Italian poetry was neglected for a time; then it was revived, for
reasons that have much to do with Italian regionalism and not
much with the problems of sequences, by his admirer Cardinal
Pietro Bembo (1470-1547),2 and it became the standard of elo-
quence for Italian writers in the sixteenth century.
As Italian culture in turn became the culture to be envied and
imitated all over Europe, so Petrarch became the master poet of
Europe for those who wrote of love; the Petrarchists turned out
hundreds of thousands of sonnets, and many hundreds of
sequences, in his style. In Britain and America, after neglect in the
eighteenth century, romantic poetry reinstated both Petrarch and
Dante, and the sonnet sequence revived again, and is still with
us, as Berryman' s Petrarchan gesture shows.
But Petrarchan love is not just adoration of a mistress, an
external and magnetizing Other: Wordsworth, himself a writer of
fine sequences, remarked of Shakespeare's sonnets that "with
this key I Shakespeare unlocked his heart," and when Berryman,
in the sonnet referred to, said that Petrarch wrote "sonnets to
something like her" (Laura), he touched on what is obvious even
in the Vita Nuova: that when poets write to their loves, they write
as much about themselves desiring as about the desired one. The
love experienced, or hoped for, rather than the person who can
gratify it, is usually the focus of attention, and the work of the
sequence lies often in the gap between desire and the Other.
Thus the speaker who stands for the poet, the I 1/ of the
sequence, is the real object/subject of his or her own discourse,
and it is this preoccupation of the sonnet sequence that Petrarch
announces in the prefatory sonnet of his Rime:
Voi eh' ascoltate in rime sparse il suono
di quei sospiri ond'io nudriva'l core
in sui mio prima giovenil errore,
quand'era in parte altr'uom da quel ch'i'sono:
del vario stile in ch'io piango e ragiono
fra le vane speranze e'l van dol ore,
ove sia chi per prova intenda amore
spero trovar pieta, non che perdono.
Ma ben vegg'io or si come al popol tutto
favola fui gran tempo, onde sovente
dime medesmo meco mi vergogno;
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THE SONNET SEQUENCE
e del mio vaneggiar vergogna e'l frutto,
e'l pentersi, e'l conoscer chiaramente
che quanto piace al mondo e breve sogno. (Rime, 1)
3
(You who listen in scattered verses to the sound
of these sighs with which I nourished my heart
during the errors of my first youth,
when I was partly a different man from what I am now:
for the varying style in which I weep and argue
between vain hopes and fruitless grief,
where there may be someone who from experience understands love,
I hope to find pity, not just pardon.
But I see clearly now how to the world at large
I was a byword for a long time, for which often
I am ashamed within me for my very self;
and of my vanities, shame is the fruit,
with repentance, and the clear knowledge
that whatever pleases the world is a fleeting dream.)
This is not one of the greatest sonnets ever written (though it is
enormously sophisticated), but given the reputation and influence
of Petrarch, it is surely the most important sonnet in the world for
the development of the sonnet sequence. Petrarch worked on the
Rime, adding, changing around, and revising the sonnets and
other poems for nearly 40 years from about 1335 to his death in
1374,
4
but during most of that time this sonnet stood as the intro-
ductory poem. Whatever he intended to do in his sequence, this
was the reader's entry into it, and thus, in a way, the entry into all
the sequences that follow. And as critics and students of Petrarch
agree that this opening sonnet sets the pattern for what follows,
we shall take some time here to examine its ideas.
With all due deference to Dante, whose Vita Nuova Petrarch
probably knew, though he never mentions it, it is established
here for the first time that a sonnet sequence can be organized by
its own sonnets rather than by a prose commentary. The use of
metapoetic comment-sonnets in a sequence talking about the
sequence-establishes at the start, and as often as the trick is
repeated, the presence of a narrating I 1/ in charge of the poesis,
and this presence, brooding over the sonnets, guarantees a kind
of continuity. Here Petrarch establishes, for his readers, certain
pointers to reading what follows:
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THE LYRIC SEQUENCE
I. The sequence recounts a personal development: it is the his-
tory of an individual, who has been in different states at dif-
ferent times (lines 1-4).
2. The sonnets actually record the voice of that individual as he
suffers, and his differences are their differences (lines 5-6).
3. The individual as he is now can, and does, revalue what the
earlier Ill felt or thought (lines 9-10).
4. This is a revaluation that the reader is encouraged to accept
and share in insofar as he or she can treat the sonnets as mir-
rors (lines 7 -8).
5. The narrating I 1/ is wise-or wiser than the earlier self, and
the poetry thus becomes an ordered experience of disorder
(lines 12-14).
It would not be too much to say that something like this orga-
nizational and reading procedure has been explicit or implicit in
sonnet sequences ever since. Not all authors choose to show a
metapoetic presence, of course: we would be much more confi-
dent in our reading of Shakespeare's sonnets, for example, if we
had a similar opening sonnet from him; but the narrating I 1/ and
the narrated Ill so well represent the features of continuity and
variation constitutive of the sonnet sequence that it is rare to find
no narrating presence at all.
In a narrative sequence, the narrating presence is more con-
cerned with events or with the thoughts of others than with his
or her own, and this is true even of the rather disturbed I 1/ of
Meredith' s Modern Love, who is more absorbed in the social
ironies of his situation than in his own inner state. What Petrarch
does, again for the first time in European poetry, is establish an
interior discourse as the dominant discourse of the sonnets, with
which he virtually creates the lyric persona. Reading the preced-
ing sonnet, the reader will have noticed that as the proemial son-
net of a sequence of poems wholly devoted to the praise of one
woman, it does not actually mention her at all but instead focuses
on the multiple personas of the speaker. Borrowing from the stil-
novisti the idea that what is of importance is the transformation
of the lover (even if that is later seen as "a youthful error"),
Petrarch moves on in the sestet of the sonnet to a second trans-
formation, his wiser self aware of his folly.
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THE SONNET SEQUENCE
So far, this is orthodox penitence for the sins of the flesh; but
though we find this idea movingly and quietly expressed in the
last lines of the last great poem of the sequence, the canzone
"Vergine bella" (366), that is not what the whole sequence shows.
What it shows, under the narrating I I/' s direction, is the instabil-
ity of the psyche, its oscillation between states, and the whole
discourse of the sequence is what he says it is, a "varied style in
which I weep and argue." If the reader looks carefully at the
meaning of the pronoun I each time it occurs, he or she will
notice that one particular I (line 5) is the most complex and unde-
cidable of all, both narrating and narrated, and "in two minds,"
as we say, both simply overcome with passion ("piango," "weep")
and also articulately proclaiming itself ("ragiono," "argue"). It is
on the unstableness of that I, its at once wonderful and damnable
unstableness, that Petrarch focuses his incredible talent and sings
it through all the glories and clouds of a lifelong absorption in
"something like Her" (my capital, not Berryman's). And that
alcoholic reprobate, himself tormented by his own inadequacies,
put the problem in the form of a question that stands as the
proem to his own Rime, Sonnets to Chris:
He made, a thousand years ago, a-many songs
for an Excellent lady, wif whom he was in wuv,
shall he now publish them?
Has he the right, upon that old young man,
to bare his nervous system
& display all the clouds again as they were above?
5
Petrarch had no doubts: throughout his long life he con-
stantly revised, reassembled, and sent out to friends the "baring
of his nervous system." The paradox that he declares himself
ashamed of loving a woman whom he dedicates his verse to
commemorating is one that the sequence does not try to
resolve: it is a nervous system, not a moral system. Every now
and then the sequence is punctuated by a sonnet that reflects
on the failure of poetry: one of the instabilities of the psyche is
to doubt the value of speech in the act of speaking, and sonnet
sequences in particular have the capacity to dramatize psycho-
logical instability as semiotic trauma (as we shall see more
clearly in the work of Tony Harrison):
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THE LYRIC SEQUENCE
Mentre che'l cor dagli amorosi vermi
fu consumato e'n fiamma amorosa arse,
di vaga fera le vestigia sparse
cercai per poggi solitari et ermi;
et ebbi ardir, cantando, di dolermi
d' Amor, di lei che si dura m'apparse,
ma L'ingegno et le rime erano scarse
in quella etate ai pensier novi e'nfermi.
Quel foco e morto e'l copre in picciol marmo
che se col tempo fosse ito avanzando
come gia in altri, infino a la vechiezza,
di rime armato ond'oggi mi disarmo,
con stil canuto avrei fatto parlando
romper le pietre et pianger di dolcezza. (Rime, 304)
(While my heart was consumed by the worms of love,
and burned in its flame,
a wandering wild creature's scattered prints
I sought on wild and unfrequented hills.
And while I sang, I had the nerve to complain
of Love, of the woman who appeared so cruel to me,
but my wits and my verses were scanty
in that age for new and unstable ideas.
That fire is dead, and a small tablet covers what
had it through time gone on growing
[as it does in others] into old age,
armed with the rhymes which today I shed,
with the style of age, I would have by speaking made
break the stones and weep with sweetness.)
Since the narrating I I/ usually knows (as here) that he or she is
narrating in verse, the speaker is naturally preoccupied with the
problems of textuality, rather than sexuality, while his or her nar-
rated self will have gone through the agonies of feeling and the
disturbances that the sonnets record. (In Dante's Vita Nuova, cor-
respondingly, the problems of the text are the concern of the
prose narrator.) The problem of the adequacy of speech and sym-
bol may, then, as in Petrarch's Rime, be foregrounded intermit-
tently by the narrating I I/, which helps to hold the sequence
together. Failing to speak well enough, or saying the wrong
things, or using art for the wrong ends-all themes that occur in
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THE SONNET SEQUENCE
Petrarch' s poems and that are present also in the corona
sequences of Donne and Macbeth, discussed earlier-are the
equivalent on the metapoetic level of failing to love well enough,
or loving the wrong (or a cold-hearted) person, or using love for
the wrong ends (for lust instead of ideal love) on the level of the
narrated I I/, who may do or feel all those things. Many seq-
uences, therefore, have moments in which the speaker observes
his or her own performance, whether disapprovingly (Petrarch)
or approvingly, as here in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's conclud-
ing sonnet to Sonnets from the Portuguese:
Beloved, thou hast brought me many flowers
Plucked in the garden, all the summer through
And winter, and it seemed as if they grew
In this close room, nor missed the sun and showers.
So, in the like name of that love of ours,
Take back these thoughts which here unfolded too,
And which on warm and cold days I withdrew
From my heart's ground. Indeed, those beds and bowers
Be overgrown with bitter weeds and rue,
And wait thy weeding; yet here's eglantine,
Here's ivy!-take them, as I used to do
Thy flowers, and keep them where they shall not pine.
Instruct thine eyes to keep their colours true,
And tell thy soul, their roots are left in mine. (xliv)
6
Here, by using the ancient trope in which poems are flowers,
Elizabeth Barrett (as she then was), metaphorizes the sonnets she
has just written for her lover, Robert Browning, to read as a col-
lection of flowers gathered from an unweeded garden-the
poetry is in some sense unsatisfactory, because her past life has
much that she regrets, but she can at least offer him devotion
(eglantine) and constancy (ivy). As the thoughts/flowers have
unfolded at various seasons, this collection records a personal
history; the "heart's ground" is a site of suffering as well as of
love.
But the reader (Robert Browning in the first instance) can
learn from this sequence about the poet and himself (he has
brought flowers to her), and in the subtle and forward-looking
thirteenth line, she points out that responsibility for the order
and sense of the sequence rests with the reader-her subjective
84
THE LYRIC SEQUENCE
wholeness depends on his reading aright what she was, and
knowing that what she was is connected still to what she is
("their roots are left in mine" [soul)). As for Petrarch, a semiotic
fear, if not trauma, arises in the speaker upon realization that he
or she exists as a text and therefore must be both preserved
("keep them") and read ("Instruct thine eyes") in order to live.
Similarly Edmund Spenser (1552?-1599) begins his sonnet
sequence, the Amoretti (1595), with a sonnet spoken by one who
has an overview of the sufferings "written with teares" by him-
self at a slightly earlier stage; we are to assume he has gathered
them together for presentation, and using the convention by
which the book or verses are treated as a messenger (here a kind
of hostage) sent to the lady, he as it were supervises the messen-
ger's departure, on whose proper "handling" his own life
depends:
Happy ye leaves when as those lilly hands,
which hold my life in their dead doing might,
shall handle you and hold in loves soft bands,
lyke captives trembling at the victors sight.
And happy lines, on which with starry light,
those lam ping eyes will deigne sometimes to look
and read the sorrowes of my dying spright
written with teares in harts close bleeding book.
And happy rymes bath' din the sacred brooke,
of Helicon whence she derived is,
when ye behold that Angels blessed looke,
my souls long lacked food, my heavens blis.
Leaves, lines, and rymes, seeke her to please alone,
whom if ye please, I care for other none. (Amoretti, lf
The sequence text as confused sounds (Petrarch); the sequence as
varied flowers and weeds (Elizabeth Barrett); the sequence as a
group of prisoners of war (Spenser)-all these metaphors pro-
ceed from a narrating or editing I I! who is presenting his or her
own past as a kind of disorder that can with goodwill be read
into wholeness or continuity-or, if that fails, as Petrarch feared it
might, then be read with forgiveness.
This strategy, which Petrarch seems to have invented for orga-
nizing his sequence, creates and perpetuates what one might call
the confessional lyric sequence. To confess is inevitably to look
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THE SONNET SEQUENCE
back and represent/re-present one's past, and at the moment of
confession one is, or should be, wiser than one has been. Even
the anarchic John Berryman, at the end of his "some hundred
sonnets" (actually 117), escapes from himself as lover into himself
as sonneteer-though he waits until the "changing" at the sestet
of his last sonnet before he does it:
The weather's changing. This morning was cold,
as I made for the grove, without expectation,
some hundred Sonnets in my pocket, old,
to read her if she came. Presently the sun
yellowed the pines & my lady came not
in blue jeans and sweater. I sat down and wrote.
(Sonnets to Chris, 117, 9-14)
8
Petrarch's Rime and Symbolism
There are other ways of holding a sequence together, even in the
absence of a poet-persona acting as architect; Petrarch was a
master also of these ways. He had the advantage over most later
sequence writers of a very long life, in which he was able to
rework and rethink his sonnets: we have many of his work-
sheets, as well as some part-autograph manuscripts of his various
versions of the Rime, so that we can trace most of the changes he
made. The first point to make is that sonnets, if properly written
and capable of standing independently, can be changed around
and still make sense, something that is not true of, say, the chap-
ters of a conventional novel. They are more like the entries in a
diary, which can be changed from date to date-it is not
unknown for diaries to be altered or reworked to suggest a new
version of events. So with the loosely connected sonnets of a
sequence: they may be shifted quite dramatically and frequently.
Petrarch' s Laura died of the Black Death in Avignon on 6 April
1348, and after her death Petrarch decided to assemble the son-
nets he had written in her praise while she lived, and add others,
presenting the collection in two sets, one up to her death, the
sonnets "in vita di Madonna Laura," and the remainder after it,
"in morte." As we know' from his worksheets, this did no: mean
that sonnets could not change from the "in vita" group to the "in
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THE LYRIC SEQUENCE
morte" group and vice versa. Although throughout the Rime
some sonnets contain dates, all of these except two lying in
chronological order in the final version he bequeathed to us,
many sonnets were temporally unfixed and the moods or feel-
ings expressed were not in his mind always keyed to a particular
moment, or even to Laura alive as distinguished from her angelic
self. To allow this temporal freedom, some other kind of linking
was needed, and what Petrarch provided-though few later
writers have had the genius to imitate it-was the continuity of
symbolism.
Explaining Petrarch's symbolism has occupied many critics
through the ages and will no doubt continue to do so; my interest
is limited here to his symbolism as it controls the sequence and
affects later writers. To take only one example for the moment: in
Berryman's final sonnet, the reference to "making for the grove"
where "the sun yellowed the pines" is heavy with Petrarchan
associations--Petrarch repeatedly used trees, the sun, and the
calor of gold as symbols both of his poetry (Apollo, the sun god,
whose tree is the laurel) and of his love (Laura, whose tree is the
laurel, and whose hair is golden). It actually becomes difficult to
write about trees without involving these ideas: here is Joachim
du Bellay, beginning the vogue of the sonnet sequence in France
with I: Olive (1549), clearing much symbolic undergrowth:
Je ne quiers pas la fameuse couronne,
Saint ornement du dieu au chef dore,
Ou que du dieu aux Indes adore
Le gai chapeau la tete m' environne.
Encore moins veux-je que I' on me donne
Le mol rameau en Cypre decore;
Celui qui est d'Athenes honore
Seul je le veux, et le ciel me l'ordonne.
0 tige heureux, que la sage deesse
En sa tutelle et garde a voulu prendre
Pour faire honneur a son sacre autel!
Orne mon chef, donne-moi hardiesse
De te chanter, qui espere te rendre
Egal un jour au Laurier immortel. (I.; Olive, 1)
9
(I do not seek for the famous crown,
The holy regalia of the god of the golden hair, [Apollo/laurel]
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THE SONNET SEQUENCE
Or that the revelling wreath of the god worshipped in the Indies
[Bacchus/vine twigs]
Should circle my head. Much less do I wish to be given
The sweet branch of the rites of Cyprus; [Venus/myrtle]
The one that is honoured in Athens
Is all I want, as heaven decrees. [Athena/the olive]
0 happy tree, that the wise goddess
Has taken under her watch and protection
To honour her holy altar,
Adorn my brow, give me the strength
To sing of you, as I hope to make you
One day the peer of the immortal Laurel. [Petrarch/Iaurel tree/Laura])
This elaborate emblematic verse establishes the speaker and his
view of his sequence right at the start: his verse will be Petrarchan
(1.14) and will praise his lady throughout (11.12-14), but he does
not claim to be an accomplished poet (11.1-2), he will not write
coarse or wanton verse (11.3-4), and he will not write in view of
marriage (11.5-6). His is an ideal devotion marked by wisdom
and purity (11.7-12). The European Renaissance developed an
extremely complex symbolic vocabulary, much of which was
independent of Petrarch; from our point of view it is noteworthy
that Petrarch developed an extensive natural symbolism, much of
which derived from a circumstance of his own life.
In 1337, 10 years after he first saw his Laura, he bought a small
house and garden 20 miles to the east of Avignon, in the spectac-
ular valley at the source of the River Sorgue, Vaucluse (vallis
clausa, "the closed valley"). Barely 300 yards from his house, the
Sorgue rises in a mysterious, green-shaded basin at the foot of
immense sheer cliffs and flows rapidly down to the plain among
trees and fertile meadows. Though there is no evidence that
Laura was ever there, Petrarch repeatedly imagined himself see-
ing her, or searching for her, by those waters and among those
hills and woods; and these became an analogue of her and of
himself, through the dominant myth of Apollo and Daphne, the
god of poetry who pursues, and the beloved who eludes in the
flesh, only to turn at the end into the laurel, the tree of poetry:
Si traviato e'l folie mi' desio
a seguitar costei che'n fugae volta
e de'lacci d' Amor leggiera et sciolta
vola dinanzi alien to correr mio,
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THF LYRIC SEQUENCE
che quanta richiamando piu 1' envio
per la sicura strada men m' ascolta,
ne mi vale spronarlo 0 dargli volta
eh' Am or per sua natura il fa restio;
et poi che'l fren per forza a se raccoglie,
i'mi rimango in signoria di lui,
che mal mio grado a moret mi trasporta;
sol per venir allauro onde si coglie
acerbo frutto, che le piaghe altrui
gustando affligge piu che non conforta. (Rime, 6)
(So astray is my wild desire
to pursue her who has turned in her flight
and loose and free from the ties of Love
flies ahead of my slow running,
that the more in recalling him I send him
by the safe path, the less he listens to me,
nor is it any use to spur him on or turn him round,
for Love by his nature makes him restless
and then when he forcefully takes the bit between his teeth,
I stay in his power,
so that against my will he bears me to my death;
and we come only to the laurel, that bears
bitter fruit, which when tasted
afflicts wounds more than it heals them.)
(It is worth noting here that Rilke also used the myth of a lightly
dancing woman and a god of poetry, Orpheus, in his sonnets.) If
this seems like an esoteric poem, then in a sense it is availing
itself of what any sonnet sequence can have: a set of symbols and
meaning generated in the course of the sequence by repetition
and allusion. If these symbols are valid in a semantics outside the
sequence, like the myth of Apollo and Daphne, then the writer
can be more oblique; if they are private, then they must be
explained as the sequence develops, such as those in George
Macbeth's "Thoughts on a Box of Razors" (Poems from Oby, 1982).
Once we grasp that razors lying in a box are like rhyming lines in
the poet's mind, the whole sequence is organized on a metapo-
etic level, but this, being a privately invented symbol, has to be
made explicit, as it is in the sixth sonnet:
Razors need razor-like precision. These
Don't quite have that. This boxfulleans on rhyme.
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THE SONNET SEQUENCE
I see the brook of recollection freeze,
And feel the cross of parting, like a crime.
I could abandon rhyme, though. Force a sly
Sixth line decision to be less exact.
A sort of gearchange, as it were, in fact.
That would be fluid, like a flow of thigh.
I don't suppose I'll do it, though, nor try.
Good rhymes can cut you. They can make you cry.
Remembering does that too. So when I
Remember blue Gillette, and rusting blades,
A kind of guilty subjugation shades.
I see my father's car, and cases packed.
10
Macbeth' s sequence here is not amatory but loosely meditative
about memory and the wholeness of personality in time. This
issue, or topic, is also profoundly Petrarchan: as he grew older,
Petrarch became increasingly occupied with the hereafter and
used the narrating I 1/ to represent the present time, while the
narrated I I/ was the past, and his desire for Laura (alive or as the
donna angelicata) reached into the future. The I !-who-speaks/ thus
occupies "now," the present point of the reader and the speaker,
and the sonnets themselves range through past and future, both
inside individual sonnets and as one goes through the sequence.
To order the past (by narrating it) and the future (by envisioning
it) is to secure the wholeness of the I I-who speaks/, and-if one
follows Petrarch' s lead-the sonnet sequence is a kind of battle
for existence.
Shakespeare's sonnets, where the metapoesis is subdued but
definite, exhibit this very strikingly; and the notion that the
sequence (whether amatory or religious) is a proclamation, or an
elocution, or an eloquence-a speaking out-of the self is one that
remains with Renaissance poets and passes down to romantic
writers, especially when, as with Baudelaire, defiance becomes
one of the social gestures expected of the poet.
Horreur Sympathique
De ce ciel bizarre et livide,
Tourmente comme ton destin,
Quels pensers clans ton ame vide
Descendent? reponds, libertin.
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THE LYRIC SEQUENCE
-Insatiablement avide
De I' obscur et de I' in certain,
Je ne geindrai pas comme Ovide
Chasse du paradis Latin
Cieux dechires comme des greves,
En vous se mire mon orgeuil;
Vos vastes nuages en deuil
Sont les corbillards de mes reves,
Et vos lueurs sont le reflet
. De l'Enfer ou mon coeur se plait. (Les Fleurs du Mal, 82)
11
(From this strange and livid sky,
Tortured like your destiny,
What thoughts fall into your empty soul?
Answer, freethinker.
-Insatiably greedy
For what is hidden and uncertain,
I shall not whine like Ovid
Banished from his Roman paradise.
Skies sundered like shores,
My pride mirrors itself in you;
Your huge clouds in their grief
Are the hearses of my dreams,
And in your gleams is reflected
the Hell where my heart rejoices.)
Here Baudelaire as speaker addresses himself, just as Petrarch
addresses Love, and his self replies with an outburst that looks
back to an urban past (Ovid) and forward to a Romantic expul-
sion into a wilderness (Ovid again, and also Petrarch and Satan),
leaving the narrating speaker of the first quatrain poised uncer-
tainly in the present. Les Fleurs du Mal (or at least the first section
called "Spleen et Ideal") is not a highly ordered sequence, but the
use of the present to stand on, as here, to look at the past with
repentance and the future with defiance is a kind of motif.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Female Speaker
The use of the lyric sequence to constitute a self in the face of
threat (from within or without) is something that certainly
91
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
appealed to Petrarch, but it applied particularly to women son-
neteers, and there is a set of confessional lyric sequences that, as I
have already said, one might call the "she-to-him" sequence type.
We have already looked at Anne Locke's sequence (1560),
which though not gender specific is certainly an attempt by a
woman speaker to discover or recover her identity as a living
soul, addressed to the Ultimate Him; Lady Mary Wrath's
sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621), a set of suites of 74
sonnets and 20 songs in all, while not uniformly or constantly
addressed to 'Amphilanthus," is an attempt by a woman in love
to come to terms with her own (unrequited) passion and with the
phenomenon of male response to it. Written in imitation of her
uncle's Astrophel and Stella, it works wholly within Petrarchan
conventions but reverses the gender roles. It has a certain
amount of ironic wit and is a predecessor in that way of Edna St.
Vincent Millay's Fatal Interview (1931), mentioned in chapter 4.
Mary Robinson's Sappho to Phaon (1796), popular with antholo-
gizers at the beginning of the nineteenth century, is a 44-sonnet
sequence in the same tradition-though "Sappho" was by tradi-
tion a woman self-asserted through her verse and thus not as
such oppressed. Thomas Hardy's four-sonnet sequence "She to
Him" of 1866, obviously not by a woman but impersonating one,
moves from bad Shakespearean pastiche to something within
striking distance of Hardy's consummately skillful lyric verse,
and as Hardy often did later, speaks for the wronged or betrayed
woman.
Christina Rossetti's Manna lnnominata (1881) declares in its
preface that it imagines the utterance of one of the ladies of the
stilnovisti "had such a lady spoken for herself," but it also pays
generous tribute to its predecessor and model, the finest of all
these sequential assertions of a woman's identity and self,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. These 44
Petrarchan sonnets were the first Victorian amatory sequence
and were written before her marriage in 1846 to Robert
Browning, but not shown to him till three years later, and pub-
lished in 1850.
The title, Sonnets from the Portuguese, reflects Elizabeth Barrett's
shyness: she hesitated to reveal the sonnets to her husband, and
he in turn had reservations about "putting one's loves into
verse," so that by agreement they presented the sonnets as if they
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THE LYRIC SEQUENCE
were translations. Elizabeth Barrett previously had written a
poem based on the story that the Portuguese epic poet Camoes
has been silently loved by a court lady, Catarina, who died at 20
without revealing her passion. Her poem, "Catarina to Camoes,"
was written in 1831, in songlike stanzas, and insofar as it belongs
to a genre, it is that of Ovid' s Heroides, the classical model for
poems from a wronged or repentant woman heroine to her lover.
However, this idea suggested the modest subterfuge of her own
sonnet sequence, and Catarina suggested the Portuguese of the
title.
12
But the genre that lies closest to the sequence, and provides its
special kind of connectedness, is the letter. Because of the circum-
stances of her domestic confinement between 1838 and 1846,
when she married Robert Browning, and because of her growing
reputation as a poet in these years, Elizabeth Barrett became a
most accomplished letter writer, and these letters were not, as
Petrarch' s were, rhetorical exercises in the spirit of Cicero or
Seneca but lively and often intimate written converse with
friends and admirers-of whom one finally became her husband
and lover. Almost uniquely, then, this sequence is addressed to a
present and future lover, not an imagined or absent or idealized
one, and while the vocabulary may be that of Catarina or any
romantic heroine, the movement of the voice inside the sonnets
and between sonnets is that of conversing, as one does in letters
to those one loves, with someone who hears one's voice as he or
she reads.
Elizabeth Barrett was already a skillful sonneteer when she
wrote this sequence, and though at times the Petrarchan model
(ABBA ABBA CDCDCD) makes her hunt for a rhyme, she
enforces her passion against the structure of the sonnet, letting it
hold her in place as she argues, breaks off, tries an epigram, looks
for the right word, calls for a response from him-in short,
engages with her addressee, as Petrarch never did. These are dra-
matic lyrics, in the sense in which the word is used of Robert
Browning's poetry:
Yet love, mere love, is beautiful indeed
And worthy of acceptation. Fire is bright,
Let temple burn, or flax. An equal light
Leaps in the flame from cedar-plank or weed.
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THE SONNET SEQUENCE
And love is fire; and when I say at need
I love thee ... mark!. I love thee ... in thy sight
I stand transfigured, glorified aright,
With conscience of the new rays that proceed
Out of my face towards thine. There's nothing low
In love, when love the lowest: meanest creatures
Who love God, God accepts while loving so.
And what I feel, across the inferior features
Of what I am, cloth flash itself, and show
How that great work of Love enhances Nature's. (x)
It is always difficult to talk about a sequence via single sonnets,
but this splendid and subtle sonnet is representative of the bond-
ing techniques that hold the sequence together. The sense of a
lively speaking voice engaging its addressee should be clear:
Elizabeth Barrett' s use of enjambment, pressing her emotions
through the end of one line into the next and overrunning the
octave by half a line into the sestet, is a developed technique that
English sonneteers had learned from Milton and the great
Romantic poets. Along with this urgency goes a new use of
metaphor: anyone reading the first quatrain might think they
were reading a translation from Dante's Vita Nuova, so strong is
the language of light and fire as symbols of love; but in Dante the
transfiguration of the lover (imagined or desired) is a final effect
and a total condition. For Elizabeth Barrett, the purpose or value
of this transfiguration is to make the self cohere in a "flash" that is
directed toward the beloved as an erotic welcome.
Again and again in this sequence, the language of religion and
of worship of an ideal beloved, familiar from Dante, from
Petrarch, and from the English Renaissance sonneteers, is used to
enhance gestures, movements of the eyes or the body between
two people sitting (as we know that Robert Browning and
Elizabeth Barrett often did, greatly to the annoyance of her
father) close together.
This sequence uses the transcendent to enhance the erotic and
the physical, whereas its predecessors work in the reverse direc-
tion, and Elizabeth Barrett' s extraordinary skill in enforcing the
movement of the speaking voice is responsible for maintaining
this illusion of physical proximity. Donne can do this, though not
in his sonnets, and Sir Philip Sidney also; Elizabeth Barrett does it
with an inherited and powerful vocabulary of idealism and tran-
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THE LYRIC SEQUENCR
scendence-something that distinguishes her from Edna St.
Vincent Millay, whose ironic detachment is too pervasive for ide-
alism to bond her sonnets together.
To call this a tactile sequence is too simple. All the senses are
involved, but the passionate observer of herself and her lover
always seems to be so close to him as to touch or be touched.
Consider the strong tactility of the closing lines of sonnet 35,
which adapt Genesis 8:9 (and possibly also, given the eroticism of
the sequence, Canticles 5:2) to make vibrant with significance the
clearly imagined sensation of holding safely a wet bird:
Alas, I have grieved I am so hard to love,
Yet love me, wilt thou? Open thine heart wide,
And fold within, the wet wings of thy dove. (35.12-14)
The final image of the dove belongs also, it might seem, to the
traditional way of asserting the self that we have called abjection,
in which the self is created by being desirous of an Other whose
recognition is sought (or, perhaps, angrily refused, as in
Shakespeare's sonnets to his Dark Lady). The self confesses to
being dependent on, and thus constituted by, the approval of the
Other. Certainly Elizabeth Barrett allows her speaker to assert
that she is weak, unworthy, and if worthy at all, only by permis-
sion, as it were:
Even so, Beloved, I at last record,
Here ends my strife. If thou invite me forth,
I rise above abasement at the word.
Make thy love larger to enlarge my worth. (16.11-14)
Yet partly because her sequence is not unified by any single
myth or image cluster, Elizabeth Barrett can image herself in
ways that are very much at variance with any simple adoration.
Consider this sonnet together with the Shakespeare sonnet that it
echoes:
Accuse me not, beseech thee, that I wear
Too calm and sad a face in front of thine;
For we two look two ways, and cannot shine
With the same sunlight on our brow and hair.
On me thou lookest, with no doubting care,
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THE SONNET SEQUENCE
As on a bee shut in a crystalline-
Since sorrow hath shut me safe in love's divine,
And to spread wing and fly in the outer air
Were most impossible failure, if I strove
To fail so. But I look on thee ... on thee.
Beholding, besides love, the end of love,
Hearing oblivion beyond memory!
As one who sits and gazes from above,
Over the rivers to the bitter sea. (15)
Accuse me thus: that I have scanted all
Wherein I should your great deserts repay,
Forgot upon your dearest love to call,
Whereto all bonds do tie me day by day;
That I have frequent been with unknown minds,
And given to time your own dear-purchased right;
That I have hoisted sail to all the winds
Which should transport me furthest from your sight.
Book both my wilfulness and errors down,
And on just proof surmise accumulate;
Bring me within the level of your frown,
But shoot not at me in your wakened hate;
Since my appeal says I did strive to prove
The constancy and virtue of your love.
(Shakespeare, Sonnets, 117)
What Rosalie Colie once memorably called Shakespeare's
"particularly brainy, calculated incisiveness" is well displayed
here: this is a forensic sonnet in a sequence dominated by argu-
ment. The speaker is talking at, rather than to, his addressee, and
the lexis and syntax are cumulative, producing a clever punch
line in the couplet. Elizabeth Barrett' s sonnet is rather more
unexpected: though it contains many archaisms and Shake-
spearean phrases, it does not move as Shakespeare's sonnet
moves, but with no concern to make a case or argue a point,
seems to go into a dream at the end. One can hear the voice, as
always, and it tails off hesitantly before returning with a strange
and unsettling image, quite unlike anything Shakespeare would
have set at the end of a sonnet:
But I look on thee ...
As one who sits and gazes from above,
Over the rivers to the bitter sea.
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THE LYRIC SEQUENCE
The effect of this image of a woman looking out from a height
upon the ocean is to make the regard of the lover who thinks her
a bee shut in a crystal seem precious and unreal. Suddenly a son-
net that seems to be arguing that the lovers are different and that
she is weaker and wholly restricted goes into the recesses of her
mind and reinstates her as a sibylline figure of great power, look-
ing from above, calmer and sadder, because wiser, than her lover.
This subversion of a stance-abjection turned into subjec-
tion-is recurrent in the sequence and can make Elizabeth
Barrett seem coy, affecting a weakness that elsewhere she denies.
(It might, of course, be said that in her life, by leaving her room to
marry and elope with Robert Browning, that was precisely what
she exhibited.) Any single sonnet might justify this objection. But
as the sequence progresses and moves from hesitation and a kind
of pathetic gratitude toward erotic welcome and self-discovery as
a woman capable of love and sexual fulfillment, the apparent
inconsistency is actually the emergence of the persona who
speaks as the writer of the sequence at the end, who has written
poetry equal to Browning's, and who now exchanges with him
like for like. This is not a narrative sequence, but its movement
keeps in being, seen in flashes (to use her own word), the proper
lover of the Beloved, who when she has fully emerged, signs off
her sequence with a firm hand, offering it as the index of her self:
take them [the poems], as I used to do
Thy flowers, and keep them where they shall not pine.
Instruct thine eyes to keep their colours true,
And tell thy soul, their roots are left in mine. (xliv.ll-14)
As always, there is a sense of speaking to someone physically
close. No other sonneteer manages this peculiar intimacy: the
Petrarchan legacy of distance between speaker and beloved is
elsewhere too powerful.
If there is a myth dominating this sequence, it is one of which,
perhaps, Elizabeth Barrett was aware more as reality than literary
figure: the Rapunzel type of the woman enclosed, attracting, but
unreachable. Insofar as this is a modernization of Daphne (the
woman fleeing and unreachable), it is a continuation of Petrar-
chan themes; but because it articulates, and triumphantly over-
comes, a quintessential Victorian female predicament, memorial-
ized by both male and female artists and writers and used by
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THE SONNET SEQUENCE
many as a metaphor for poetry itself (see Tennyson's The Lady of
Shalott), it became one of the most popular of all her works and a
model for later writers (e.g., Christina Rossetti, Manna Inno-
minata). Its success helped to reinstate the amatory, confessional
sonnet sequence as a literary genre.
Tony Harrison, from The School of Eloquence
At first sight, nothing could be less like Sonnets from the Portuguese
than Tony Harrison' s aggressively modern sequence from The
School of Eloquence, published in 1978 and written, for good mea-
sure, not even in 14-line sonnets, but in 16-line ones, rhyming
like Meredith's in four quatrains. Compared with his predeces-
sors' sonnets, everything is looser and more irregular; but as we
shall see, the basic pattern and main themes remain surprisingly
traditional.
The collection consists of 67 sonnets, usually rhyming in qua-
trains but sometimes in couplets and sometimes in a mixture of
the two. They are arranged in three numbered but untitled sec-
tions of 14, 35, and 18 sonnets, respectively, and within each sec-
tion each sonnet has a title and sometimes an epigraph. There are
several suites of two and three sonnets in the sequence, and the
last section concludes with a complicated suite of sonnets, "Art
and Extinction," consisting of six items, the first of which, titled
"The Birds of America," is itself a suite of three sonnets, each with
is own title. With a kind of academic wit apparently at odds with
his Leeds upbringing (the tension between the two is a major
subject of the sequence), the first 16-line poem after the epigraph
turns out to be an extract from Milton's Latin poem '1\d Patrem,"
carefully printed to look like one of Harrison' s own poems.
Harrison is also ferociously addicted to punning titles, so that the
movement of reading the sequence is not only linear but also tan-
gential. The sonnets are not serially numbered, except for the
suites, and will be referred to here by section and title.
Harrison's cleverness, as was suggested, is part ofhis subject
matter. As surely as Dante or Petrarch or any of the other writers
we have examined, he focuses on moments in the being-or
becoming, if one wishes to give a post-Rilke and post-Heidegger
context to the modern sequence--of his self. The self has its
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THE LYRIC SEQUENCE
desired Other, and though this is not a conventional amatory
sequence, it is very much about love, love of his home in Leeds
and of his parents. Like Petrarch, Harrison begins with a poem
not about love but about language and identity-though as the
reader will just have encountered the extracts from Milton's Ad
Patrem referred to earlier, Harrison's title here, "On Not Being
Milton," brings Milton's love for and acknowledgment of his
own father into the ambience of the sonnet:
On Not Being Milton
for Sergio Vieira & Armando Guebuza (Frelimo)
Read and committed to the flames, I call
these sixteen lines that go back to my roots
my Cahier d'un retour au pays natal,
my growing black enough to fit my boots.
The stutter of the scold out of the branks
of condescension, class and counter-class
thickens with glottals to a lumpen mass
of Ludding morphemes closing up their ranks.
Each swung cast iron Enoch of Leeds stress
clangs a forged music on the frames of art,
the looms of owned language smashed apart.
Three cheers for mute ingloriousness!
Articulation is the tonguetied' s fighting.
In the silence all round poetry we quote
Tidd the Cato Street conspirator who wrote:
Sir, I Ham a very Bad Hand at Righting.
13
This dense, allusive, and witty sonnet is also a metapoetic start
to the sequence, identifying it obliquely as a "cahier" -notebook
or account book. It places the sequence within a cultural and
political struggle, being dedicated to two of the Angolan guerrilla
fighters, and thus underscores the pun that identifies poetry
with revolution: writing/righting. The challenge is to become
articulate without losing one's native speech: to accept that one's
regional dialect is "thick" or "lumpen" is to betray one's identity
and sell out to the condescension of the ruling class (referred to
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THE SONNET SEQUENCE
in the echo of Thomas Gray's "Some mute inglorious Milton here
may rest"). But Milton, of course, became articulate without los-
ing his revolutionary fervor and paradoxically became liberated
through the most elite of all tongues, academic Latin; perhaps
obstinate adherence to one's dialect speech is a kind of Luddism.
"Three cheers for mute ingloriousness!" is a witty encapsulation
of what is, at the outset of this sequence, an intensely problematic
situation for the speaker.
Harrison was, and as speaker of his sequence is, in love with
those who as a family sustained him-father, mother, and uncles.
His father, as he reminds the reader often, did not read books
(Two; ''A Good Read"); his mother disliked the kind of books her
son wrote (Two: "Bringing Up" -the title suggests both nourish-
ing and vomiting); and as for his uncles, an epigraph tells the
inquiring reader
How you became a poet's a mystery!
Wherever did you get your talent from?
I say: I had two uncles, foe and Harry-
One was a stammerer, the other dumb.
The would-be poet could express his love for his family and his
culture and class only by reaching a level of education and articu-
lation ("The School of Eloquence") that divided him from those
he loved: the result was often anger and frustration and discon-
tent, as he says in "Confessional Poetry" (Two), using Sir Philip
Sidney's device of an intrusive reader at his elbow:
But your father was a simple working man,
they'll say, and didn't speak in those full rhymes.
His words when they came would scarcely scan.
Mi dad's did scan, like yours do, many times!
That quarrel then in Book Ends II between [Book Ends li-the poem on the
previous page]
one you still go on addressing as 'mi dad'
and you, your father comes across as mean
but weren't the taunts you flung back just as bad?
We had a bitter quarrel in our cups
and there were words between us, yes,
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THE LYRIC SEQUENCE
I'm guilty, and the way I make it up's
in poetry, and that much I confess. (lines 5-16)
"To make it up in poetry" is of course both to fictionalize and
to reconcile, and this metapoetic intervention identifies the
sequence as both confessionaVpenitential and the product of arti-
fice. As the sequence progresses, the gap between origins and
present identity is bridged, as in Petrarch, by elegy. The sonnet
on his father's cremation, "Marked with D" (Two), is well-known
and often anthologized (though it gains immensely from being
read in sequence); the sonnet on his mother's cremation, one of
the most moving of modern lyrics, is less well-known and, com-
ing as it does immediately after "Bringing Up," is full of irony as
well as pathos:
Timer
Gold survives the fire that's hot enough
to make you ashes in a standard urn.
An envelope of coarse official buff
contains your wedding ring which wouldn't burn.
Dad told me I'd to tell them at St James' s
that the ring should go in the incinerator.
That 'eternity' inscribed with both their names is
his surety that they'd be together, 'later'.
I sign for the parcelled clothing as the son,
the cardy, apron, pants, bra, dress-
the clerk phoned down: 6-8-8-3-1?
Has she still her ring on? (Slight pause) Yes!
It's on my warm palm now, your burnished ring!
I feel your ashes, head, arms, breasts, womb, legs,
sift through its circle slowly, like that thing
you used to let me watch to time the eggs. (Two)
As in Petrarch' s Rime 348, the speaker's sense of loss is marked by
a sensuous itemization, leading down the sonnet to a loneliness
"amid the wastes of time." Where Harrison exploits the macabre
symbolism of the egg timer (Old Father Time, the egg of creation,
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THE SONNET SEQUENCE
sands of time) to define his own precariousness "as the son," the
naked and blind I I! of Petrarch can look, tentatively, toward a
hereafter, but the similarities are more powerful than the differ-
ence:
Da'piu belli occhi, et dal piu chiaro viso
che mai splendesse, et da'piu bei capelli
che facean l' oro e'l sol parer men belli,
dal piu dolce parlare et dolce riso,
da le man, da le braccia che conquiso
senza moversi avrian quai piu rebelli
fur d'amor mai, da'piu bei piedi snelli,
da la persona fatta in paradiso
prendean vita i miei spirti; or n'a diletto
il Re celeste, i suoi alati corrieri,
ed io son qui rimaso ignudo e cieco.
Sol un conforto a le mie pene aspetto:
ch'ella che vede tutt'i miei penseri
m'impetre grazia ch'i possa esser seco. (Rime, 348)
(From the fairest eyes and the brightest face
that ever shone, and from the finest hair
that made gold and the sun seem less fair
from the sweetest speech and sweetest smile,
from the hands and arms that without movement
would have conquered the most rebellious
against Love, from the beautiful light feet,
from the body created in Paradise
my spirits drew life; now in them delights
the King of Heaven, and his winged messengers,
and I am left here naked and blind.
One solace only do I look for for all my misery:
that she who knows all of my thoughts
will obtain grace for me, that I may be with her.)
What is being confessed to, in both sequences, is not so much
things done and regretted as a kind of existential undermining
by time, as the sands run through. This haunted Shakespeare,
who likewise lamented, while trying to defy, "Time's fickle glass,
his sickle hour"; the sense that /I/ is, now, at a vanishing point
was perhaps more familiar to ages like Petrarch's or Shake-
speare's, more surrounded by symbols of memento mori. But
Harrison, too, has his struggle to reclaim identity from oblivion
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THE LYRIC SEQUENCE
through speech, the more bitter in that poetry is not what once it
was, the favorite of kings and nobles:
Silence and poetry have their own reserves.
The numbered creatures flourish less and less.
A language near extinction best preserves
the deepest grammar of our nothingness. (Three: "t' Ark," 11.1-4)
The "language near extinction" is on one level the Leeds
dialect that recurs throughout the sequence, the speech of those
who could not speak for themselves preserved by a speaker who
had left their speech behind. Unlike Petrarch, Harrison does not
conclude his sequence with religious resignation and penitence,
nor like Elizabeth Barrett, with the hope of a bright future, but (as
in a postmodernist age one might expect) with the semantic
trauma, as I have called it earlier, with which he began. The last
section (Three) begins with a sonnet called "Self-Justification"-
not a religious pun this time, but a semiotic one, referring to his
uncle Joe, the stammerer who became a printer and
handset type much faster than he spoke.
Those cruel consonants, ms, ps and bs
on which his jaws and spirit almost broke
flicked into order with sadistic ease.
Since Harrison's own existence as a poet now depends on his
poems being printed and read, he and his uncle are alike in find-
ing their "voice" through
... aggression, struggle, loss, blank printer's ems
by which all eloquence gets justified.
The reader is looking, quite literally, at justification on the page,
and the visual semiotic pun enforces the existential point as the
sequence moves into its last section: to speak is to exist. Similarly,
to have spoken, or signed, is to have existed; and as the sequence
moves through time, from Harrison' s origins and schooling
through the aging and deaths of his relatives to his own estab-
lishment as a poet, each sonnet takes a moment of existence,
often through a symbolic item, such as a cap or a photograph or a
habit of behavior, and by giving it a sign gives it being. Often in
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THE SONNET SEQUENCE
the last line or quatrain, the point of that being is suddenly made,
articulated as a problem of identity (the epigrammatic clinch of
the Shakespearean sonnet), even if (as here) it has sixteen lines:
Illuminations (ii)
We built and bombed Boche stalags on the sands,
or hunted for beached starfish on the rocks
and some days ended up all holding hands
gripping the pier machine that gives you shocks.
The current would connect. We'd feel the buzz,
ravel our loosening ties in one tense grip,
the family circle, one continuous US!
This was the first year on my scholarship,
and I'd be the one who'd make the circuit short.
I lectured them on neutrons and Ohm's Law,
and other half-baked physics I'd been taught.
I'm sure my father felt I was a bore!
Two dead, but current still flows through us three
though the circle takes for ever to complete-
eternity, annihilation, me,
the small bright charge of life where they both meet.
The /1/ who reflects in the final quatrain on the experience
described in the previous three is aware of himself, just as
Petrarch was, as a point between past and future, a point where
transvaluation of the past and of the self takes place. The sonnet
sequence is the matrix of these points, which the reader progress-
ing through can understand either as something static-"Not
marble, nor the gilded monuments I Of princes, shall outlive this
powerful rhyme," something that Harrison described wittily as
"the poet preserved beneath deep permaverse" -or as some-
thing dynamic, the sound of sighs, the poet's evolving self. But
the self is neither whole nor achieved, and the sign of that is the
discontinuity of sequence, the dislocation as one moves from
sonnet to sonnet. Elizabeth Barrett felt justified in presenting her
sequence as a bouquet-the flowers varied but all together; but
such confidence is unusual. Berryman, in the sonnet quoted ear-
lier from the end of his sequence, took a hundred sonnets with
him to read to his lady, but she did not come, "so I sat down and
wrote": a hundred sonnets are futile, and a new one must be
begun.
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THE LYRIC SEQUENCE
Harrison' s powerful re-creation, through the single-sonnet
glimpses of memory, of his childhood and adolescence con-
trasted with his present state, is a reassurance that in the twenti-
eth century, the pattern initiated in the thirteenth and templated,
as it were, by Petrarch in the fourteenth still functions. The con-
fessional lyric sequence, in which the I 1/ is simultaneously sub-
ject and object of its own discourse, in which a narrating I 1/ usu-
ally appears as conscious of its own poesis, offering a revaluation
of itself to the reader, in which the discontinuities of the self
(past/present, inner/outer, feeling/thought) are represented for-
mally by the individuality of each sonnet, and the continuity is
shown by the motifs and symbols that hold the sequence
together (if they do)-this kind of sequence, often categorized as
"love poetry" because the /I/ is defined by its desire of an Other,
is the most popular and, it has to be said, the most successful in
European poetry.
Categorical sequences, as I have called them, in which thenar-
rating I 1/ is more of an observer (passionate or wise or both) of a
succession of objects (scenes, times, persons) that pass before him
or her are also common, and often very agreeable, but rarely
have been rewarded with the kind of critical attention and suc-
cess that the lyric sequences have had. The problematics of the
self, at least since the Renaissance, have been at the center of liter-
ary endeavor in Europe and America more than any other single
topic, and the sonnet-sequence genre has been particularly
friendly to them.
Donne's Holy Sonnets and Shakespeare's Sonnets
Before we leave the lyric sequence and turn to the philosophical
sequence, to be examined through the sonnets of Rilke, we shall
look briefly at two of the most famous British sonnet sequences,
John Donne's Holy Sonnets, written after 1609 and published in
1633 and 1635, and Shakespeare's Sonnets, probably written
before 1600 and published in 1609. In these collections, which as I
shall argue are not quite to be regarded as sequences, the prob-
lematics of the self create sonnets whose concern is perhaps not
philosophical but certainly existential. In both collections, one
short and sacred, one long and secular, the author has chosen to
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THE SONNET SEQUENCE
withdraw the voice of an organizing or presiding speaker as we
have heard it, for instance, in the Rime of Petrarch or the corona
sequence of George Macbeth; we have only the voice of the
speaker of each sonnet, with whatever continuities of repeated
motifs or positions the successive sonnets may display. Crucially,
this has the formal consequence that we do not know, in either
case, that we are dealing with a sequence at all. This uncertainty
affects in turn our sense of what the speaking self is, verbally and
psychologically, "making of itself."
The problem is partly textual and historical: for neither collec-
tion do we have any contemporary letters or documents dating
composition or transmission, and both collections were printed
apparently without the intervention of the authors or instruc-
tions from them-Donne's sonnets were published posthu-
mously in 1633 and 1635, and Shakespeare, though alive in 1609,
has left no trace of his connection, however slight, with the print-
ing of his sonnets.
Both authors have withdrawn, or been withdrawn by the acci-
dents of time, as organizers of their sonnets. These two collec-
tions are sequences by virtue of the efforts of editors and readers
only, using the common authorship to infer a persona as the
thread on which to string the sonnets sequentially. If the sonnets
were mediocre and miscellaneous, then we should not need to
take the matter further: but not only are there individual sonnets
from both men that must rank among the world's greatest, but
the intensity of the collection when read as a whole suggests
sequentiality so strongly as to have kept editors and critics busy
for centuries. Shakespeare's sonnets, in particular, are one of the
great mysteries of literature because they seem to be so specific
and circumstantial and yet offer no connections at all with his-
tory other than their publication in 1609.
John Donne: Holy Sonnets
Donne' s "La Corona," discussed in chapter 2, is established as a
sequence by the linking of its lines. The Holy Sonnets are much
harder to handle, and a brief account of the textual problems is
needed here.
In a modern edition of Donne' s poems, the reader will usually
find 19 Holy Sonnets, often with a prefatory sonnet, "To E. of D. with
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THE LYRIC SEQUENCE
six holy Sonnets."
14
The order in which they occur is the decision of
the editor. The prefatory sonnet, usually thought to be addressed to
the Earl of Dorset, Richard Sackville (1590-1624), refers to sending
six sonnets out of seven written but does not make it clear which
seven sonnets Donne then h a d ~ i t is first printed in 1633 on its
own, many pages after the sonnets, showing that the editor had no
manuscript evidence either. (There are indeed seven sonnets in "La
Corona," but their close linking and circularity make it unlikely that
Donne would have sent only six of those.)
The sonnets are preserved in various manuscripts made in
Donne' s lifetime, none being in his handwriting, and also in the
two printed texts of 1633 and 1635.
15
The manuscripts suggest
that the 19 sonnets circulated in Donne's lifetime in two sets.
These two sets, as potential sequences, can be tabulated more
readily if we first list all19 as they appear in Grierson's edition:
I. Thou hast made me
2. As due by many titles
3. 0 might those sighes and tea res
4. Oh my blacke Soule!
5. I am a little world
6. This is my playes last scene
7. At the round earths imagin' d corners
8. If faithfull soules alike be glorified
9. If poysonous mineralls
10. Death be not proud
11. Spit in my face you Jewes
12. Why are we by all creatures waited on?
13. What if this present were the worlds last night?
14. Batter my heart, three person' d God
15. Wilt thou love God, as he thee!
16. Father, part of his double interest
17. Since she whom I lov' d hath pay' d her last debt
18. Show me deare Christ, thy spouse
19. Oh, to vex me, contraryes meet in one
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THE SONNET SEQUENCE
One group of manuscripts supplies a 12-sonnet set with the title
Holy Sonnets, which the 1633 edition printed: sonnets 2, 4, 6, 7, 9,
10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16. A second group includes sonnets 1, 3,
5, and 8 and produces a different 12-sonnet set: 1, 2, 3, 16, 4, 6, 5,
7, 9, 8, 10, and 15, to which the title "Divine Meditations" was
attached. Sonnets 17, 18, and 19 appear in only one manuscript,
the Westmoreland manuscript, which has the complete set of 19:
the second group's 12, then 11, 12, 13, and 14, and finally 17, 18,
and 19. The editor of the second edition of 1635 had extra manu-
scripts available and by inserting his extra sonnets produced the
16-sonnet set that gave the order followed by Grierson, listed ear-
lier. The reader should note that this "sequence," probably the
most readily available in modern times, is wholly editorial, does
not reproduce the order of either of the two manuscript groups,
and is thus least likely of all to show Donne' s intentions.
The last three sonnets of the 19 occur in only one manuscript
probably because they are later in date: sonnet 17 refers to the
death of Donne's wife in 1617, 18 has been dated plausibly to
1620, and 19, appearing with them, may also be late. They do not
seem connected in any other way and do not form a suite.
Faced with this self-assembly kit of sonnets, where any editor
or critic is free to argue for his or her own sequencing, or for
none,
16
the reader may well wonder why Donne's Holy Sonnets
should intrude into this study at all. The pressure to make a
sequence of them, or of the majority of them, comes from two
observable facts, one formal and one generic. First, Donne used
the sonnet form for only two purposes: short verse letters to
friends, as Milton did, and devotional meditative poetry. As is
well known, his secular collection of "Songs and Sonnets" con-
tains no sonnets. He seems to have associated the sonnet with
devotional verse. Second, his own corona sequence, though litur-
gical and constructive rather than meditative and analytic, shows
his familiarity with the sonnet sequence as an utterance in the
genre of the spiritual exercise, in which each sonnet is used to
focus the mind on a moment, a sensation, or a thing in a review
or progress, as in Anne Locke's Meditation of a Penitent Sinner ( dis-
cussed in chapter 2).
Had Donne wished to produce a disciplined meditative
sequence after the Ignatian or Calvinist models, with which he
was well acquainted, he would have done so, subduing each son-
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THE LYRIC SEQUENCE
net, as in "La Corona," to a rational plan; what we have here is a
set of sonnets almost all of which are exclamatory-petitioning or
questioning or appealing in a state of excitement. Though the
content is religious, this is still the Petrarchan model of sonnet
writing, in which each sonnet holds or expresses an intensely felt
moment of unease or some strong emotion and attempts as far as
can be done in 14lines both to dramatize and control it. Donne
certainly would have known the most popular sonnet sequence
of his own youth, Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella (1591),
which-in the universe of Cupid rather than of Christ-presents
the desiring self in exactly that way. Lacking a metapoetic pres-
ence (as Donne's sonnets do) to give an assurance of overall con-
trol, each sonnet's particular effort at control must finish with its
couplet, and the reader (and speaker) then moves to a new crisis
and a new effort in the next sonnet.
From the textual evidence mentioned previously, we cannot
be sure that Donne intended this, but he certainly allowed his
sonnets to circulate in this looser way. Whatever the order in
which they are read, according to the first or second group of
manuscripts, the movement from one sonnet to the next, across a
gap of white paper, represents a movement of the mind from one
topic to the next, hunted by the terrors of the Four Last Things,
heaven, hell, death, and judgment. The formal meditation
(which these sonnets do not make) was designed to help the
mind of the sinner to cohere in the face of the unsequencing ter-
ror of final judgment; but as Donne writes these they are dis-
jointed, belonging together, but separated into unhappy pieces.
His sixth sonnet actually presents the speaker's existence in this
way:
This is my playes last scene, here heavens appoint
My pilgrimages last mile; and my race
Idly, yet quickly runne, hath this last pace,
My spans last inch, my minutes latest point,
And gluttonous death, will instantly unjoint
My body, and my soule, and I shall sleep a space,
But my' ever-waking part shall see that face,
Whose feare already shakes my every joynt. (6.1-6)
The syntax and lexis of this sonnet, especially in the first qua-
train, echo the disjointing effects of fear; and the movement from
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THE SONNET SEQUENCE
one sonnet to another can be read as a larger kind of dislocation
of the mind, jumping from one topic to another.
A few of the sonnets are more deliberate, showing a kind of
collectedness in the face of fear or uncertainty; and it is signifi-
cant that in both groupings of sonnets sonnet 2 is at the start-
first in the 1633 volume and second in the other group of 12. This
sonnet is a kind of inventory of existence and seems to be about
to define the speaker as a living soul, joined to his God; but as it
ends it disjoints, and the final tercet opens up a problem so vast
that the whole subsequent series of sonnets might be thought
generated from it:
As due by many titles I resigne
My selfe to thee, 0 God, first I was made
By thee, and for thee, and when I was decay' d
Thy blood bought that, the which before was thine,
I am thy sonne, made with thy selfe to shine,
Thy servant, whose paines thou hast still repaid,
Thy sheepe, thine Image, and till I betray' d
My selfe, a temple of thy Spirit divine;
Why doth the devill then usurpe on mee?
Why doth he steale nay ravish that's thy right? [that's: what is]
Except thou rise and for thine owne worke fight,
Oh I shall soone despaire, when I doe see
That thou lov'st mankind well, yet wilt' not chuse me.
And Satan hates mee, yet is loth to lose mee. (1)
Donne had his age's appetite for puns and quibbles in full mea-
sure, and the legal metaphor of "titles" certainly suggests that to
resign oneself to God is to re-sign oneself: as a created soul, as a
son, as a purchase, as an image, and as many others. The enunci-
ation of the many titles in the sonnet is a new signature/signi-
fier/significance, or would be if the antithesis in the final couplet
did not disrupt the "signing'' process. The connection Harrison
makes between the wholeness of existence and the integrity of
writing/speech-something Petrarch also observed in his sonnet
sequence-was familiar to Donne and his age in the notion of the
two covenants that God and Christ had signed and signaled for
humanity, the covenants of law and of grace. This is the subject
of one of the other more deliberate sonnets, the sixteenth, which
stands last in the 1633 set of 12:
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THE LYRIC SEQUENCE
Father, part of his double interest
Unto thy kingdome, thy Sonne gives to mee,
His joynture in the knottie Trinitie,
Hee keeps, and gives to me his deaths conquest.
This Lambe, whose death, with life the world hath blest,
Hath made two Wills, which with the Legacie
Of his and thy kingdome, doe thy Sonnes invest,
Yet such are these laws, that men argue yet
Whether a man those statutes can fulfill;
None doth, but thy all healing grace and Spirit,
Revive againe what law and letter kill,
Thy !awes abridgement, and thy last command
Is all but love; Oh let this last Will stand! (12)
This very technical sonnet involves the customary distinction
between the covenant of law, written in the Old Testament, and
the covenant of grace, proclaimed in the New Testament: that
man is condemned under the law but of God's free will ran-
somed by grace by the actions of Christ as recorded in the New
Testament, one of which was to command his disciples, as the
final commandment, to love one another (John 13:34). This son-
net, at the end of the group, has a definite effect of closure and of
sequencing: it returns to the idea of man existing through legal
title and, instead of the multiple signatures of sonnet 1, offers to
the disjointed soul a "joynture," that is, a legally guaranteed
shared interest in an estate, figured repeatedly in the New
Testament as, for example, in the mansions that Christ said he
was preparing for his disciples. Man can claim this not by statute
but by testament (God's "will," as shown in the New Testament).
If we knew certainly that sonnets 1 and 12 had been placed by
Donne himself where they are in the 1633 volume,17 then these
12 sonnets would be unassailable critically as a sequence: the last
sonnet would be the speaker's claim to his inheritance. What
makes one inclined to leave this set as the statement of an exis-
tential problem is the fact that this last sonnet ends not with a
claim but a plea: the matter is still uncertain as the speaker ends.
A lyric sequence that directly confronts existential problems-
"What am I and by virtue of what does this I I! exist?" -encoun-
ters a curious paradox: by another of these puns that link writing
with existence, to be an author is to have authority over one's
text, and by that to exhibit (usually by publication) a definite
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THE SONNET SEQUENCE
ordering presence, the very thing, of course, that these sonnets
are questioning and at moments denying. It is tempting to think
that Donne left the Holy Sonnets in their present indeterminate
form because he recognized this point and denied himself the
accomplishment of a formal sequence because its completed
form would be, as it is in "La Corona," a sign of achieved identity,
like the signature on a will, and thus would contradict the claim
that "none cloth" fulfill the requirements of the law. Religious
scruple prompts the carpet weavers of the East to weave an error
into the end of their carpets, lest a perfect human work seem
insolence to God: a like scruple may have inhibited Donne from
formally perfecting his holiness in these sonnets.
William Shakespeare: The Sonnets
Shakespeare's Sonnets were published in 1609 by a publisher
named Thomas Thorpe in a small quarto volume entitled
"SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS. Never before Imprinted" and
known to scholars as Q.l
8
They were identified as Shakespeare's
on the title page, and no one in Shakespeare's own day (he him-
self lived until1616) or later has reputably challenged this (though
individual sonnets may be suspect). There are 154 sonnets and a
long poem called ''A Lover's Complaint." But, although there are a
number of metapoetic references in the sonnets, some of which
suggest the existence of a collection of poems (e.g., sonnets 78,
102, 103, and 105), nowhere is it clear that the poems we are read-
ing are the collection referred to. Further, there is no evidence to
show or suggest that Shakespeare oversaw or was even con-
nected with the printing and publishing of his sonnets-a thing
quite possible in Jacobean times, when copyright laws did not
exist-and there is textual evidence to suggest positively that he
did not supervise the printing (e.g., patent misprints [126]) that
the author would have picked up had he been there.
The problem gets more acute: we know that Shakespeare was
writing and circulating sonnets in manuscript before 1600, a
decade or so before the Sonnets were published by Thorpe, and
two of them, 138 and 144, had appeared in print in an anthology
of 1599; but almost incredibly, nowhere in the entire collection is
there a single unambiguously clear historical or biographical ref-
erence that would enable any sonnet, let alone the whole collec-
112
THE LYRIC SEQUENCE
tion, to be dated or even assigned to the historical Shakespeare
(compare Petrarch, whose worksheets we have, or Tony
Harrison, whose name is in his sequence several times). There
are a good many puns on "will," but none on "shake-spear." If
Shakespeare did, like Donne, allow manuscript copies to circu-
late, we do not have any of them, as we have for Donne' s Holy
Sonnets. Manuscript copies of particular sonnets exist, but none
can be shown to have any authority.
In sum, then, there is no confirmation in the text or in history
(for all the efforts of critics and biographers) that the 154 sonnets
we have were ever intended by the author to be a collection, or,
supposing that they were, that they were intended to be in the
order in which we now have them, or even that they are all by
Shakespeare. On the side of cohesion and sequentiality, it can be
said that we seem to have two linked sequences rather than one:
sonnets 1 through 126 appear to be addressed to, or concerned
with, a handsome young man, and sonnets 127 through 154 sim-
ilarly concern a dark-haired lady. But since many of the sonnets,
particularly in the first section, have no markers of gender for the
addressee, their appearance in the given section may be Thorpe' s
work rather than their author's. There are many paired son-
nets,
19
and some sonnets in threes, and the collection opens with
a suite of 17 sonnets all urging the young man to beget a child (15
does not by itself, but it is almost certainly paired with 16), so
coherent in tone and imagery that it is hard to believe they were
not assembled by their author.
Further, there is a suppressed narrative in which it appears
that the young man of the first section and the woman of the sec-
ond formed a sexual liaison that the speaker regarded as a
betrayal. There are four "triangle" sonnets, 42, 133, 134, and 144,
which allude to this triad, and if 42 was meant by Shakespeare to
be where it is, then that would establish a link between the 1
through 126 set and the 127 through 154 set.
If only .... If only the sequence ended with a metapoetic son-
net, looking back on the themes of the preceding 154, we could
talk with some confidence about Shakespeare's art in the con-
struction of sequences. As it is, the sequence ends with two rather
silly and mannered sonnets (153-54) that belong together but
regrettably do not belong to anything that precedes them, and
152 is not in any way an "overview" sonnet.
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THE SONNET SEQUENCE
That Shakespeare, as speaker of the sonnets, was haunted by
the instability of the self in time and in social reality-like
Petrarch and Harrison-is clear from many of the sonnets; but it
is not clear, and in the present state of our knowledge is not likely
to be clear, that the collectivity of the sonnets is any attempt to
order the experience of that instability. Themes recur, paradoxes
and problems are presented acutely and movingly, but sequen-
tiality we do not have. Or, rather, we do not know we have. It is
not difficult to find sequences within the Sonnets: 1 through 17
form a suite long enough to count as a sequence, and though
their order is not certainly Shakespeare's, it is inconceivable that
they were not intended to be read together. Similarly sonnets 78
through 86 form a suite concerned with the so-called Rival Poet,
but neither 78 nor 86 looks like the beginning or end of a free-
standing sequence, and there are other sonnets concerned with
rival poetry outside that group-for example, sonnet 102.
There is no reason why Shakespeare might not have allowed
publication of all the sonnets he was prepared to see circulated in
1609, simply as a miscellany, within which there would naturally
occur suites that had been written on particular topics or occa-
sions during his life. One fact about the Sonnets makes for this
hypothesis, and one makes against it. For it is the failure of the
Sonnets to end in any way suggestive of sequence: as noted, the
two final sonnets, 153 and 154, are a pair that have no connection
with the rest of the set and certainly have no effect of closure or
finality. Against it is "sonnet" 126, a 12-line poem in couplets,
unique in the series, which sums up a great deal of what has been
said in the preceding 125 and addresses the "lovely boy" quite
clearly. The printer set it with a pair of empty brackets below the
last two lines, showing that he thought a final couplet was miss-
ing and that he could not check the matter with the author.
But the poem is complete, plainly different from everything
else in the series, and situated exactly where the sonnets change
from talking about a man (or "boy") to talking about a woman.
This might happen by chance, but it is hard to resist the conclu-
sion that Shakespeare put it there as a closure of the first part of
the series, thus signaling sonnets 1 through 125 plus 126 as a
sequence. What follows might then be simply what was left over,
a miscellany of other sonnets. However, when we register that
the tone of the second part, bitter and angry and cynical, con-
114
THE LYRIC SEQUENCE
trasts strongly with that of the first, we are bound to think of the
Petrarchan template of sonnets in vita followed by sonnets in
morte, or sonnets of love followed by sonnets of penitence, and
wonder whether Shakespeare intended "sonnet" 126 to mark the
transition from the male lover who gives life to the female lover
who brings death.
Let us now assume Shakespeare's authorship, if not his
ing, of the Sonnets, and say that the common experience of his
readership has been that what he writes is intensely and
pellingly problematic.
20
He is not directly engaged, as Donne
was, in confronting his spiritual destiny and his existence as an
immortal soul in a perishable body, and in the course of
ing his lovers he writes many elegiac sonnets and sonnets of
praise of a conventional, though exquisitely finished, kind. But
what raises the question of sequentiality is that these sonnets, in
both parts, appear to be keyed to a suppressed narrative, a chain
of events both circumstantial and psychological that are known
to the speaker and his addressee and that are being alluded to
but not directly expressed.
Dante in his Vita Nuova wrote in this way but then obligingly
surrounded the allusive sonnets with a prose narrative supply-
ing the circumstances; Sidney in Astrophel and Stella likewise
assumes a narrative background, but we happen to know it from
history, and he refers to it often enough within his sonnets to
make it serve to connect them. The same is true of John
Berryman' s Sonnets to Chris. But Shakespeare, quite remarkably,
has contrived to give all the appearances of circumstantiality
without once providing a clue that would enable a single event
or person to be identified. It is the problem of referencing that
Lewis Carroll parodies in the trial scene of Alice in Wonderland:
They told me you had been to her,
And mentioned me to him:
She gave me a good character,
But said I could not swim.
Without losing sight of the possibility that the playwright who
imagined the sufferings of Hamlet and Othello could well have
imagined the narrative of the sonnets, we can reasonably
assume, with most modern critics, that the majority of the son-
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THE SONNET SEQUENCE
nets as we have them were written by Shakespeare, probably in
the 1590s, out of his own feelings toward a young man and a lady
with whom he was involved emotionally. The young man was
rich, powerful, and unmarried and in a position to give
Shakespeare patronage: at some stage Shakespeare felt himself
being supplanted in the young man's affections or esteem by the
figure known to critics as the Rival Poet. The woman, commonly
called the Dark Lady, since her hair was black, was married to
someone else but had an affair with the young man, as well as
with Shakespeare. The young man's youth and beauty made
Shakespeare feel old (he was in his mid-thirties in the late 1590s).
Finally, Shakespeare's affection for him was not physically homo-
sexual, as sonnet 20 makes clear.
There is one devotional sonnet (146) that seems not to belong
to this scenario at all, and a number of generalized, reflective son-
nets (e.g., 30, 64, 116, and 129) that, although congruent with it,
need not have been part of it; many of the sonnets have no
marker of gender and might be addressed to a lover of either sex,
or simply to a close friend. On the side of continuity, many of the
sonnets are in pairs, and there is even one triplet, sonnets 91
through 93, which can be read as a single poem; all this strength-
ens our sense of an ongoing narrative on which we are reading
an allusive commentary-or, since so many of the sonnets actu-
ally are addressed to the lover, overhearing a commentary.
In the first part, sonnets 1 through 126, the speaker is for the
most part in the stance we have called abjection, as is Donne in
his Holy Sonnets: wholly dependent on the young man for favor,
advancement, and power in a manner typical of Renaissance
social politics. This does not prevent him from offering advice,
but it is always advice with humility:
Lord of my love, to whome in vassalage
Thy merrit hath my dutie strongly knit;
To thee I send this written ambassage
To witnesse duty, not to shew my wit.
Duty so great, which wit so poore as mine
May make seeme bare, in wanting words to shew it;
But that I hope some good conceipt of thine
In thy soules thought (all naked) will bestow it:
Till whatsoever star that guides my moving,
Points on me gratiously with faire aspect,
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THE LYRIC SEQUENCE
And puts apparrell on my tottered loving,
To shew me worthy of thy sweet respect, [Q: their sweet]
Then may I dare to boast how I doe love thee,
Til then, not show my head where thou maist prove me.
[maist prove: might test] (26)
As words are the dress of thought, which cannot be known
until spoken or written, so the effect of words is to win favor,
which will (quite literally) enable the petitioner to appear well
dressed and so establish himself in society: till then, he must be a
social reject, or outcast, like a beggar. This analogy links
speech/writing to existence: to exist is to be properly signified,
and to fail to speak well, or to not have one's speech heard, is to
vanish-"not show my head where thou maist prove me."
Sonnets (or any other kind of petitionary writing) are thus
ambassadors (1.3), on whose favorable reception the existence of
the outsider depends.
This idea, which will apply also to prayers addressed to God, is
a translation into the realm of social politics of the Petrarchan con-
ceit that the lady constitutes the lover by her favor: without it he is
dead, or abandoned, or turned to stone. Anxiety, therefore, over
the possibility of failure, leads to self-doubt and existential angst,
one of the ingredients of which, for a practicing poet, is doubt
over the capacity of language itself to signify properly. This has
two opposite results. First, it produces a number of sonnets in
which the power of language to immortalize is defiantly asserted:
"His beauty shall in these black lines be seen, I And they shall live,
and he in them still green" (63.13-14)-the "shall" in that last line
is comparable to Donne' s "Oh let that last Will stand!" But second,
it produces a number of sonnets in which all signifiers are seen as
weak and uncertain, like existence itself. A sonnet sequence, spe-
cial among literary genres, does not have to reconcile opposed
positions: it can simply leave them side by side.
But wherefore do not you a mightier waie
Make warre uppon this b\oudie tirant time?
And fortifie your selfe in your decay
With meanes more blessed than my barren rime?
Now stand you on the top of happie houres,
And many maiden gardens yet unset,
With vertuous wish would beare your living flowers,
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THE SONNET SEQUENCE
Much liker than your painted counterfeit:
So should the lines of life that life repaire
Which this (Times pensel or my pupill pen)
Neither in inward worth nor outward faire
Can make you live your selfe in eies of men,
To give away your selfe, keeps your selfe still,
And you must live drawne by your owne sweet skill. (16)
Sonnet 16, a particularly difficult and riddling sonnet even
when read as the continuation and completion of 15, shows the
intimate connection between existence and language in
Shakespeare: when this existential nervousness appears, it has an
ambiguating effect on language, making the speaker play with
signifiers as a sign of his own uncertainty. The octave continues
the plea made throughout suite 1 through 17 that the young man
should marry and beget a son to perpetuate his qualities. The
comparison of actual procreation with poetic creation (16.4) now
makes the written sign weaker ("barren," "painted counterfeit")
than the human sign ("living flowers"). The sestet develops the
implications of this idea, as it should, but something then hap-
pens that is characteristic of Shakespeare, indeed one of the dom-
inant mannerisms of the Sonnets: on all the levels of style, phono-
logical, lexical, syntactic, and referential, a kind of ferocious
rhetorical play develops, where items are hurled about in the
lines, with the result, as Stephen Booth points out in his edition,
that the reader at one and the same time understands quite well
what has been said but does not in the least understand how it
has been said.
21
The octave separates poetry from procreation, to the latter's
advantage: the sestet appears to develop this idea but does so by
collapsing the two again. "The lines of life" is probably a refer-
ence to a "line of children" arranged as they often were in
Renaissance portraits like flowers in a flower bed, developing the
conceit of 1.7; but "lines" can only be said to "repair" life if there is
a very strong sense of drawing lines--immediately confirmed by
1.10, which foregrounds the idea of writing again. Now it is plau-
sible to imagine children as redrawn versions of their father; but
the moment one does this, one realizes that children are redrawn
by removing lines, not adding them-the faces of children pre-
cisely do not have the lines of the adult. And Shakespeare himself
118
THE LYRIC SEQUENCE
elsewhere uses "lines" in this sense to make the dark lines of
poetry superior to the lines of age.
At this point, the reader will also lose the thread of the syntax:
it is almost impossible to establish the grammar of "which this ...
can make you live yourself." The meaning ought to be damaged
by this apparent error, but the reader will not be in any doubt
that lines 9 through 12 mean roughly what lines 13 and 14 say.
However, the final complication is the place where lexis and
ontology meet: "To give away your selfe, keeps your selfe still."
Rhetorically, this line is a riddle to be solved like most riddles by
understanding that words do not mean what they seem to mean.
Here "give" is made to mean the same as "keep," its normal
antonym, by the maneuver of understanding that "your selfe"
can have two different meanings: first, "your seed," which bio-
logically carries your "self," and then second, "your present noble
qualities." The effect of that is to make "you must live" in 1.14
carry a double significance, which is the significance of doubled
life, as the parent gives life to the child, life that is at once the
child's own and the parent's relived ("repaired," which now
acquires a double meaning in 1.9).
Any riddle involves the awareness that words have double
meanings; but when the riddle itself is concerned with the mean-
ing of life, as it is here, then lexis and ontology meet, and the
instability of life is instantiated in the instability of words.
(Shakespeare is also prepared to say that the permanence of life
can only be found in the permanence of words.)
My intention here is not to explain sonnet 16, on which there
is already a great deal of critical comment, but to draw attention
to a recurrent feature of the Sonnets: in the patron/client relation-
ship that is also a relationship of love and favor, Shakespeare
(more exactly, his speaker) frequently doubts either his own
capacity to deserve love and give it, or his lover's reliability, and
sometimes both at once. All this happens under the awareness of
the impermanence of all things. When this insecurity of his self-
hood becomes acute, so too becomes the instability of the lan-
guage in which the insecurity is expressed-a contrived instabil-
ity, certainly, inasmuch as any sonnet is a rhetorical creation.
When existence is problematical, language is riddling, and the
reader must apprehend that problematic through the effort of
understanding unstable meanings:
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THE SONNET SEQUENCE
Sinne of selfe-love possesseth al mine eie,
And all my soule, and al my every part;
And for this sinne there is no remedie,
It is so grounded inward in my heart.
Me thinkes no face so gratious is as mine,
No shape so true, no truth of such account,
And for my selfe mine owne worth do define,
As I all other in all worths surmount.
But when my glasse shewes me myselfe indeed
Beated and chopt with tand antiquitie [tand: tanned)
Mine owne selfe love quite contrary I read
Selfe, so selfe loving were iniquity.
Tis thee (my selfe) that for my selfe I praise,
Painting my age with beauty of thy daies. [Q has daies ]
22
From the very first line, where "al mine eie" is also readable as "all
mine I/' this sonnet is replete with selves of every kind (assisted by
the fact that Shakespeare's printers did not distinguish, as we do,
between "myself" and "my self"): the self reflected in the eye, the
self reflected as the Ill the self in the heart, the self imaged in the
mind, the self who watches the other selves, the self seen in the
mirror, the /I/ who is constructing these selves, the beloved, who
in the last couplet is parenthetically called "my selfe/' and finally
the painted self, whose relation to the self that is "thee" and to the
self that is 'T' is difficult to establish.
This existential riddle is inextricable from-indeed it has to
arise from-the lexical riddle created by the multiplying of the
word "self" and its cognates. The iteration and the paradoxes
(how can a mirror show the truest self?) intensify through the
sonnet, until in the thirteenth line the reader might well suspect
that this speaker knows neither who he is nor by what, or whom,
he is "indeed" and in word possessed. Shakespeare wrote many
clear and melodious sonnets, usually elegiac in tone, which have
nothing, or very little, of this existential complexity, but the note
of riddling and studied obliquity is sounded constantly through-
out the Sonnets; no contemporary sonneteer has it, other than
momentarily, and because it also occurs in the plays, particularly
in the major tragedies and later plays, we can assume that it was
congenial to Shakespeare's mind to think in this way.
This mode of apprehension, intimately linking poesis to exis-
tence, can hardly be called philosophical but, exhibited as it is
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THE LYRIC SEQUENCE
throughout a collection of 154 sonnets, it amounts to something
more than a quirk. Each sonnet is used as a puzzle, a space in
which to solve a problem very quickly, and it is that sense of
resistance to an obstacle that links Shakespeare with Donne. The
kinds of resistance offered are different: Donne characteristically
proposes a straightforward argument that becomes tense and
desperate through the figure of hyperbaton, distortion of normal
syntax:
If poysonous minerals, and if that tree,
Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us,
If lecherous goats, if serpents envious
Cannot be damned, alas, why should I be?
Why should intent or reason, born in me,
Makes sins, else equal, in me more heinous? (Holy Sonnets, 9.1-6)
Here each word is plain in its meaning, and the sense that the
speaker is fighting for his existence comes from the compression
of the syntax and the phonological difficulties created by awk-
ward consonantal clusters. Shakespeare works differently:
Tis better to be vile then vile esteemed,
When not to be, receives reproach of being,
And the just pleasure lost, which is so deemed,
Not by our feeling, but by others seeing.
For why should others false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood? (121.1-6)
Here neither the syntax nor the phonology offers any difficulty:
what renders this nearly impenetrable is the obliquity of the lexis.
Any word by itself has a readily available sense-"reproach," "of,"
"being''-but their conjunctions-" reproach of being" -place
each word obliquely to its neighbor, so that the sense seems
obscured.
If in reading Donne one has the sense of a mind speaking to its
God, so urgently that mortal ears cannot keep up, in reading
Shakespeare the sense is of a mind communing with itself,
intensely self-absorbed, and constantly alluding to what it and
only it and its lover already know. (A good dramatic soliloquy is
written to seem like this, though it must in practice be compre-
hensible to the audience.) Donne's existential problems are theo-
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THE SONNET SEQUENCE
logical in origin: he is "in" a scheme of grace and salvation or
damnation, and must by asking questions find where and what
he is.
Shakespeare's existential problems are apparently social in ori-
gin: to be is to be recognized by others, and the recognition
depends on speech, the speech that will establish that one loves
or is loved. There is something echoic about this, like a bat send-
ing out sound signals to position itself, and indeed iteration,
making a sound rebound so that it defines itself against itself is as
we have seen, a mannerism of Shakespeare. "No, I am that I am,"
he declares later in sonnet 121, and this ironic use of the ultimate
in existential pronouncements-Dnly God can so define himself,
and only Iago tries to imitate him-points to the bafflement and
anguish inherent for mortals in such narcissistic self-definition,
where each word looks at its reflection, falls into itself, and is
drowned.
In both collections-! am reluctant to call them sequences-
there is thus a suppressed narrative (for Donne, a well-known
drama of judgment and salvation or damnation, for Shakespeare
a private story of social and erotic relationships) and a quest for
meaning; for both poets the speech must be effective, for Donne
as prayer and argument or plea, for Shakespeare as self-assertion
and homage to acquire recognition. Punningly one might say
that for Shakespeare cognition and recognition are inseparable. If
we cannot show that either poet intended this, we can at least
show by critical reading that the narratives and the quests are
there, and that if we do not have sequence in the formal sense,
we have at least continuity and repetition from two poets whose
speakers see life as a drama in which one must continue to peti-
tion in order to exist at all.
122
Chapter 6
THE PHILOSOPHICAL SEQUENCE:
CHRISTINA RoSSETTI, "THE THREAD
OF LIFE," AND RAINER MARIA RILKE,
SONNETS TO 0RPHEUS
I
n one way Shakespeare's sonnets, sequential or not, were pow-
erfully influential on later sequence writers: when the sonnet
sequence returned to favor in the nineteenth century in Europe
and America, the meditative or, as one may say, the philosophical
element in the Sonnets became thematically and stylistically a
kind of cultural icon, as the meditative speeches from the plays
already were. When F. T. Palgrave produced his Golden Treasury (a
title itself with iconic overtones) in 1861, he included 20
Shakespearean sonnets, and for 15 of them supplied titles, most
of which, without in the least doing violence to the poem, gloss it
as the meditation of a wise (57), "Time and
Love" (65), "The World's Way" (66), "The Life without Passion"
(94), and so forth.
Nineteenth-century literary theory emphasized the uplifting
and idealizing quality of literature, as in Matthew Arnold's
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THE SONNET SEQUENCE
Culture and Anarchy (1853), and its cultural practice gave almost
hieratic status to literary figures (usually but not always male),
which was often accompanied by an archaizing of their roles and
of their imagery (as in the photographs of Julia Margaret
Cameron). This encouraged great literary figures to speak, as it
were, from a height, and Wordsworth in particular wrote sonnet
sequences in the last third of his life in which he delivered his
thoughts on subjects both eternal and contemporary in astound-
ingly oracular vein. A kind of combined ShakespeareaniMiltonic
I Wordsworthian style became the common property of the age,
and lesser men and women turned out sonnets and sonnet
sequences in the form of meditations on all sorts of nominally
uplifting subjects.
It is easy to make fun of an age's lesser poetry: my purpose is
to point out that to this desire, culturally prominent from the
1830s to the 1930s, the sonnet sequence offered a suitable form-a
loosely connected grouping of briefly uttered thoughts, each one
aspiring to reach the marmoreal clarity of Shakespeare, but not
demanding any continuous or sustained reflectiveness. In this
sense of "philosophizing," the lyric sonnet sequence shades into
the philosophical, and nineteenth-century anthologies, such as
David Main's Treasury of English Sonnets (1880), show a decided
preference for sonnets with a general reflective bent-of which
there are plenty, given the inherent tendency of the sonnet to
comment in its sestet on what is observed in its octave. In this
sense any sonnet in which the I 1/ reflects on his or her experi-
ence with some generalized conclusion could be said to be
"philosophical," such as Milton's sonnet "On his Blindness," the
last line of which has become a proverb: "They also serve who
only stand and wait."
When one tries to pass beyond the single sonnet into some
kind of connected argument, difficulties arise that have bedev-
iled all philosophical poetry, not just that which might be written
in sonnets. Aristotle long ago pointed out in The Poetics that if a
philosopher wrote in verse, the result would not be poetry but
philosophy in verse, because poetry is a kind of imitation (mime-
sis) not a kind of analysis.l Poetry is not a medium in which phi-
losophy may work, but a mode of apprehension categorically dif-
ferent from the philosophical mode. For a poem to be called
"philosophical," the distinctively poetic mode of envisioning the
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THE PHILOSOPHICAL SEQUENCE
world has to be used alongside some kind of abstract explanation
of these visions, and the explanation has to be the primary aim of
the poem. So Wordsworth' s Ode: Intimations of Immortality
(1802-1807) would normally be considered a philosophical
poem, as would T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets; Milton's Paradise Lost,
on the other hand, though it contains a good deal of Christian
philosophical thinking, would not be seen as philosophical,
because its primary aims are epic and narrative. The necessity of
developing some kind of argument as one advances toward the
truths of which the poetic images are the mimesis means that
considerable length is required, perhaps as long as an epic
(Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, 1st B.C.E.). While a sonnet sequence
could give this, it is hard to see it offering development without
sacrificing the sonnetness of each sonnet; if it retained that, the
sequence would fragment into a series of thoughts.
One interesting attempt, which will serve to show in sequence
form the problems and procedures we are discussing, is Christina
Rossetti's "The Thread of Life," a three-sonnet sequence written
before 1882:
The irresponsive silence of the land,
The irresponsive sounding of the sea,
Speak both one message of one sense to me:-
l\loof, aloof, we stand aloof; so stand
Thou too aloof, bound with the flawless band
Of inner solitude; we bind not thee;
But who from thy self-chain shall set thee free?
What heart shall touch thy heart? what hand thy hand?'-
And I am sometimes proud and sometimes meek,
And sometimes I remember days of old,
When fellowship seemed not so far to seek,
And all the world and I seemed much less cold,
And at the rainbow's foot lay surely gold,
And hope felt strong and life itself not weak
Thus am I mine own prison. Everything
Around me free and sunny and at ease:
Or if in shadow, in a shade of trees
Which the sun kisses, where the gay birds sing,
And where all winds make various murmuring;
Where bees are found, with honey for the bees;
Where sounds are music, and where silences
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THE SONNET SEQUENCE
Are music of an unlike fashioning.
Then gaze I at the merrymaking crew
And smile a moment and a moment sigh,
Thinking, Why can I not rejoice with you?
But soon I put the foolish fancy by:
I am not what I have nor what I do;
But what I was I am, I am even I.
Therefore myself is that one only thing
I hold to use or waste, to keep or give;
My sole possession every day I live,
And still mine own despite Time's winnowing.
Ever mine own, while moons and seasons bring
From crudeness ripeness mellow and sanative;
Ever mine own, till Death shall ply his sieve;
And still mine own, when saints break grave and sing.
And this myself as king unto my King
I give, to Him Who gave Himself for me;
Who gives Himself to me, and bids me sing
A sweet new song of his redeemed set free;
He bids me sing, 0 Death, where is thy sting?
And sing, 0 grave, where is thy victory?
2
Philosophically, it is perhaps a pity that the existential inquiry
begun in the first sonnet is diverted at the end of the third into
conventional religious sentiment, however sincerely felt.
Nonetheless, this is a determined and poignant attempt by an
unmarried woman to find her selfhood as age advances (the echo
of Keats' s Ode to Autumn in the third sonnet may not have been
conscious), and the chain of the sonnets is used to assert an argu-
ment: "Thus am I I Therefore myself ... " which is carried forward
by using the turn from octave to sestet in each sonnet to advance
from one image cluster to the next. Each cluster expands on a
feeling that is part of the sense of self (or selves) that the existen-
tial argument addresses: aloofness (1.1-8); hope (1.9-14);
estrangement from harmony (11.1-8); perplexity (11.9-14); self-
possession (III.1-8); and religious exaltation (111.9-14). These six
moods are constitutive of "the thread of life."
This attempt is hardly weighty or general enough to be accept-
able as philosophy, but it is a genuine and well-crafted attempt to
use the sonnet sequence to ask an existential question. It is still a
lyric sequence, in that it fore grounds the feelings of an I 1/ who is
126
THE PHILOSOPHICAL SEQUENCE
simultaneously subject and object of her own discourse, but it
also presents itself to the reader as a single unit; it would be pos-
sible to read this as one poem in three stanzas before noticing
that each stanza is also a complete sonnet. As a three-sonnet suite
or a three-stanza poem, it is a way of gaining the extra length that
a complicated philosophical or metaphysical inquiry seems to
need, without losing the sequentiality of sonnets. Longfellow's
four-sonnet sequence, "The Two Rivers," though it has much less
to say and takes longer to say it, is of the same kind.
It is probably fair to say that the sonnet sequence, as a genre,
has never really coped with the problem of waxing philosophi-
cal. The Italian Renaissance, and after it the Renaissances of other
European countries, inherited from neoclassical rhetoric a strong
sense that length and dignity went together, and a poem by defi-
nition short, such as the sonnet, was regarded as a low or middle
form of verse, suitable for low or middling subjects. The writer of
the sonnet could not elevate his or her speech to epic or tragic or
philosophical subjects, since these required, according to the
rules of classical eloquence, rhetorical elaborations (such as epic
similes) that are simply too extended for 14 lines. The sonnet is
for Donne, in "The Canonisation," "a pretty room," not a vast
library; "a well-wrought urn," not one of those "half-acre tombs."
Spenser similarly, taking a break about 1592 from the writing of
The Faerie Queene to praise his wife in his Amoretti, sees his son-
nets in relation to his epic as his wife is in relation to his Queen:
Till then give leave to me in pleasant mew [then: i.e., till he restarts
his epic; mew: retreat]
To sport my muse, and sing my love's sweet praise:
The contemplation of whose heavenly hew
My spirit to an higher pitch will rayse.
But let her prayses yet be low and meane, [meane: of middle rank]
Fit for the handmayd of the Faery Queene. (Amoretti, lxxx 9-14)
To increase the sonnet sequence's capacity for greatness, Dante in
his Vita Nuova interspersed his sonnets with longer poems, using
the most noble long poem (below the level of epic), the canzone,
to extend his thinking: there are 31 poems in his sequence, in this
order: 10 sonnets, 1 canzone, 4 sonnets, 1 canzone, 4 sonnets, 1
canzone, 10 sonnets.
3
Petrarch, as most critics agree, adopted the
idea of a mixed sequence from Dante, and inserted 29 canzoni
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THE SONNET SEQUENCE
into his sequence of 366 poems. There are also nine sestinas, and
though a sestina must have only 36 or 39lines (72 or 75 for a dou-
ble sestina), whereas a canzone may be of much greater length,
there is thus roughly the same 1:10 proportion of long poems to
short in Petrarch' s sequence as in Dante's.
Despite Petrarch' s immense influence, the idea did not catch
on, and few later sequence writers mixed in other poems, let
alone long, dignified ones. In English literature, Sir Philip Sidney,
William Drummond, and one or two others inserted "songs" and
"madrigals" into their sequences, but these were not in any way
intended to be philosophical or expand the level of thought of
the sequences. When the sonnet sequence revived in the nine-
teenth century, the notion of decorum that kept the sonnet "low
and meane" had vanished; and though the ode (the successor to
the canzone) flourished as a vehicle for ceremonious or lofty
ideas, no one seems to have offered to mix odes with sonnets as
Dante had mixed canzoni with them.
Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus
However, the sonnets of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), to
whom we now turn, in a strange way keep company with a
group of philosophical long poems, and thus one of the most
extreme and free of sonnet sequences returns to the pattern of
Petrarch six centuries earlier. The long poems are known as the
Duino Elegies, after the castle in Italy where Rilke began to com-
pose them, and there are 10 of them, written between 1912 and
1922. They vary in length from 44lines to 112, but as long poems
are comparable to Petrarch' s canzoni. The Sonnets to Orpheus,
mentioned in chapter 1, number 55, in two parts, 26 and 29, and
were written (almost unbelievably) in 18 days, from 2 February to
20 February 1922. At exactly the same time, Rilke finished the
Duino Elegies: he had already written elegies 1 through 5, and
parts of 6, 9, and 10; he now completed these, added 7 and 8, and
wrote a new elegy 5.
4
Among those poets of whose creativity we
have a record, there is no comparable achievement in so short a
time.
A thumbnail sketch of this extraordinary man would make
him seem to be an incarnation of Bunthorne, the poet so savagely
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THE PHILOSOPHICAL SEQUENCE
satirized in Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience. Hugely famous in his
later life, wholly self-absorbed and incapable of lasting commit-
ment to anything except his own inner daimon, he moved rest-
lessly around Europe and its borders, constantly rescued from
catastrophes by rich, intelligent, and attractive women who gave
him apartments and castles, lavishly furnished, in which to write.
Duino was one of these, and the Sonnets to Orpheus were com-
posed, and the Duina Elegies finished, in Chateau Muzot, in
Switzerland, his last refuge. He was neither unkind nor unsocia-
ble, merely deeply and permanently restless and unfixed, except
when confronting in words the enormous imaginative energies
of his inner nature. W. H. Auden most acutely called him "the
Santa Claus of loneliness" and pays tribute to him in his own
Sonnets from China (1937) as one
Who for ten years of drought and silence waited
Until in Muzot all his powers spoke,
And everything was given once for all. (xix, 11.9-11)
This is not the place to attempt an explanation or critique of
Rilke' s sonnets; as elsewhere in this book, I am concerned with
them as a particular kind of sequence. But some outline of Rilke' s
ideas is essential to understanding how he uses the sonnet form
and the sequence genre to present them. Auden's phrase "all his
powers spoke" is apt, for Rilke frequently represented the com-
position of his poems-and especially these-as almost involun-
tary, as if he had been taken over by a higher power or spoken to
out of a whirlwind (the first sentence of the First Elegy arrived in
exactly that way, he said).
5
Allowing for the fact that this is a
myth of poesis embedded in Romantic aesthetics and critical the-
ory, there seems no reason to doubt that Rilke composed very
rapidly in a high state of excitement, imposed on, as he once said,
in "breathless obedience." Yet, while the Duino Elegies-actually
extensively reworked-do indeed show a kind of looseness of
form and content that suggests this spontaneous overflowing,
the sonnets are oddly strict in form, as if one part at least of
Rilke' s mind had determined to keep a tight grip on the enor-
mous pressure of their excitement.
In content, they are apparently miscellaneous and uneven
and, had they been discovered among Rilke' s papers after his
129
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
death, might not have been considered a sequence at all. Yet the
circumstances of their composition being known, there would
certainly have been a case for regarding them as a group; since
Rilke supplied the title, there is no doubt that he thought of them
as a set, composed in two parts, and as he said, "filled with the
same essence" and "of the same litter" as the Elegies.
6
The son-
nets interrupted his planned work on the Elegies and thus
appear as a kind of series of excited exclamations in the midst of
the more somber and argumentative long poems. For the reader
unfamiliar with the Elegies, it may be helpful to suggest a com-
parison with William Blake, who, though utterly different from
Rilke in almost all personal circumstances, was like him a mystic,
and one whose mysticism, expounded at length in the Prophetic
Books (prose poems [1789-1804] not unlike the Elegies), appears
in a highly condensed form in his Songs of Innocence and
Experience (1789, 1794). The shorter poems of both appear as a
song-discourse opposed to (as well as congruent with) the more
didactic and evangelical long prose poems.
There is no metapoetical sonnet to give an overview of the col-
lection: instead the title, Sonnets to Orpheus, supplies the mythical
thread. Rilke had been attracted to the figure of Orpheus before,
but when in the summer of 1921 he moved into Chateau Muzot,
the woman who was currently arranging his life for him,
Dorothee Klossowska, discovered a postcard of a Renaissance
drawing of Orpheus with his lyre among the animals, and put it
on the wall facing his desk. Around this image the Sonnets
cohered. Only five of the sonnets are addressed directly to the
"gottlicher" (demigod) himself-I.ii (possibly along with l.i),
I.xviii, I.xx, I.xxvi, and Il.xiii-and two to Wera Knoop, the
account of whose death touched off the sequence (I.xxv and
II.xxviii); the remainder are to a variety of people and things,
including a number to a generalized "us," and one even to a dog
(I.xvi). But the significance, or better, significances, of Orpheus as
Rilke perceived them are everywhere in the vocabulary and
themes of the sonnets, just as the significances of Apollo run
through Petrarch' s Rime.
Orpheus as demigod is the protopoet, the "Bard who present,
past, and future sees" as Blake says, and thus the god or master
(I.xviii, xx) of the speaker of the sonnets, himself a poet. Because
Orpheus was able, according to legend, to move stones and corn-
130
THE PHILOSOPHICAL SEQUENCE
pel trees and animals to come to him by his song, he is a force of
movement, the movement of being itself, what one might call the
Lord of the Dance. Since Wera Knoop, before her illness took
hold, was a beautiful dancer, there are references throughout the
sonnets to dancing and rapid movement as an affirmation of
oneness with the created universe, both temporal and eternal.
But since Orpheus is also a lyre player, he creates harmony,
and though he is the lord of movement he is also the lord of rest,
or at least of the peace of harmony (Ordnung). Poignantly, in his
legends, Orpheus was destroyed by screaming unreason, by the
Maenads: Rilke sees his essence surviving in all creation as it tries
to transcend its temporality through natural love. The sonnet
that ends the first part, written like so many of the Sonnets in
dactylic, dance rhythm, hymns this aspect of Orpheus:
Du aber, Gottlicher, du, bis zuletzt noch Ertoner,
da ihn der Schwarm der verschmahten Manaden befiel,
hast ihr Geschrei i.ibertont mit Ordnung, du Schoner,
a us den Zerstorenden stieg dein erbauendes Spiel.
Keine war da, class sie Haupt dir und Leier zerstor',
wie sie auch rangen und rasten; und alle die scharfen
Steine, die sie nach deinem Herzen warfen,
wurden zu Sanftem an dir und begabt mit Gehor.
Schliesslich zerschlugen sie dich, von der Rache gehetzt,
wahrend dein Klang noch in Low en und Felsen verweilte
und in den Baumen und Vogeln. Dort singst du noch jetzt.
0 du verlorener Gott! Du unendliche Spur!
Nur weil dich reisf'nd zuletzt die Feindschaft verteilte,
sind wir die Horenden jetzt und ein Mund der Natur. (I.xxvi)
(But you, divine one, you, till the end still singing out,
as the horde of rejected Maenads seized you,
overlaid their shrieks with your harmony, fair one,
from the destruction rose your creative song.
There was none that could break your head or your lyre,
however they pressed and twisted; and all the sharp
stones that they threw against your heart
were turned to gentleness there, and became your listeners.
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THE SONNET SEQUENCE
At last they destroyed you, inflamed with revenge;
lingering in lions and in rocks your sound stays,
and in trees and birds. There you now sing still.
0 you vanished God! You endless track!
Only because hatred finally tore and dispersed you,
are we now listeners today, and a mouth of Nature.)
Orpheus as a symbol of the triumph of art over death is tradi-
tional, as in Milton's Lycidas,7 but Rilke takes the symbol further:
violence and destruction (as in Wera Knoop's death) actually
enable us to hear the song of Orpheus, dispersed now through-
out all creation, because Orpheus himself, in his quest for
Eurydice, knew death, and is thus transcendent, immanent, and
mediating (the parallel with Christ will occur to today's reader,
but it is not one that Rilke used). We must, Rilke thinks, welcome
metamorphosis, the transformations of our nature, looking both
back to what we have been in our ancestors and forward to what
we may be in our descendants. Otherwise we are trapped-as
animals, less time bound than we, are not-by the mechanisms
of clocks and machines. To quote from Leishman's translation of
Rilke's own comment on his poems,
We, local and ephemeral as we are, are not for one moment con-
tented in the world of time nor confined within it; we keep on cross-
ing over and over to our predecessors, to our ancestry, and to those
who apparently come after us. In that greatest 'open' world all are,
one cannot say 'contemporary', for it is the very abolition of time that
makes them all be. Transitoriness is everywhere plunging into a pro-
found being, and therefore all the forms of the here-and-now are not
merely to be used in a time-limited way, but, so far as we can, instated
within those superior significances in which we share. But not in the
Christian sense (from which I more and more passionately with-
draw), but, in a purely terrestrial, deeply terrestrial, blissfully terres-
trial consciousness, to instate what is here seen and touched within
the wider, within the widest orbit-that is what is required. Not
within a Beyond, whose shadow darkens the earth, but within a
whole, the whole .... Therefore, not only must all that is here not be
vilified or degraded, but, just because of that very provisionality they
share with us, all these appearances and things should be, in the most
fervent sense, comprehended by us and transformed. Transformed?
Yes, for our task is to stamp this provisional, perishing earth into our-
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THE PHILOSOPHICAL SEQUENCE
selves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its being may rise
again, invisibly, in us. We are the bees of the Invisible.
8
In this quest for truth, Orpheus is the "unendliche Spur," the
endless track, his Orphic essence dispersed through all creation, to
be (to change the Rilkean metaphor) gathered by us like bees and
stored up to be returned to the" great golden hive of the Invisible."
The last attribute of Orpheus is what makes this mystic quest
possible for Rilke and for us, as it was for Blake and for
Wordsworth in their different ways. Orpheus as a poet could say
things into being: to name is to create. To name a rose is to trans-
form the rose into being (I.vi); to describe an anemone, or
celandine, is to enter into its movements (I.v). All poetry has this
power, the power of mimesis, which is not copying, but creation
and action. This telling, Rilke saw in the Sonnets as praise-
"Ri.i.hmen, das ists!" -and it is this concept that gives the Sonnets
their affirmative nature and constant dancing movement.
This philosophy (or part of one) has its instantiation in the
form of the sonnet sequence. I called its contents "miscellaneous"
earlier, but 1\ilke's bee metaphor suggests a different kind of
approach. The reader, following the "scent" of Orpheus in all
things, follows the speaker across the field of creation, where to
visit any object-a rose, a dead child, the stars, oranges, a foun-
tain-and name it aright is as Yeats splendidly said, to be
absorbed "into the artifice of eternity." Shakespeare thought his
own poetry capable of doing this, as did Petrarch (though he
rested within a Christian framework that Rilke rejected); Blake
and Wordsworth too looked through objects to a symbolic
wholeness, and saying so made it so. "Poetry redeems from
decay the visitations of the divinity in man" -Shelley's dictum is
a Rilkean starting point; but to move through the poetry is then
to enact the movement that the philosophy behind the poetry
desires. As Laura draws poetry out of Petrarch's speaker by flee-
ing ahead of him, as Daphne' s escape from Apollo is the birth of
poetry, so, Rilke says to the reader,
die verwandelte Daphne
will, seit sie lorbeern fiihlt, dass du dich wandelst in Wind. (II.xli.13 -14)
(the transformed Daphne
since she feels herself laurelled, wants you to change yourself into a wind.)
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THE SONNET SEQUENCE
Rilke' s sonnets, then, are individually specimens, or visits,
way stations or shrines where the speaker stops to praise; but col-
lectively and progressively they are a movement, part of the
larger faith, explored and explained in the Elegies, which sur-
rounds all this activity but is not constantly articulated. The dis-
continuities between sonnets are the gaps between the individu-
alities of things; the continuities are of course the traces of
Orpheus, and his dancer Wera, and what enacts this is, quite
uniquely in the history of the sonnet sequence, rhythm.
It is essential to Rilke' s philosophy that the reader move joy-
fully through his poetic creation as if dancing: the strict form of
the sonnets, always in 14 lines, always with a Shakespearean
octave and a Petrarchan sestet, keeps rhyme and sound recur-
rent, and the constantly altering rhythms keep the reader mov-
ing forward, but with changes of speed. Elsewhere, with rare
exceptions, sonnets in sequence are written in iambic pentameter
(or hendecasyllables in Italian and French): Rilke established a
dominant dactylic rhythm, the rhythm of dance, which gives
way now and then to iambic or trochaic as the subject matter
changes. He also alters the length of lines, both inside sonnets
and from sonnet to sonnet: they range from 6 to 14 syllables. In
the wonderful twenty-second sonnet of the first part, the change
in movement from sonnet to sonnet becomes the symbol of what
the sonnet is talking about-this is a metarhythmic sonnet. The
previous sonnet gives us the dance of spring:
Friihling ist wiedergekommen. Die Erde
ist wie ein Kind, das Gedichte weiss, viele, o viele ....
(Springtime has come again back, and the Earth is
like to a child, that has poems by the score .... ) (I.xxi.l-3)
Then the reader is checked in flight; there is a deeper harmony:
Wir sind die Treibenden.
Aber den Schritt der Zeit
nehmt ihn als Kleinigkeit
im immer Bleibenden.
Alles das Eilende
wird schon voriiber sein;
134
THE PHILOSOPHICAL SEQUENCE
denn das Verweilende
erst weiht uns ein.
Knaben, o werft den Mut
nicht in die Schnelligkeit,
nicht in den Flugversuch.
Alles ist ausgeruht:
Dunkel und Helligkeit,
Blumen und Buch.
(We are the Strivers;
yet Time in its waning
goes into littleness
in the Remaining.
All of the hastening
Will surely be past;
We then are led in
By what stays as Last.
Not at the fleeing wing,
Child, nor at lightness,
level your power;
Rest is on everything:
Darkness and Brightness,
Codex and Flower.) (I.xxii)
The last words of Rilke' s last sonnet are "Ich bin" -"1 exist";
however, these are not spoken by the speaker but are the affirma-
tion recommended to us all, through the "silent friend of many
far from us" to whom the sonnet is nominally addressed.
Und wenn dich das Irdische vergass,
zu der stillen Erde sag: Ich rinne,
Zu dem raschen Wasser sprich: Ich bin. (II.xxix.12-14)
(And when earthliness forgets you,
to the quiet earth say, I run;
to the running water say, I exist.)
It would be captious to say that so explosively emotional and
passionate a sequence is not lyrical, but it is certainly not of the
same kind as the sequences we have looked at previously. The
135
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
speaker is not preoccupied with his own identity or selfhood,
and the form of the sequence-discrete sonnets versus continu-
ous sequence-is not used to dramatize the aporias of the /I! or
make an accounting of it. Instead, we have a unique achievement
(anticipated, perhaps, by the sonnet writing of Gerard Manley
Hopkins) in which the accumulation of rhythms throughout the
sequence is used as a metonym for the philosophical Dance of
Being, of which the narrated figures of Orpheus and Wera
Knoop are types. Each individual sonnet attests to, or praises,
some aspect of the being of created things, including "us," to
whom a number of sonnets are addressed.
As noted, there is no properly metapoetic sonnet in the
Orpheus cycle, no poem in which the speaker identifies himself
as narrator of it. But the extraordinary first sonnet of the second
part is Rilke' s-or his speaker's, as the apprentice of Orpheus-
view of his art. Using the traditional metaphor of poetry as
breath, spiritus, he sees his own breath as forming part of the air
that circles the entire world and hence himself as instantiated in
creation by his poesis, as Orpheus was:
Atmen, du unsichtbares Gedicht!
Immerfort urn das eigne
Sein rein ausgetauschter Weltraum. Gegengewicht,
in dem ich mich rhythmisch ereigne.
Einzige Welle, deren
allmahliches Meer ich bin;
sparsamstes du von allen moglichen Meeren-
Raumgewinn.
Wie viele von diesen Stellen der Raume waren schon
innen in mir. Manche Win de
sind wie mein Sohn.
Erkennst du mich, Luft, du, voll noch meiniger Orte?
Du einmal glatte Rinde,
Rundung und Blatt meiner Worte. (II.i)
(Breathing, thou invisible poem!
Always a pure world-space
exchanged for this single existence. Counterweight
of my enactment of myself in rhythm.
136
THE PHILOSOPHICAL SEQUENCE
Single wave, of which
I am the accumulating sea;
you, of all possible seas the most frugal,
space to be used.
How many of these places in space were already
within myself. Many a wind
is like a son to me.
Do you know me, air, still filled with my habitations?
You, sometime the smooth outer skin,
the rounding and leaf of my words.)
Though this leap of the imagination belongs to Rilke' s ideas, it is
also a traditional way of thinking of the sonnet sequence: follow-
ing Petrarch, many poets represented their utterances as sighs or
cries to be taken up by Nature, and the double meaning by which
the word for page is also, in most European languages, the word
for the leaf of a tree, allows the wind and the trees and the whole
natural world to become a metaphor of the the
natural world is often figured as God's poem. As has been sug-
gested, the sonnet sequence is akin to genres such as the photo-
graph album and the diary, in which the sense that one is order-
ing a world in miniature is particularly strong.
Dante, whose Divine Comedy is probably the greatest poetic
world shaping in European literature, stopped short of using his
own sonnet sequence, Vita Nuova, to construct a cosmos: he said
in the prose gloss to his final visionary sonnet that
After this sonnet, there came to me a miraculous vision, in which I
beheld things that convinced me to write no more about that blessed
spirit [Beatrice] until I could do so in a worthier manner; to which
end, I am now doing what I can, as she well knows. (Vita Nuova, xlii)
To that end, he needed, he thought, to move from the lower style
of the sonnet world to the high style of the Divine Comedy.
Petrarch' s vision remained always fixed on himself, however res-
onantly; Wordsworth' s world vision, and Milton's, went into epic
blank verse; and Blake, who might have been able to use the son-
net form to make a cosmos, wrote no sonnet sequence. Only
Rilke, under intense and irresistible pressure, grasped the entire
137
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
cosmos in a sustained lyric outburst that also takes sonnet-se-
quence form, with that sense of evolving power that runs
through Romanticism:
Worte gehen noch zart an Unsaglichen aus ....
Und die Musik, immer neu, aus den bebendsten Steinen,
baut im unbrauchtbaren Raum ihr vergottlichtes Haus.
(Words ever go forth into that unsayable place ....
And Music, always anew, with unreliable stones
builds up her celestial house out of the wastes of space.) (II.x.lZ-14)
138
CONCLUSION
I
n this brief study, I have tried to give the reader an overview of
the way the sonnet sequence works, from its beginning in the
thirteenth century in Italy to the present day. Because, as I argue,
the sonnet sequence has remained constant in both its form and
its generic properties, I have worked through the book by asking
the reader to set sonnet sequences from different times and
places alongside one another. If this created some temporal con-
fusion, I have made amends by helping the reader with a chrono-
logical overview in the introduction.
So little has been written about the theory of sonnet se-
quences-a few pages here and there from critics usually pursu-
ing some other (quite legitimate) main interest-that I have
offered my own scheme of analysis from the start, as something
that will enable the reader to think about, analyze, and discuss
the sequentiality of sequences: in practice, what holds a group of
sonnets together. What follows is a brief attempt to clarify this
scheme, now that the reader is familiar with some of the material
on which it operates.
All poets who publish (in print or manuscript) a collection of
sonnets face what I call the "problem of aggregation": they have
to know what holds together this selection of sonnets in this
order. The problem in its simple form is shown aptly by a minor
eighteenth-century English poet, Anna Seward (1747 -1809), who
in 1799 published "A Centenary of Original Sonnets." They are
139
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
certainly united by authorship, but should we call this a se-
quence? Seward herself attempts to settle the matter by de-
scribing her work as
my centenary of sonnets which form a sort of compendium of my
sentiments, opinions and impressions during the course of more than
20 years
1
-a comment that leaves modestly unresolved her recognition of
the miscellaneous nature of her text ("a sort of") with her desire
to see it as a whole ("a compendium"). This is an authorial collec-
tion, not a sequence; a reader who wanted to argue for its
sequentiality would have to discover kinds of continuity in it of
which Seward herself was presumably unaware-not impossi-
ble, and critically quite justifiable, but in this instance, I think,
unlikely.
Whether authors do it themselves, or we retrospectively claim
to discover what they may not have realized, there seem to be
four main kinds of connectedness, which I have called formal,
narrative, lyric, and philosophical. These terms are not mutually
exclusive-a sequence could, I suppose, have elements of all four
at once, though I have never met one-but they do seem to
describe ways of aggregating that poets have actually used, and
one or other seems to dominate the organization of a sequence.
1. Formal. Sonnets linked by repetition of some element of their
form-rhyme, syntax, single lines, or by response to some
element of form, as when one sonnet starts with the second
half of the sentence that ended the preceding one. The most
elaborate formal linkage is that of the corona sequence with
sonnetto magistrale, as described in chapter 2. A development
of this is the categorical sequence, in which the sequence of
the sonnets is the sequence of a category or set of objects out-
side it-the months of the year or the seven deadly sins, for
example. The topographical sequence can shade into narra-
tive or lyric.
2. Narrative. The sonnets are arranged to unfold a story to the
extent that the people and objects in it are presented as they
would be in a novel, with descriptors of place and time and
140
CONCLUSION
character. Narrative is an uncommon kind of linkage, since
its demands tend to obliterate the internal wholeness of sin-
gle sonnets.
3. Lyric. The sonnets individually register the moods of a reflec-
tive persona, whose continuing presence in the sequence is
usually marked by one or more of the following: direction of
sonnets to the same person or addressee; maintenance of a
symbolic language; thematic recurrence; and, most impor-
tantly and commonly, the emergence in the sequence of
reflections on the act of uttering or speaking it (metapoesis).
To put it in modern terms, if we recognize the existence of a
personality that recognizes itself, we are dealing with a lyric
sequence.
4. Philosophical. Philosophizing, in a loose sense, is done all the
time by sonnet writers, since the structure of the sonnet
encourages reflective development of one's moods; but a sin-
gle sonnet, or even two or three, is hardly long enough to
exhibit philosophical thought. But occasionally the reflective-
ness of the speaker rises to a level of abstractness or general-
ity that transcends individual personality, and the voice
becomes diffused, as in the sonnets of Rilke; truth about the
world, not personality, becomes the primary object of atten-
tion for both speaker and reader. When that happens, the
term philosophical seems appropriate.
I have also drawn attention to the uniqueness of the sonnet
sequence: it is the only literary genre (apart from an author's
publication of his or her own letters) to balance the wholeness of
each of its parts with the wholeness of the entire collection. In a
novel, the wholeness of the entire work overpowers the whole-
ness of each chapter, even when written for serial publication;
conversely, in a collection of short stories, the wholeness of each
short story claims attention ahead of the wholeness of the collec-
tion. The sonnet sequence compromises exactly between these
two positions. Historically, Dante and Petrarch, in different ways,
discovered and demonstrated that this balance can be used to
image the precarious balance of integration of personality, and
the sonnet sequence has been a tool for the exploration of self-
141
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
hood ever since. Thus writers of lyric sequences, trying to bind
together the disparate elements of their own persona, often call
what they offer by a narrative name: an account, a story, a jour-
ney, a book. Sir Philip Sidney, in Astrophel and Stella, said it in 10
crisp syllables for all time:
I am not I: pity the tale of me.
142
Notes and References
Introduction
1. For further and more detailed information about Petrarch
and the text of his poems, the reader is referred to endnotes
1, 3, and 4 for chapter 5.
2. For Rilke, likewise, see endnotes 4 and 5 for chapter 6.
3. For a fuller account of these authors, see Michael R. G. Spiller,
The Development of the Sonnet (London and New York:
Routledge, 1992), eh. 2; hereafter cited as Spiller, Development
of the Sonnet.
4. The only account of the development of the corona form I
have found is that by G. M. Crescimbeni, L:Istoria della Volgar
Poesia, vol. 1 (2d imprint, Venice, 1731), 211-14, "Delle
Corone, e d' ogni altra spezie di piu sonetti legati insiemi"
("On coronas, and all other kinds of numbers of sonnets
joined together"). After discussing the revival of interest in
tenzoni in the sixteenth century among men of wit in Italy,
he goes on to say:
Some poets, who wished to make the way of doing [sequences] stricter,
obliged themselves to weave all the sonnets together with the same
rhymes .... [T]hey also made them in other ways, among which there was
one that they called a corona, which they made up of however many son-
nets they wanted, in which usually the only concern was to start one sonnet
with the last line of the preceding one, finishing the last sonnet with the first
143
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
line of the first one. There is an example of this sort of corona in the Poems of
Tasso ... of twelve sonnets, beginning 'Era pieno l'ltalia e pieno il Mondo',
which ends with a slight change, 'E gia pieno l'Italia, e pieno il Mondo.'
But the poets of Siena, and particularly the Academy of the Intronati,
found the proper way of constructing coronas-since the ones mentioned
above should really be called sequences [' catene'] rather than coronas. These
ones are composed of fifteen sonnets, the last one of which is called the
'magistrale' and from the lines of that one are taken the first and last lines of
all the other fourteen, in such fashion that the first sonnet begins with the
first line of the magistrale and finishes with its second; the second begins
with its second line and finishes with its third; and so it follows through to
the fourteenth, which begins with the fourteenth line of the magistrale, and
finishes by picking up its first one again; so that at the point where the
magistrale comes in, the composition concludes with it having come full cir-
cle like a crown ['corona']. (212-14)
5. George Gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573; reprint,
London: Scolar Press, 1970), 336.
6. William T. Going, Scanty Plot of Ground: Studies in the Victorian
Sonnet (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), 14.
7. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, vol. 3, ed. E. de
Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1946), 557; hereafter cited as Selincourt, Poetical Works of
William Wordsworth.
Chapter 1
1. H. Austin Dobson (1840-1921) had a dilettantish attitude to
the presentation of poetry that is apt to strike the modern
reader as superficial or irritating. He was nevertheless a good
craftsman and an elegant and witty writer at his best. The
poem quoted, entitled "Urceus Exit," can be found in the
Oxford Book of English Verse edited by Sir Arthur Quiller-
Couch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939) at no. 828.
2. The sonnet was added, at the end of nine others, to the 1673
edition of Milton's poems, Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions
(London: Thomas Dring, 1673), but unlike the others was not
numbered, suggesting that it was perceived as irregular.
3. William Sharp, editor of Sonnets of This Century (London:
Waiter Scott, [1886]), 307. Meredith himself, however, knew of
144
NOTES AND REFERENCES
the sonnetto caudato, and declared that his 16-line stanzas
were "not designed for that form." (The Letters of George Mere-
dith, vol. 2, ed. C. L. Cline [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970],
798.)
4. Joachim du Bellay (1522-1560), Defense et Illustration de la
Langue Franr;aise (Paris: Arnoull' Angelier, 1549), livre 2, eh. 4.
5. The poems of Giacomo da Lentino, with translations, notes,
and a brief account, are available in a modern critical edition
by Step hen Popolizio, A Critical Edition of the Poems of Giacomo
da Lentino, Ph.D. thesis, 1975 (Ann Arbor University Micro-
films, Michigan, 1980). See also E. H. Wilkins, "The Invention
of the Sonnet," Modern Philology 13 (1915): 463-94.
6. "Undid silbe ciascun vuole pun to" -Pieraccio Tedaldi, ea.
1330. A "punto" is a full stop, comma, or semicolon, and also
by synecdoche the point at the end of which the stop comes.
For the complete sonnet, see G. Getto and E. Sanguinetti, If
Sonetto (Milano: Mursia, 1957), 80.
7. Popolizio, Poems of Giacomo da Lentino, 159.
8. Samuel Daniel, A Defence of Ryme [1602?]; reprinted in
Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols., ed. G. Gregory Smith
(Oxford: Clarendon Press,l904), 2, 358.
9. The comparison (humorously done) occurs in a sonnet
quoted in Spiller, Development of the Sonnet, 9-10 and n. 11.
The "Sonnet on the Sonnet" is almost a subgenre, attracting
at least one book, David T. H. Scott, Sonnet Theory and Practice
in Nineteenth-Century France: Sonnets on the Sonnet (Hull:
University of Hull Publications, 1977), and an anthology, M.J.
Russell, Sonnets on the Sonnet (London: Longmans, 1898). The
Italian anthology mentioned in endnote 6 for chapter 1
quotes several of the kind in its introduction and reprints
them in the body of the anthology.
10. Dante, Vita Nuova, ea. 1292, section 3. The sectionalization of
the text followed here is that of the Societa Dantesca Italiana
in Opere di Dante (Firenze: F. Lemonnier, 1960). The translation
is mine.
11. The "first among my friends" was Guido Cavalcanti, whose
reply begins "Vedeste al mio parere onne valore" ("You have
beheld, to my way of thinking, the highest worth"); the other
145
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
replies surviving are by Cino da Pistoia ("Naturalmente
chere ogni amadore" ["Every lover naturally seeks"]), and
Dante da Maiano ("Di cio che stato sei dimandatore" ["Of
what you have requested"]). Each of the replies uses the
rhymes given by Dante in his opening sonnet: -ore, -ente
(AB), -endo, -ea (CD). The complete tenzone is reprinted in
Vita Nuova, ed. Fredi Chiapelli (Milano: Mursia, 1965), 79-80.
12. The most exhaustive examination of tenzoni in thirteenth-
century sonnets is by Salvatore Santangelo, Le tenzoni poetiche
nella letteratura Italiana delle origini (Geneva: Olschki, 1928), a
study that has not been translated into English.
13. Gascoigne, Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, 336.
14. Santangelo, Le tenzoni poetiche.
15. Crescimbeni, Llstoria della Volgar Poesia, vol. 2, 211-14.
16. Gascoigne, Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, title page. The three
sonnets given are on pp. 211-12, first called a "terza se-
quenza" and then simply "this sequence."
17. Gascoigne, Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, 360-63, referred to as
"seven sonnets in sequence."
18. George Macbeth, Collected Poems, 1958-1970 (London and
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1971), 34-41.
19. There is a brief notice of Anne Locke in Spiller Development of
the Sonnet , 92-93. See also Spiller's 'A. Literary First: The
Sonnet Sequence of Anne Locke (1560)," Renaissance Studies,
March 1997, forthcoming. Anne Locke's sequence is edited by
Kel Morin-Parsons, Anne Locke's Sonnet Sequence (Ontario:
North Waterloo Press, 1997).
20. Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate (London and Boston: Faber,
1986). The stanzas of the novel are iambic tetrameters,
rhyming ABAB CCDD EFFE GG, and have a consistent
sequence of feminine and masculine rhymes, FMFM FF MM
FMMF MM. This stanza was invented by Alexander Pushkin
for his verse novel Eugene Onegin (1823), and while it has
been suggested by Vladimir Nabokov in Eugene Onegin, vol. 1
([London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964], 12) that Pushkin
may have intended a kind of sonnet, it is really a narrative
stanza. Sonnets in tetrameters, often comic or satirical, are of
course not uncommon.
146
NOTES AND REFERENCES
21. Il Fiore e Il Detto d'Amore, ed. G. Contini, Opere di Dante, vol. 8
(Milano: Societa Dantesca Italiana, 1984).
22. Crescimbeni, r:Jstoria della Volgar Poesia, vol. 2, 344.
23. George Wither, Campo-Musae (London: Austin and Coe,
1643), 78; reprinted in Miscellaneous Works of George Wither:
First Collection (The Spenser Society, 1872); Vox Pacifica
(London: Austin, 1645); reprinted in Miscellaneous Works of
George Wither: Second Collection (The Spenser Society, 1872).
An extract from Vox Pacifica appears in The Penguin Book of
Renaissance Verse, 1509-1659, ed. David Norbrook (London:
Penguin Press, 1992), 745-47.
24. An 18-sonnet sequence by the British writer Charles Emily
appeared in 1781; there seems to be no American sonnet
sequence dated in the eighteenth century. In the literary
remains of the British writer Thomas Edwards (1699-1757),
published in 1758, there is a collection of 45 sonnets, all
Miltonic and most addressed to friends, which in the last
sonnet are offered as "the Collection" by the author; but it is
not clear that they are connected by anything except numer-
ation. It could be argued that this is the first eighteenth-cen-
tury sonnet sequence.
25. For a list of British sonnet sequences of this period, see
William T. Going, Scanty Plot of Ground: Studies in the Victorian
Sonnet (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), 157 -67; for American
sequences, see Lewis G. Sterner, The Sonnet in American
Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1930), 145-48.
26. Du Bellay' s sequence was intended as the first book in a
series, but his early death prevented the publication of a
sequel. In its 1558 form it contained 32 sonnets with a prefa-
tory sonnet ' ~ u Roy." This was followed by "Un Songe ou
Vision sur le Mesme Subject," a second sequence of 15 son-
nets describing a number of fantastic, emblematic objects
connected to the fallen grandeur of Rome. See du Bellay,
Oeuvres Poetiques, vol. 2, ed. Henri Chamard (Paris: E.
Comely, 1908-1910), 3-39. For the English reader, there is an
excellent translation by Edmund Spenser, "Ruines of Rome:
by Bellay," in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund
Spenser, ed. W A. Oram and others (New Haven and
147
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
London: Yale University Press, 1989), 381-405. Spenser also
translated du Bellay' s "Songe" twice: once in 1569, in }an van
der Noot' s A Theatre for Worldlings, in which he produced a
sequence of 15 blank verse sonnets, a rare form, though only
11 of the 15 are taken from du Bellay; and then as "The
Visions of Bellay," in which all15 are translated into English
sonnet form (Yale Shorter Poems, 441-50, 470-84).
27. Guittone d' Arezzo, Le Rime, ed. F. Egidi (Bari: Laterza, 1940),
235-48. The vices are pride, avarice, luxury, envy, gluttony,
sloth, anger, vainglory, cowardice, and injustice; the virtues
are knowledge, humility, generosity, chastity, friendship,
temperance, goodwill, meekness, charity, honor, fortitude,
and justice. Some of these are plainly social practices rather
than moods, but the medieval concepts of passion, tempera-
ment, and humor deal with emotional characteristics in a
more stereotyping and ethically oriented way than in mod-
ern times.
Chapter 2
1. Guittone d' Arezzo, Rime, ed. Egidi, 179-82.
2. The texts of Folgore' s sonnets are taken from Poesia del
Duecento e del Trecento, ed. Carlo Musetta and Paolo Rivalta
(Torino: G. Einaudi, 1956), 397. The complete sequence is
printed on pp. 393-99. The translations, which I have
adapted extensively, are taken from D. G. Rossetti, Poems and
Translations 1850-1870 (London: Oxford University Press,
1926), 252. The complete sequence, with the dedicatory son-
net, is translated by Rossetti on pp. 247-54.
3. The text, printed at the end of Locke's translation of Calvin,
Sermons of John Calvine upon the Songe that Ezechias made.
(London: John Day, 1560), is taken from the unique British
copy, British Library 696.a.40, sig. [Axi(r)-v]. The translation
of the two psalm verses, 51.11-12, appears to be Anne
Locke's own.
4. The quotations from Donne' s "La Corona" are taken from the
1633 edition, Poems by ]. D. With Elegies on the Authors Death
(London: John Mariott, 1633, 28-32).
148
NOTES AND REFERENCES
5. Donne, Poems by J. D., 31 (sonnets 5 and 6).
6. Donne, Poems by f. D., 29 (sonnet 3).
7. Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems (New York: Harper
and Row, [1956]), 728.
8. References throughout are to the number and line(s) of the
sonnets of "A Christmas Ring" in George Macbeth, Collected
Poems 1958-1970 (London: Macmillan, 1971), 34-41.
9. Using the second line of the sonetto magistrale as an example,
the rhyme word "beak" (A) has to rhyme with cheek, leak, and
shriek (3). But each of these lines, back in its original sonnet, is
an A or a B rhyme, and so has to rhyme with three others:
beak/meek, piq-, reek; cheek/week, seek, unique; leak/freak, Greek,
weak; shriek/streak, chic, oblique (12). All four first lines are also
last lines (CDE rhymes) in the sonnet immediately previous,
and in the Petrarchan form each rhymes with one other line
in its sestet: beak/creak; cheek/eeek!; leak/peak; shriek/sleek (4). So
beak generates 19 rhymes, supposing that there are no repeti-
tions. A magistrale line in the sestet will similarly have nine
words rhyming with its rhyme word.
10. Gascoigne, Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, 360-63. Only once in
the seven-sonnet sequence does Gascoigne alter the meaning
of a line as it passes from one sonnet to the next. Lady Mary
Wrath, "Pamphilia to Amphilanthus," The Poems of Lady Mary
Wrath, ed. Josephine Roberts (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University, 1983). She was the niece of Sir Philip Sidney and
imitated his style in Astrophel and Stella creditably; she does
not, however, appear to know how a corona sequence works.
Chapter 3
1. The text used for all references to and quotations from
Word swarth's sonnet sequences is Selincourt, Poetical Works
of William Wordsworth. This quotation, from the ample notes,
is on 557; the River Duddon sequence is on 242-61 and the
Ecclesiastical Sonnets on 341-407.
2. "The nineteenth century critics were too much concerned
with the prosody of the individual sonnet to be aware of the
149
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
widespread experimentation of the poets in linking sonnets
into poems of unique unity." (William T. Going, Scanty Plot of
Ground: Studies in the Victorian Sonnet [The Hague: Mouton,
1976], 36).
3. Wordsworth himself pointed to Milton's 'And feel that I am
happier than I know" (Paradise Lost, viii.282) and to a line of
Moschus that he had himself translated as "But we, the great,
the mighty, and the wise" (Selincourt, Poetical Works of
William Wordsworth, 524). Since he knew Burns's poetry well,
he may also have recalled "But och! I backward cast my ee"
from To a Mouse; and the modern reader will hear the
Platonic echo of Shelley's "The One remains, the many
change and pass." The elegiac allusiveness of this sonnet is
remarkable.
4. G. H. Tucker, The Poet's Odyssey: ]oachim du Bellay and the
Antiquitez de Rome (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 3.
5. Du Bellay' s text, here and elsewhere, is from Oeuvres
Poetiques, vol. 2, ed. Henri Chamard (Paris: Comely,
1908-1910), 3-29. The Antiquitez were very readably trans-
lated by Edmund Spenser about 1580, and the text used here
is The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed.
William A. Oram and others (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1989), 381-405; hereafter cited as Spenser:
Shorter Poems.
6. Spiller, Development of the Sonnet , 80- 82.
7. See "Roman Texts and Contexts" in Tucker, Poet's Odyssey,
105-74.
8. "Exegi monumentum aere perennius" -Horace, Carminum
Liber Ill, final poem. Shakespeare repeatedly defies time in
this way in his Sonnets (e.g., sonnets 18, 19, 55, 63, and 65).
9. On this, see discussion in Spiller, Development of the Sonnet,
eh. 9 and also Joel Fineman, Shakespeare's Perjured Eye (Los
Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
10. My translation: Spenser's version misses the point, in 1.6, that
he has made his verses sing (dire) the monuments.
11. Spenser: Shorter Poems, 404.
150
NOTES AND REFERENCES
Chapter 4
1. An excellent account, but not available in English, is Mario
Marti, Storia dello Stil Nuovo (Lecce: Milella, 1973). The editor-
ial material in Mark Musa, Dante's Vita Nuova (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1973) is helpful. See also Spiller,
Development of the Sonnet, eh. 3.
2. Though the material is not directly relevant to this study,
there are two useful anthologies with explanatory material:
Bernard O'Donoghue (ed.), The Courtly Love Tradition
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982); R. T. Hill
and T. G. Bergin (eds.), Anthology of the Provenqal Troubadours
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973). For the
Latin popular tradition, see Peter Dronke, Mediaeval Latin and
the Rise of the European Love Lyric, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1968). There are two Italian studies of the connections
referred to: Anna Clausen, Le origini della poesia lirica in
Provenza e in Italia (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1976),
and F. Catenazzi, J;influsso dei Provenzali sui temi e immagini
della poesia Siculo- Toscana (Brescia: Marcelliana, 1977).
3. I am presenting Dante's Vita Nuova as innovative; but to a
contemporary it would have looked like another example of
the prose/verse narrative of medieval times, the prosimetrum.
One later sequence indebted to Dante is Lorenzo de'Medici' s
Comento (ea. 1482), a set of 41 sonnets with a prose commen-
tary; but the sonnets-which are mainly Petrarchan love son-
nets-are very much subdued to an extremely long quasi-
philosophical commentary, so that, indeed, it is questionable
whether we should call this a sonnet sequence at all, or a
philosophical work with verse insertions. See Sara Sturm,
Lorenzo de'Medici (New York: Twayne, 1974), 63-76.
4. The Vita Nuova was largely neglected even in Italy in the six-
teenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, but in the
nineteenth century was widely translated, both in whole and
in parts and referred to and imitated by many poets, as well
as used by graphic artists. This was part of a European and
American rediscovery of Dante, principally of the Divine
Comedy.
151
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
5. Her sonnets, including the sequences referred to here, form
the last section (pp. 561-738) of her Collected Poems, ed.
Norma Millay (New York and London: Harper Brothers,
1956). A good short biography and critical account, with a full
bibliography, is Norman Brittin, Edna St. Vincent Millay (New
York: Twayne, 1967).
6. W H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson
(London: Faber and Faber, 1976), 192.
7. The four sonnets entitled "She, to Him" were written in 1866
and published in Wessex Poems and Other Verses (London:
Osgood, Mcllvaine & Co., 1898).
8. Brittin, St. Vincent Millay, 111.
9. The Poems of George Meredith, vol. 1, ed. Phyllis Bartlett (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978) 115-45.
Originally published in Modern Love and Poems of the English
Roadside (London: Chapman and Hall, 1862).
10. Complete Poems of Robert Frost (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966),
143-44.
Chapter 5
1. John Berryman, Collected Poems, 1937-1971, ed. Charles
Thornbury (London and Boston: Faber, 1989), 108; hereafter
cited as Berryman, Poems. For a readable biography of
Petrarch, see Morris Bishop, Petrarch and His World
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963). For a densely
informative short study of Petrarch's major works, with a
biography and an account of the making of his sonnet
sequence, see Kenelm Foster, Petrarch: Poet and Humanist
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984).
2. Spiller, Development of the Sonnet, 71-82.
3. The text used for quotations from Petrarch is the
Italian-English edition by Robert Durling, Petrarch's Lyric
Poems (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University
Press, 1976), easily the best for the serious reader whose Italian
is not wholly fluent. Translations of Petrarch are my own.
4. The classic account of Petrarch' s working is E. H. Wilkins, The
Making of the 'Canzoniere' and other Petrarchan Studies (Rome:
152
NOTES AND REFERENCES
Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1951). A good summary
account is in Aldo S. Bernardo, Petrarch, Laura and the
Triumphs (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974),
26-63.
5. Berryman, Poems, 70.
6. Selected Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Margaret
Forster (London: Chatto and Windus, 1988), 237.
7. Spenser: Shorter Poems, 600.
8. Berryman, Poems, 129. The sestet is strongly reminiscent of
Petrarch's sestina, Rime 30; also, one of the rhyme words in
this sestina is "chiome"[hair], which according to the ses-
tina's rules occurs six times. Quirkily, the sequence ends with
Berryman referring the reader to Judges 16:22, which states
"Howbeit, the hair of his [Samson' s] head began to grow
again after he was shaven." The name Lise in the sonnet
quoted was an alias for Chris: in the first publication of the
Sonnets to Chris, Berryman's Sonnets (New York: Farrar
Strauss, 1967), he used Lise (one syllable); in the Collected
Poems 1939-1971 (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), she is
called by her real name, Chris, except in this last sonnet,
where Lise is retained. Her identity has been shrouded care-
fully by Berryman' s biographers: she was 27, married with a
young son when they had their affair in 1947 in Princeton;
but Chris does not even appear in the index of Paul Mariani' s
Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman (New York: William
Morrow, 1990). Since Petrarch, whom Berryman admired
and imitated, shrouded the identity of Lama, this is perhaps
appropriate.
9. Du Bellay, Oeuvres Poetiques, I.27.
10. George Macbeth, Collected Poems 1958-1982 (London:
Hutchinson, 1989), 350.
11. Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, Oeuvres Completes, ed.
C. Pichois, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1975-1976), 1.232.
12. See Dorothy Mermin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins
of a New Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989),
eh. 5. It is possible that Elizabeth Barrett also knew of the
famous collection of letters to an unworthy lover called
Letters from the Portuguese, supposed to have been written in
153
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
the seventeenth century by a Portuguese nun, Maria Alco-
forado, though actually an eighteenth-century French com-
pilation. They were popular and widely translated, and an
English translation was made by William Bowles in 1817,
which Elizabeth Barrett could have known. Curiously, Rilke
was impressed by them and attempted to translate them into
German ea. 1908. Another suggestion may have come from
Poems from the Portuguese of Luis de Camoens, a popular transla-
tion by Percy, Viscount Strangford, printed five times
between 1803 and 1824.
13. Tony Harrison, from The School of Eloquence, Selected Poems
(Penguin Books, 1984), 112. The word from in the title points
to the fact that "The School of Eloquence" is not really the
name of a sequence, but of a project on which Harrison is still
engaged. Eighteen sonnets under that title were published in
1978; these expanded to 50 in 1981, and then to 67 in 1984.
Michael Drayton similarly worked on and published his son-
net sequence, Idea, between 1599 and 1619, and Petrarch
(before the invention of printing) issued various versions of
his Rime to friends and patrons. On Harrison, see Neil Astley,
"Tony Harrison: Selective Bibliography," in Tony Harrison, ed.
Neil Astley (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1991), 504-5.
14. The standard edition of Donne's poems, to which most later
editions are indebted, is The Poems of John Donne, ed. H. J. C.
Grierson, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912). The stan-
dard edition of the Divine Poems, with full scholarly appara-
tus, is John Donne, The Divine Poems, ed. Helen Gardner
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). Gardner prints the Holy
Sonnets in three groups: the 1633 set, followed by the addi-
tional sonnets from the 1635 volume, followed by the addi-
tional sonnets from the Westmoreland manuscript.
15. See Gardner (ed.), Divine Poems, lvi-xcviii. I have quoted
from the 1633 edition, Donne, Poems by]. D.
16. See the reappraisal of Gardner's edition by John Stach-
niewski, The Persecutory Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1991), eh. 6.
17. The printer set them out as a sequence, with each sonnet
numbered and the group of 12 set off by double rules at
beginning and end. His use of double rules in the volume is
154
NOTES AND REFERENCES
not, unfortunately, consistent. See Gardner (ed.), Divine
Poems, lxxxii-lxxxvii.
18. A facsimile of Q is printed in Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed.
Stephen Booth (New Haven and London: Yde University
Press, 1977). This is a magisterial edition with a rich commen-
tary. I have quoted from Q, since any edition introduces edi-
torial decisions about meaning. I have substituted v for u and
j for i and have corrected Q, with a marginal note, only
where the original would seriously mislead the reader.
19. See discussion of these in Spiller, Development of the Sonnet,
170-75
20. For an account of the debate, see Hugh Calvert, Shakespeare's
Sonnets and Problems of Autobiography (Devon, England: Merlin
Books, 1987), and also Paul Ramsey, The Fickle Glass (New York:
AMS Press, 1979), which has an excellent bibliography. The
most intense examination of the problem of subjectivity in the
Sonnets is Joel Fineman, Shakespeare's Perjured Eye (Los Angeles
and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
21. Booth, Shakespeare's Sonnets, xii.
22. Q prints a comma, not a full stop, at the end of this sonnet.
This punctuation, which is also at the end of some other son-
nets, is probably a misprint, but as often happens in Q, it is
immediately suggestive: it is just possible, given Shake-
speare's fondness for pairing sonnets, that 62 is intended to
be read with 63 as a single poem, though there is an awk-
ward change of person from "thee" to "him."
Chapter 6
1. "People do associate the word poet with the metre itself, and
speak of 'elegiac poets' or 'epic poets' as if a poet were not
made by imitation, but by the verse, entitling them all indis-
criminately to the name. Even when a treatise on medicine or
natural philosophy is brought out in verse, the name of poet
is by custom given to the author; yet Homer and Empedocles
have nothing in common except the metre, so that it would
be right to call the former a poet, but the latter a natural
philosopher rather than a poet." (Aristotle, Poetics, 1.7 -8)
155
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
2. The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti, ed. WM.
Rossetti (London: Macmillan, 1911), 262-63.
3. The arrangement is plainly intended to be symmetrical but is
not as neat as it seems. In the first group of poems, one of the
10 is actually a ballata, a long, songlike poem; two of the son-
nets are extended sonnets, in which short lines of seven sylla-
bles are inserted: AaBBbA AaBBbA CDdC CDdC (and CDdC
DCcD). This is a variant known as a sonettus duplex or sonetto
doppio and is comparatively rare. In the last group of 10, one
of the poems is a canzone of two 13-line stanzas.
4. The reader is referred to the bibliography of recommended
titles for details of the original German texts. I have used the
second edition of the Sonnets to Orpheus, tr. J. B. Leishman
(London: Hogarth Press, 1936); hereafter cited as Rilke,
Sonnets. The preface gives a translation of the letter to his
Polish translator, Witold von Hulewicz, which I have cited.
Leishman' s translations of the Sonnets copy the rhythm and
rhyme scheme closely but sometimes sacrifice accuracy; I have
used my own translations. The reader who wants to go on to
the Duino Elegies has a choice of a number of modern transla-
tions: a useful bilingual text is the translation by Stephen
Cohn, Rilke, Duino Elegies (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1989).
5. "The poet walked up and down [on the castle bastions] ....
[T]hen suddenly, as he was pondering, he stopped dead: it
seemed to him that he heard a voice call through the roaring
of the wind: Who, if I cried, would hear me from the ranks of the
angels?" ["Wer, wenn ich schriee, horte mich denn aus der
Engel I Ordnungen?" is the first line of the first elegy]. The
reminiscence, by Rilke' s friend Princess Marie von Thurn
und Taxis, is quoted often; see, for example, Siegfried
Mandel, Rainer Maria Rilke (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1965), 91-92.
6. Rilke, Sonnets, 18.
7. Milton, of course, is occupied, both in Lycidas and in the par-
allel passage in Paradise Lost, vii.32-36, with the danger to
the artist himself of sudden death or political persecution. It
is significant, however, that in a poem concerned with the
transfiguration of the artist, the detail of Orpheus' death that
Milton emphasizes is the survival of the head, whose
156
NOTES AND REFERENCES
gory visage down the stream was sent,
Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore. (Lycidas, 61-62).
Rilke, like Milton, bases his sonnet firmly on the account of
Orpheus' death in Ovid's Metamorphoses, xi.1-60. However,
he chooses to contradict Ovid's point that Orpheus could not
make his voice heard against the Maenads-
tendentemque manus et in illo tempore primum
inrita dicentem nee quicquam voce moventem
sacrilegae perimunt. (Metamorphoses, xi.39-41)
(the blasphemers destroyed him as he held out his hands,
speaking for the first time without effect, nor causing anything
to respond to his voice.)
The imaginative leap that turns the stones thrown at
Orpheus into listeners seems to be a conflation of the attack
of the Maenads in Ovid with his remark that
perque os, pro Iuppiter! illud
auditum saxis intellectumque ferarum
sensibus, in ventos anima exhalata recessit. (41-43)
(and through those lips, by Jupiter! that
had been listened to by the rocks and understood by the senses
of wild beasts, his spirit expired, and vanished upon the winds.)
Ovid also supplies the detail that the head and the lyre
survived, thrown both into the Hebrus, where they floated,
sounding audibly, down to the sea and to the shores of
Lesbos. There is a good deal of imagery associated with the
drowning and recovery of heads in Lycidas.
8. Rilke, Sonnets, 18-19.
Conclusion
1. Quoted by Margaret Aston, The Singing Swan (New York:
Greenwood Press, 1931; reprint, 1968), 226.
157
Bibliographical Essay
I
n his pioneering study of the sonnet sequence during its sec-
ond great flourishing in English, William T. Going, in Scanty
Plot of Ground (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), points to the difficulty
faced by anyone trying to guide readers on the subject: "almost
every account of the sonnet during the Renaissance in England is
in reality an account of the sonnet sequence" (11). Almost all crit-
ics use the term sonnet as a collective noun or adjective to refer to
both the generality of individual sonnets and the aggregation of
them into sequence: when, for example, Lauro Martines in his
Society and History in English Renaissance Verse (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1985) writes that "the sonnet craze comes and goes too
swiftly to be rhymed with gradual change in the institution of
upper-class marriage" (101), he blurs the distinction between the
coming and going of the sonnet sequence craze, which was very
quick in Britain, between 1591 and 1597, with the coming and
going of the sonnet, which was rather longer, between ea. 1580
and ea. 1625. Moreover, critics who are actually concerned with
sonnets that appeared in sequences tend to discuss them largely
as individual sonnets, as does J. W. Lever in his key study, The
Elizabethan Love Sonnet (London: Macmillan, 1956). I plead guilty
to this blurring myself in The Development of the Sonnet (London:
Routledge, 1992)-though there is at least a properly indexed
entry under "sonnet sequence" -and it is perhaps a sense that
"0, I have ta' en too little care of this!" that has led me to under-
158
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
take this present study. Be that as it may, information about and
critical discussion of the sonnet sequence is scattered thinly
among the much larger amount of work on "the sonnet" in the
sense alluded to previously, and the reader has to be prepared to
work generally with discussions of the sonnet. Checklists of son-
net sequences are not numerous. (Note that sonnet is spelled son-
net in French but sonetto in Italian, soneto in Spanish, and sonett in
German.) For the early Italian period (thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries), there is a brief list in Leandro Biadene, Morfologia del
Sonetto nei Secoli XIII-XIV (1888; reprint, Firenze: Le Lettere,
1977), iii, "Serie o Corone di Sonetti." For the later period, the
account of the corona sequence already mentioned earlier, by the
eighteenth-century critic G. M. Crescimbeni (see endnote 22,
chapter 1), mentions a number of sequences with dates and pub-
lication details. The large bibliographic study by Hugues
Vaganay, Le Sonnet en Italie et en France au XVIeme Siecle (Louvain,
1899; reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1966), includes all sonnet
sequences of that century but unfortunately does not distinguish
them as such, so that unless the printed title includes a word
such as corona or serie one cannot know. There is a complete list of
British sonnet sequences in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies in Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet, appendix 1, and a
reasonably complete list of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
British sequences in William T. Going, Scanty Plot of Ground,
appendix. A checklist of American sonnet sequences up to 1929 is
provided by Lewis G. Sterner, The Sonnet in American Literature
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930), table enti-
tled '1\merican Sonnet Sequences." Spiller records 43 sequences,
including some not in 14lines, for the Renaissance period; Going
records more than 230, and Sterner 64, for the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, in lists that do not claim to include
every minor poet. It is clear that the high point of the sonnet
sequence, numerically at least, is the late Victorian period in
British and American literature.
Before I mention particular studies, there is one master bibli-
ography of studies of the British and American sonnet: Herbert S.
Donow, The Sonnet in England and America: A Bibliography of
Criticism (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982) (which
despite its title includes all the sonneteers of Scotland). This
splendid compilation is indispensable for the student of the son-
159
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
net in English and American literature, and though it does not
list editions of the sonnets themselves, it groups critical studies
under each author, alphabetically arranged within the Ren-
aissance and again within the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies, with a separate section for Shakespeare. Its Contents is
thus a useful though not exhaustive checklist of sonnet writers.
For our purposes, it is worth noting that of the 96 items listed
under the heading of "General Criticism" only one has the word
sequence or cycle in its title: Donow 120, Lawrence Zillman,
"Sonnet Cycle," in Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. A.
Preminger (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965).
There are numerous studies of the sonnet, some of them
forming portions of larger treatments of vernacular verse, from
the earliest work by Antonio da Tempo, written between 1329
and 1332, through to John Fuller's The Sonnet (London: Methuen
Critical Idiom, 1972). Da Tempo's treatise, known from its Latin
title as De Ritimicis Vulgaribus (On Vernacular Verse), was first
printed in Venice in 1509 by Simone de Luere, and was later
reprinted in an edition by G. Crion with the Italian title Delle
Rime Volgari (Bologna: Commissioni pe'testi di lingua, 1869). The
original text subsequently was edited in a modern edition by R.
Andrews, Summa Artis Rithimici Vulgaris Dictaminis (Bologna:
Commissioni per i testi di lingua, 1977). Da Tempo's concern, in
sections that deal with the sonnet form, is with the different
kinds of sonnet form practiced in the early fourteenth century,
and he has nothing to say about what the Italians later called
catene, or series/cycles of sonnets. His approach set the treatment
mode of the sonnet for later writers such as Giovanni Trissino, La
Poetica (Vicenza: per Tolomeo Janiculo, 1529), and Mario
Equicola, Istitutioni al comporre in ogni sorte di rima della lingua vol-
gare (Milano: n.p., 1541), ("General guide to the composition of
vernacular verse"), and it is not until Crescimbeni (see endnote 4
for the introduction) that we find a section devoted specifically
to sequences, short though it is. In the early modern period,
after the revival of interest in the sonnet at the end of the eigh-
teenth century, there are a number of accounts of the develop-
ment of the sonnet, often prefaced to anthologies, of which
Charles Tomlinson' s The Sonnet: its Origin, Structure and Place in
Poetry (London: John Murray, 1874) is one of the longest and
fairly representative. By this time nationalism had bedeviled dis-
160
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
cussion of the sonnet with two controversies: was the sonnet in
its origins French/Provent;al or was it a native Italian creation?-
an issue of more than academic interest during the Italian strug-
gle for independence in the nineteenth century; and was the
Petrarchan model of the sonnet to be preferred, for British poets,
over the Shakespearean model? Neither of these concerns was
conducive to treatment of sonnet sequences, and it is not until
John Fuller's The Sonnet in 1975 that a general study of the sonnet
considers the sequence separately, if briefly. Neither Waiter
Monch' s Das Sonett, Gestalt und Geschichte (Heidelberg: F. H.
Kerle, 1955)-the best single book on the development of the
European sonnet-nor Max Jasinski' s Histoire du Sonnet en France
(Douai: Brugere, 1903) pays specific attention to the sequential-
ity of sonnets.
There are three useful studies, limited in their historical range,
that consider the problems of aggregation. The most sophisti-
cated of these is Mario Santagata, Dal Sonetto al Canzoniere
(Padova: Liviana, 1979), which investigates the appearance and
development of the canzoniere (the ordinary Italian word for a
collection of poems, covering anything from an anthology to a
sequence) at the end of the thirteenth century. His thesis is that
the sonnet was invented at the point where listening to poems,
often set to music, began to give way to reading them, and that
this prompted people to compile, and poets to offer, poems and
notably sonnets in collections. This in turn fosters the writing of
collections that are truly sequential, and Santagata links this to
the development of the concept of self:
the canzoniere is the most complex result, in the sphere of lyric
poetry, of the prevalence of the written word over the spoken or sung
word .... We may conclude that in modern Western poetry the strik-
ing manifestation (epifania) of the subject-self presupposes the book
as material object. (122, my tr.)
He draws attention, as I have, to the way in which collections of
sonnets combine the identity of each short poem with the repeti-
tive and cumulative effects of a long poem and suggests that
the canzoniere is the result of a step-by-step process of forms in
time--the logical succession might well be: tenzone, corona, collec-
tion-essentially endogenetic. (47, my tr.)
161
THE SONNET SEQUENCE
Santagata' s book is not available in translation but offers a serious
attempt at a sociohistorical explanation of sequentiality, keyed to
the conditions of the Italian thirteenth century, but suggestive
beyond that for the sequence as a genre.
Two older studies, which have the merit of being particularly
concerned with sequences, are Cecil L. John's Elizabethan Sonnet
Sequences (New York: Columbia University, 1938) and Janet G.
Scott's The Elizabethan Sonnets (Paris: Honore Champion, 1929).
Both concentrate on sonnets in sequences: John investigates motifs
running through sequences, and Scott discusses borrowings from
French sonnet writing. Much of what they say is pitched at the
level of the individual sonnet, but attention is paid to the continu-
ities of sequences, even if not in any theoretical way. Two generic
studies, which in different ways deal with the sonnet's relation to
epigram and to narrative, are Alistair Fowler's Kinds of Literature
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982)-an indispensable work for any-
one interested in genre theory-and Rosalie Colie' s The Resources
of Kind (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press,
1973), eh. 4, "Kindness and Literary Imagination." Both authors are
immensely learned and move easily among a wide range of sonnet
material in several languages: neither takes space to develop a
generic theory of the sequences, but their suggestions are preg-
nant: Colie remarks, for example, that
the "more" of the sonnet-sequence lies not only in its shadowy psy-
chological plot, but also in the deepening of analytical themes already
present in the thematics of the single sonnet-the sonneteer's self-
examination, expressive of internal condition, his commentary on his
own progress in both poetry and love. (105)
A critic might travel a considerable distance through sonnet
sequences guided by that notion of" a shadowy psychological plot."
Colie and Fowler are both Renaissance scholars; for the later
phase of the sonnet sequence, the essential text is William T.
Going's Scanty Plot of Ground (1976), already referred to. His
excellent introductory chapter, "The Victorian Sonnet Sequence,"
sets the post-1830 sequence in relation to the Elizabethan and
eighteenth-century sequence, tracing the continuity of themes
and techniques. As he justifiably says,
the history of the sonnet as well as that of the sonnet sequence dur-
ing the nineteenth century has yet to be written. For the nineteenth
162
BIBLIOGRAPI IICAL ESSAY
century belongs to the recent past; the number of sonnets, sonneteers
and publishing and printing establishments is far greater in the nine-
teenth century; the sonnet and the sonnet sequence have become
after Milton's insistence on the single sonnet two distinct genres; and
the scope of subject matter and the conventions of technique for the
sonnet as well as for the sonnet sequence during the Romantic and
Victorian periods have become broader and more varied and hence
more complicated to analyse and describe. (11)
Going is particularly interested, as he takes the reader through
the work of the major Victorian sonnet writers, in the narrative
capacity of the sonnet sequence; in the process, he also notes that
the word sequence is a late-Victorian invention: though it was
used first in relation to a set of sonnets by George Gascoigne in
1573, it does not appear again until D. G. Rossetti subtitled his The
House of Life (1881) "a Sonnet-Sequence"-before that, collective
terms including century, series, or cycle are used. The term was
then used retrospectively of earlier sonnet collections by critics
(Going, 35); and insofar as it inserts into critical thinking a notion
of progress or accumulation absent from the earlier collective
words, it might be considered a significant theoretical contribu-
tion in itself.
There are a number of works useful to the reader who wants
to take further the study of the expression of self, which I have
argued is a constant problem or preoccupation of the sonnet
sequence. The problem of subjectivity arises well before the
invention of the sonnet, and two helpful works are Prospero
Saiz, Persona and Poesis: The Poet in the Poem (The Hague: Mouton,
1976), and Paul Zumthor's magisterial work, Essai de Poetique
Medievale (Paris: Seuil, 1976), which has a long treatment of sub-
jectivity (p. 64 onward). More immediately relevant to the
Renaissance period are Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-
Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), and
Anne Ferry, The 'Inward' Language (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1983). For the sonnet sequence in its social matrix,
see Lauro Martines's Society and History in English Renaissance
Verse, which itself has an extensive bibliography, and Arthur
Marotti' s article, " 'Love is not Love': Elizabethan Sonnet
Sequences and the Social Order," English Literary History (1993),
396-428, which again has a detailed and useful bibliography in
its footnotes.
163
Bibliography of Sequences
(Where a sequence has an authorial or well-established title, this
is given. Titles printed independently are in italics.)
Auden, W H. "Sonnets from China." In Collected Poems. Edited by E.
Mendelson. London: Faber and Faber, 1976, 149-57.
Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. Sonnets from the Portuguese. In Selected
Poems. Edited by Margaret Forster. London: Chatto and Windus,
1988,216-37.
Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du Mal. In Oeuvres Completes, 2 vols.
Edited by C. Pichois. Paris: Gallimard, 1975-1976, I.l-134.
Berryman, John. "Sonnets to Chris." In Collected Poems, 1937-1971.
Edited by C. Thornbury. London and Boston: Faber and Faber,
1989, 69-129.
d' Arezzo, Guittone. Rime. Edited by F. Egidi. Bari: Laterza, 1940, 179-82.
da San Gemignano, Folgore. Sonnetti. Edited by G. Caravaggi. Turin:
Einaudi, 1965. "Sonnets on the Months." In Poems and Translations
1850-1870. Translated by D. G. Rossetti. London: Oxford
University Press, 1926,247-54.
Dante [Alighieri, Dante]. Vita Nuova. Edited by D. de Robertis. Milan and
Naples: Ricciardi, 1980. Attributed to Dante. Il Fiore. In Il Fiore e il
Detto d'Amore. Edited by G. Contini. Opere di Dante, VIII. Milano:
Societa Dantesca Italiana, 1984.
Donne, John. Poems by f. D. With Elegies on the Authors Death. London:
John Mariott, 1633. The standard modern edition is The Divine
Poems. Edited by Helen Gardner. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952;
revised, 1964,1-5.
164
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SEQUENCES
du Bellay, Joachim. Les Antiquitez de Rome. In Oeuvres Poetiques. Edited by
H. Chamard. Paris: Comely, 1908-1910, 11.3-29. For the transla-
tion by Spenser, see under "Spenser, Edmund."
Gascoigne, George. A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers. 1573. Reprint, London:
Scolar Press, 1970.
Harrison, Tony. from The School of Eloquence. In Selected Poems. New York
and London: Penguin, 1984,109-78.
Locke, Anne. A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner. In Sermons of John Calvine
upon the Songe that Ezechias Made. London: John Day, 1560. Sonnets
of Am1e Locke. Edited by Kel Morin. Ontario: North Waterloo Press,
1996.
Macbeth, George. "A Christmas Ring." In Collected Poems 1958-1970.
London: Macmillan, 1971, 34-41. "Thoughts on a Box of Razors."
In Collected Poems 1958-1982. London: Hutchinson, 1989, 347-55
(these are quite different collections).
Meredith, George. Modern Love. In The Poems of George Meredith. Edited
by Phyllis Bartlett. New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1978, 1.115-45.
Millay, Edna St. Vincent. "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree" and
"Epitaph for the Race of Man." In Collected Poems. New York:
Harper and Row [1956], 606-22,701-18.
Petrarch, Francis [Francisco Petrarca]. Rimo:: Sparse. Translated with the Italian
text and additional poems as Petrarch's Lyric Poems. Edited by R.
Durling. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press,
1976. In many editions, the Rime Sparse are called the Canzoniere.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Sonnets to Orpheus. Translated with the German text
by J. B. Leishman. London: Hogarth Press, 1946. Leishman's
German text was taken from Die Sonette an Orpheus. Leipzig: Insel
Verlag, 1923. This text is now superseded by the text in the
Siimtliche Werke, vol. 1. Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1927). Revised and
edited by E. Zinn, 1955-1966.
Rossetti, Christina. "Monna Innominata," "Later Life," and "The Thread
of Life." In The Poetical Works of Christina Rossetti. Edited by W. M.
Rossetti. London: Macmillan, 1911, 58-64, 73-82,262-63.
Shakespeare, William. The Sonnets. Edited by W. G. lngram and T.
Redpath. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964. Revised, 1978.
Spenser, Edmund. "Ruines of Rome" and Amoretti. In The Yale Edition of
the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser. Edited by W. A. Or am and oth-
ers. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989,
381-405,583-658.
Wordsworth, William. The River Duddon and "Ecclesiastical Sonnets." In The
Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Edited by E. de Selincourt and
H. Darbishire. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946, III.242-61, 341-407.
Wrath, Lady Mary. "Pamphilia to Amphilanthus." In The Poems of Lady
Mary Wrath. Edited by Josephine Roberts. Baton Rouge, La.:
Louisiana State University Press, 1983,85-145.
165
Index
Alighieri, Dante. See Dante
Apollo, 58,88-89, 130, 133; and
Daphne, 88-89,97, 133
Aristotle, 124; The Poetics, 124
Arnold, Matthew, 123; Culture and
Anarchy, 124
Auden, Wystan H., 6, 7, 69, 70, 76,
129; Sonnets from China, 6, 69, 70,
129
Augustine, St., 64; Confessions, 64
Austen, Jane, 71
Bannerman, Ann, 5
Barnes, Barnabe, 5; A Divine Centurie,
5
Barrett, Elizabeth. See Browning,
Elizabeth Barrett
Baudelaire, Charles, 6, 64, 90, 91; Les
Fleurs du Mal, 64, 91
Bembo, Pietro, 79
Berryman, John, 2, 7, 55, 64, 76, 78,
79, 82, 86, 104, 115; Sonnets to
Chris, 64, 78, 82, 86, 115
167
Biadene, Leandro, 159; Morfologia del
Sonetto nei Secoli XIII-XIV, 159
Blake, William, 130, 133, 137;
Prophetic Books, 130; Songs of
Innocence and Experience, 130
Blunt, Wilfred, 16; The Idler's
Calendar, 16
Boethius, 64; Consolation of
Philosophy, 64
Boissevain, Eugene, 69
Booth, Step hen, 118
Bridges, Robert, 31, 45; The Growth of
Lo1'e, 31,45
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 2, 17,
30, 68, 70, 84, 85,91-98,103,
104; Sonnets from the Portuguese,
8, 17, 68, 70, 84,92-98
Browning, Robert, 6, 30, 84,92-94,
97
Burns, Robert, 51
Cameron, Julia Margaret, 124
Cammelli, Antonio, 10
Cam6es, Luis de, 93
canzone,12,64,127,128
canzoniere, 3, 4, 161
Carrafa, Ferrante, 26; Dell'Austria, 26
Carroll, Lewis, 115; A/ice in
Wonderland, 115
catena, 3, 22
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 30
Colie, Rosalie, 96, 162; The Resources
of Kind, 162
corona sequence, 16, 22, 24, 36,
37-43, 48, 53, 159
Crescimbeni, Giovanni, 159, 160
da Lentino, Giacomo, 12-14,24
Daniel, Samuel, 14, 44; Delia, 14,44
d' Annunzio, Gabriele, 14
Dante, 2, 3, 5, 15, 22, 26, 28, 31,
61-67, 72, 79, 80, 94, 98, 115,
127, 128, 137, 141; and Beatrice,
64, 67, 137; Divine Comedy, 137;
Il Fiore (attrib.), 26, 77; Vita
Nuova, 2, 3, 15, 33,61-67,79,
80, 83, 94, 115
d' Arezzo, Guittone, 2, 25, 31, 32, 46,
62, 63; Tenzone con la Donna
Villana, 32
da San Gemignano, Folgore, 3, 25,
33-35,41, 46; "Sonnets on the
Months," 3, 25,33-34
da Tempo, Antonio, 160; De
Rithimicis Vulgaribus, 160
Dickinson, Emily, 6
Dobson, Austin, 10
Donne, John, 2, 16, 18, 24, 32-40, 41,
43, 67, 84, 94, 105-13,115, 116,
117; Canonisation, The, 127;
Corona, La, 16, 18, 32, 37-40, 55,
109, 112; Holy Sonnets, 32,
105-12, 113, 116; Songs and
Sonets, 108
Donow, Herbert, 159; The Sonnet in
England and America, 159
Dorset, Earl of, 107
Drayton, Michael, 44; Idea, 44
Drummond, William, 128
du Bartas, Saluste. See Sylvester,
Joshua
INDEX
168
du Bellay, Joachim, 11, 29, 46,51-59,
87; Les Antiquitez de Rome, 29,
46, 51- 59; I: Olive, 4, 51, 87
Edwards, Thomas, 5
Eliot, T 5., 125; Four Quartets, 125
enonce/enonciation, 65
Equicola, Mario, 160; Istitutioni a/
comporre ... del/a lingua volgare,
160
Ferry, Anne;163; The "Inward"
Language, 163
fin'amors, 62
Fowler, Alistair, 162; Kinds of
Literature, 162
Frost, Robert, 73-74; Home Burial, 74;
Hyla Brook, 74
Fuller, John, 7, 28, 160, 161;
Illusionists, The, 28; Sonnet, The,
7, 160, 161
Gascoigne, George, 4, 22-24, 43, 163;
Adventures of Maister F.I., The,
23; Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, A,
23
Gilbert and Sullivan, 129; Patience,
129
Going, William T, 158, 159, 162-63;
Scanty Plot of Ground, 158, 159,
162
Gray, Thomas, 50, 100; Elegy, 50
Greenblatt, Step hen, 163; Renaissance
Self-Fashioning, 163
Greville, Fulke, 4; Caelica, 4
Grierson, Herbert, 107
Hardy, Thomas, 70, 92; "She to Him,"
92
Harrison, Tony, 7, 19, 31, 55, 64, 82,
98-105, 110, 113, 114; The School
of Eloquence, 7, 19, 31, 64,98-105
Henri II, King of France, 51, 52, 57
Holden, Edith, 35; Country Diary of
an Edwardian Lady, 35
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 136
Horace, 47, 55,57
INDEX
Intronati, Accademia degli, 3
James VI, King of Scotland, 25
Jasinski, Max, 161; Histoire du Sonnet
en France, 161
John, L. Cecil, 162; Elizabethan Sonnet
Sequences, 162
Keats, John, 6, 126; "Ode to
Autumn," 126
Klossowska, Dorothee, 130
Knoop, Wera, 1,130-36
Laura. See Petrarch
Lawrence, D. H., 72; Odour of
Chrysanthemums, 72
Leishman, J. B., 132
Lever, J. W., 158; The Elizabethan Love
Sonnet, 158
Locke, Anne, 22,25-26,32,35-38,
41, 55, 92, 108; Meditation of a
Penitent Sinner, 4, 25-26, 32,
35-38, 108
Longfellow, Henry W., 6, 29, 30, 127;
"The Two Rivers," 29, 127
Lucretius, 125; De Rerum Natura, 125
Macbeth, George, 7, 24, 25, 32, 35,
40-44,53,67,84, 89, 90, 106;
"Christmas Ring, A," 24, 32,
40-44, 53; Patient, The, 16, 17,
40; "Thoughts on a Box of
Razors," 25, 40, 89, 90
Main, David, 124; Treasury of English
Sonnets, 124
Marotti, Arthur, 163
Martinez, Lauro, 158, 163; Society and
History in English Renaissance
Verse, 158, 163
Meredith, George, 7, 11, 19, 30, 68,
73, 76, 81, 98; Modem Love, 11,
19,68,73,76,81
metapoesis, 40, 51, 53, 81, 84, 90, 99,
101; and control of sequence,
40, 80, 89, 109, 112, 113; and nar-
rative, 44, 67, 136; and speaking,
50,58,65,80,136,141
169
Milholland, Inez, 69
Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 16, 26, 39,
61, 68-76, 92, 95; "Epitaph for
the Race of Man," 68; Fatal
Interview, 68, 70, 92; "Sonnets
from an Ungrafted Tree," 16, 26,
61, 68, 71-76
Milton, John, 5, 10, 16, 29, 49, 51, 59,
61, 69, 94, 108, 124, 137; "Ad
Patrem," 98- 99; Lycidas, 132;
Miltonic sonnet, 5; "On his
Blindness," 124; Paradise Lost,
125; and Petrarchan form,
6,28
Monch, Waiter, 161; Das Sonett,
161
Moschus,51
Orpheus, myth of. See Rilke, Rain er
Maria
Ovid, 91, Heroides, 93
Palgrave, Francis, 123; The Golden
Treasury, 123
Petrarch, Francis, 1, 2, 3, 7, 22, 31, 64,
77-91 93, 98, 102, 103, 113, 127,
133, 137, 141; and identity, 99,
104, 110, 114; imitation by later
poets, 5, 21, 29, 30, 51, 67, 92,
105, 128, 137; Laura, 1, 60, 78,
79, 86-88, 90, 133; Rime Sparse,
1, 3, 4, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 30, 50,
51, 60,77-91,101, 102, 106, 130;
at Vaucluse, 29, 88. See also son-
net, Petrarchan
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 1, 2, 31, 43, 89,
98, 128-38, 141; Duino Elegies,
128-29; Orpheus, myth of, 89,
130-34, 136; Sonnets to Orpheus,
1, 2, 43, 128-38
Rilke, Ruth, 1
Robinson, Mary, 92; Sappho to Phaon,
92
Roman de la Rose, 26
Rossetti, Christina, 25, 53, 64, 92, 98,
125-27; "Later Life," 25;
INDEX
"Monna Innominata," 25, 92,
98; "Thread of Life, The,"
125-27
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 31, 34, 63, 64,
163; "The House of Life," 31,
163
Roubaud, Jacques, 7
Sackville, Richard. See Dorset, Earl of
Saiz, Prospero, 163; Persona and
Poesis, 163
Santagata, Mario, 161; Dal Sonetto al
Canzoniere, 161
Sceve, Maurice, 19; Delie, 19
Scott, Janet, 162; The Elizabeth
Sonnets, 162
sequence, use of term, 4, 18, 19, 23, 163
sestina, 128
Seth, Vikram, 18, 26, 28; The Golden
Gate, 18, 26, 28
Seward, Anna, 139, 140; A Centenary
of Original Sonnets, 139
Shakespeare, William, 2, 28, 29, 31,
60, 79, 96, 102, 106, 112-22, 124,
160; Dark Lady, 95, 113, 116;
"Lover's Complaint, A," 112;
Rival Poet, 114, 116; Sonnets, 18,
44,57,60,68,81,90,95, 105,106,
112-23. See also sonnet,
Shakespearean
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 6, 51
Sidney, Sir Philip, 25, 44, 60, 94, 100,
109, 115, 128, 142; Arcadia, 8;
Astrophel and Stella, 4, 8, 60, 92,
109, 115, 142
sonetto caudato, 10, 11; magistrale, 22,
24,40,41,42,140
sonnet: aggregation of, 16, 20, 24, 40,
44, 48, 55, 60, 139, 140, 158, 161;
and canzone, 12; as deconstruc-
tive, 31, 44; development of,
11-14; and narrative, 8, 9, 65,
67, 68; octave and sestet of, 9;
origins of, 2, 12; parts of, 6,
9-12; Petrarchan, 5, 6, 9, 10, 42,
93, 134, 161; Shakespearean, 6, 9,
24, 25, 104, 134, 161; structure of,
9-12; suite of, 19; tailed, 10, 11
170
sonnetness, 8, 27, 66
sonnet sequence: beginnings of , 2,
14, 22, 25; categorical, 3, 24, 25,
29, 33, 35, 47, 52, 105, 140; con-
fessional, 85, 92, 101, 105;
corona (see corona sequence);
definition of, 16-18; formal, 16,
19, 20,21-26,32-45, 140;
generic properties of, 139; lyric,
17, 19, 20, 28-31,46, 61, 77-122,
124, 126, 140-41; narrative,
8-9, 19, 2 1 ~ 26-28,43,60,
61-76, 140; philosophical,
69-70,123-38, 140-41; as pho-
tograph album, 20-21; sequen-
tiality, overview of, 140-41; and
tenzone (see tenzone); theory of,
5, 7, 49, 54, 139; topographical,
29-30, 46-60;
Spenser, Edmund, 4, 28 29, 31, 57, 59,
60, 68, 85, 127; Amoretti, 60, 68,
85, 127; Faerie Queene, 127
Spiller, Michael R. G., 158-59; The
Development of the Sonnet,
158-59
Sterner, Lewis G., 159; The Sonnet in
American Literature, 159
stilnovisti, 62-63, 66-67, 72, 81, 92
suite of sonnets, 19, 63, 98, 108, 113
Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of, 4, 25
Sylvester, Joshua, Divine Weeks and
Works (transl.), 43
Tasso, Torquato, 24
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 6, 69, 73, 98;
Tn Memoriam, 69; "Lady of
Shalott, The," 98; "Mariana," 73,
75
tenzone, 2, 3, 14, 15, 16, 18, 22, 32, 61,
63
Thomson, Alexander, 5
Thorpe, Thomas, 18, 112, 113
Tomlinson, Charles, 160; The Sonnet,
160
Tottel, Richard, 4; Songes and Sonettes, 4
Trissino, Giovanni, 160; La Poetica,
160
Tupper, Martin, 25
Vaganay, Hugues, 159; Le Sonnet en
Italie et en France, 159
Virgil, 59, 74; Acneid, 59; Eclogues,
74
Watson, Thomas, 19; Hekatompathia,
19
Whitman, Walt, 6
Wither, George, 26, 27; Campo-Musae,
26; Vox Paczfica, 26
Wordsworth, William, 5, 6, 17, 30, 31,
45, 46-51, 53, 54, 55, 57, 59, 79,
124, 133, 137; Ecclesiastical
Sonnets, 6, 45, 47, 59, 60;
INDEX
171
"Memorials of a Tour in Italy,"
47; "Ode: Intimations
oflmmortality," 125; River
Vuddon, The, 17, 29, 31,46-51,
54, 55, 59; "Widow on
Windermere-Side, The," 18
Wrath, Lady Mary, 43, 92; Pamphilia
to Amphilanthus, 92
Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 4
Yeats, W B., 70, 133
Zumthor, Paul, 163; Essai de Poetique
Medievale, 163