Sonnet Set Up
Terry Chavarin
Giacomo da Lentini, is credited with the sonnet's invention at the Court of Frederick II in the Sicilian city of Palermo. The Sicilian School of poets who surrounded Lentini then spread the form to the mainland. Those earliest sonnets no longer survive in the original Sicilian language, however, but only after being translated into Tuscan dialect. The form consisted of a pair of quatrains followed by a pair of tercets with the symmetrical rhyme scheme ABABABAB CDCDCD, where the sense is carried forward in a new direction after the midway break.
Peter Dronke has commented that there was something intrinsic to its flexible form that contributed to the sonnet's survival far beyond its region of origin. [2] William Baer suggests that the first eight lines of the earliest Sicilian sonnets are identical to the eight-line Sicilian folksong stanza known as the Strambotto. To this, da Lentini (or whoever else invented the form) added two tercets to the Strambotto in order to create the new 14-line sonnet form.[3]
In contrast, Hassanally Ladha[4] has argued that the Sicilian sonnet's structure and content drew upon Arabic poetry and cannot be explained as the "invention" of the Sicilian School of poets. Ladha notes that "in its Sicilian beginnings, the sonnet evinces literary and epistemological contact with the qasida",[5] and emphasizes that the sonnet did not emerge simultaneously with its supposedly defining 14-line structure. "Tellingly, attempts to close off the sonnet from its Arabic predecessors depend upon a definition of the new lyric to which Giacomo's poetry does not conform: surviving in thirteenth-century recensions, his poems appear not in fourteen, but rather six lines, including four rows, each with two hemistiches and two 'tercets' each in a line extending over two rows."[6] In Ladha's view, the sonnet emerges as the continuation of a broader tradition of love poetry throughout the Mediterranean world and relates to such other forms as the Sicilian strambotto, the Provenal canso, the Andalusi Arabic muwashshah and zajal, as well as the qasida.[7]
The structure of a typical Italian sonnet as it developed included two parts that together formed a compact form of "argument". First, the octave forms the "proposition", which describes a "problem" or "question", followed by a sestet (two tercets) that proposes a "resolution". Typically, the ninth line initiates what is called the "turn", or "volta", which signals the move from proposition to resolution. Even in sonnets that do not strictly follow the problem/resolution structure, the ninth line still often marks a "turn" by signaling a change in the tone, mood, or stance of the poem.
Later, the ABBA ABBA pattern became the standard for Italian sonnets. For the sestet, there were two different possibilities: CDE CDE and CDC CDC. In time, other variants on this rhyming scheme were introduced, such as CDC DCD or CDE DCE. Petrarch typically used an ABBA ABBA pattern for the octave, followed by either CDE CDE or CDC CDC rhymes in the sestet.
At the turn of the 14th century there arrive early examples of the sonnet sequence unified about a single theme. This is represented by Folgore da San Geminiano's series on the months of the year,[9] followed by his sequence on the days of the week.[10] At a slightly earlier date, Dante had published his La Vita Nuova, a narrative commentary in which appear sonnets and other lyrical forms centred on the poet's love for Beatrice.[11] Most of the sonnets there are Petrarchan (here used as a purely stylistic term since Dante predated Petrarch). Chapter VII gives the sonnet "O voi che per la via", with two sestets (AABAAB AABAAB) and two quatrains (CDDC CDDC), and Ch. VIII, "Morte villana", with two sestets (AABBBA AABBBA) and two quatrains (CDDC CDDC). Petrarch followed in his footsteps later in the next century with the 366 sonnets of the Canzionere, which chronicle his life-long love for Laura.[12]
Widespread as sonnet writing became in Italian society, among practitioners were to be found some better known for other things: the painters Giotto and Michelangelo, for example, and the astronomer Galileo. The academician Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni lists 661 poets just in the 16th century.[13] So common were they that eventually, in the words of a literary historian: "No event was so trivial, none so commonplace, a tradesman could not open a larger shop, a government clerk could not obtain a few additional scudi of salary, but all his friends and acquaintance must celebrate the event, and clothe their congratulations in a copy of verses, which almost invariably assumed this shape."[14]
The sole confirmed surviving sonnet in the Occitan language is by Paolo Lanfranchi da Pistoia and confidently dated to 1284.[15] This employs the rhyme scheme ABAB ABAB CDCDCD and has a political theme, as do some others of dubious authenticity or merit ascribed to "William of Almarichi" and Dante de Maiano.
The poet igo Lpez de Mendoza, 1st Marquis of Santillana is credited as among the foremost to attempt "sonnets written in the Italian manner" (sonetos fechos al itlico modo) towards the middle of the 15th century. Since the Castilian language and prosody were in a transitional state at the time, the experiment was unsuccessful.[18] It was therefore not until after 1526 that the form was reintroduced by Juan Boscn. According to his account, he met Andrea Navagero, the Venetian Ambassador to the Spanish Court, in that year while the latter was accompanying King Carlos V on a visit to the Alhambra. In the course of their literary discussion, Navagero then suggested that the poet might attempt the sonnet and other Italian forms in his own language.[19]
Boscn not only took up the Venetian's advice but did so in association with the more talented Garcilaso de la Vega, a friend to whom some of his sonnets are addressed and whose early death is mourned in another. The poems of both followed the Petrarchan model, employed the hitherto unfamiliar hendecasyllable, and when writing of love were based on the neoplatonic ideal championed in The Book of the Courtier (Il Cortegiano) that Boscn had also translated. Their reputation was consolidated by the later 1580 edition of Fernando de Herrera, who was himself accounted "the first major Spanish sonneteer after Garcilaso".[20] During the Baroque period that followed, two notable writers of sonnets headed rival stylistic schools. The culteranismo of Luis de Gngora, later known as 'Gongorismo' after him, was distinguished by an artificial style and the use of elaborate vocabulary, complex syntactical order and involved metaphors. The verbal usage of his opponent, Francisco de Quevedo, was equally self-conscious, deploying wordplay and metaphysical conceits, after which the style was known as conceptismo.
Soon afterwards, the sonnet form was deconstructed as part of the modernist questioning of the past. Thus, in the Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni's Mascarilla y trbol (Mask and Clover, 1938), a section of unrhymed poems using many of the traditional versification structures of the form are presented under the title "antisonnets".[29]
In French prosody, sonnets are traditionally composed in the French alexandrine, which consists of lines of twelve syllables with a central caesura. Imitations of Petrarch were first introduced by Clment Marot, and Mellin de Saint-Gelais also took up the form near the start of the 16th century.[39] They were later followed by Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay and Jean Antoine de Baf, around whom formed a group of radical young noble poets of the court, generally known today as La Pliade. They employed, amongst other forms of poetry, the Petrarchan sonnet cycle, developed around an amorous encounter or an idealized woman. The character of the group's literary program was given in Du Bellay's manifesto, the "Defense and Illustration of the French Language" (1549), which maintained that French (like the Tuscan of Petrarch and Dante) was a worthy language for literary expression, and which promulgated a program of linguistic and literary production and purification.[40]
In the aftermath of the Wars of Religion, French Catholic jurist and poet Jean de La Ceppde published the Theorems, a sequence of 515 sonnets with non-traditional rhyme schemes, about the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Drawing upon the Gospels, Greek and Roman mythology, and the Fathers of the Church, La Ceppde's poetry was praised by Saint Francis de Sales for transforming "the Pagan Muses into Christian ones". La Ceppde's sonnets often attack the Calvinist doctrine of a judgmental and unforgiving God by focusing on Christ's passionate love for the human race. Afterwards the work was long forgotten, until the 20th century witnessed a revival of interest in the poet, and his sonnets are now regarded as classic works of French poetry.[41]
Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, have been described as "the first English Petrarchans" from their pioneering the sonnet form in English. In addition, some 25 of Wyatt's poems are dependent on Petrarch, either as translations or imitations, while, of Surrey's five, three of them are translations and two imitations.[47] In one instance, both poets translated the same poem, Rime 140.[48] From these examples, as elsewhere in their prosodic practice, a difference between their style can be observed. Wyatt's verse metre, though in general decasyllabic, is irregular and proceeds by way of significantly stressed phrasal units.[49] But, in addition, Wyatt's sonnets are generally closer in construction to those of Petrarch.
Prosodically, Surrey is more adept at composing in iambic pentameter and his sonnets are written in what has come to be known anachronistically as Shakespearean measure.[50] This version of the sonnet form, characterised by three alternately rhymed quatrains terminating in a final couplet (ABAB CDCD, EFEF, GG), became the favourite during Elizabethan times, when it was widely used. It was particularly so in whole series of amatory sequences, beginning with Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella (1591) and continuing over a period of two decades. About four thousand sonnets were composed during this time.[51] However, with such a volume, much there that was conventional and repetitious came to be viewed with a sceptical eye. Sir John Davies mocked these in a series of nine "gulling sonnets"[52] and William Shakespeare was also to dismiss some of them in his Sonnet 130, "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun".