English Romantic sonnets

A draft of Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

The sonnet was a popular form of poetry during the Romantic period: William Wordsworth wrote 523 sonnets, John Keats 67, Samuel Taylor Coleridge 48, and Percy Bysshe Shelley 18.

The sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines that follows a strict rhyme scheme and specific structure, the invention of which is credited to the thirteenth century Italian poet Giacomo Da Lentini, and was subsequently made famous by Petrarch. Sir Thomas Wyatt, in the early 16th century, introduced the sonnet into England. However, it was the Earl of Surrey who developed the rhyme scheme – abab cdcd efef gg – which now characterizes the English or Shakespearean sonnet.

Romantic literature in English includes both Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnets.

Revival

The sonnet has been a popular literary form across Europe since its creation in 13th century Sicily. Adopted into English poetry during Tudor and Stuart times, it had fallen out of favour during the late 17th and early 18th century, although it had not disappeared altogether. Revival began with poets like Thomas Warton and Charlotte Smith before later including Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley.

The Romantic poets were influenced by all their famous predecessors when writing sonnets, but the most important single influence was John Milton, who had written less than 30 sonnets himself. In the 17th century Milton had kept the sonnet form alive while also expanding the subject matter – which hitherto had mainly been love – by writing about ideas, events, history and contemporary issues, as well as including more personal feelings. Like Milton, the Romantics wrote relatively few love sonnets and the sonnet of the Romantic era focuses more on politics, nature, friendship, art, history, religion, life and death. In fact some of the Romantic poets recommended the form in sonnets of their own. Wordsworth's "Scorn not the Sonnet" and "Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room" are examples of this, as well as Keats' suggested formal improvements in "If by dull rhymes our English must be chain'd".

In Wordsworth's opinion, poets should write sonnets to add variety to their work and keep them out of the trap of routine. John Clare, too, believed the sonnet gave him scope to annotate the natural themes that took his fancy in a disciplined way. A later editor has surmised that its compact form represented for him "a kind of self-discipline, forcing him to concentrate and obtain his effects with economy, where in other poems he allowed himself to wander a little aimlessly". But younger poets meanwhile took advantage of the form's restriction to engage in friendly competition. At the end of 1816, John Keats and Leigh Hunt set themselves the task of each writing a sonnet "On the Grasshopper and Cricket" in a quarter of an hour. In the following year Shelley and Horace Smith competed together after visiting the British Museum, from which sonnets on Ozymandias resulted. And early in 1818, Shelley, Keats and Hunt took "The Nile" as their subject for sonnets published separately soon after.

But the sonnet form presented a different kind of challenge to the older Romantic authors, who are usually noted for their strong "I" assertion in lyric narratives. Coleridge confessed of his own performance that "The sonnet has ever been a favourite species of composition with me; but I am conscious that I have not succeeded in it".

Nature

Although the Romantics wrote sonnets about a variety of subjects, one of the most common was nature. Petrarch, indeed, had included descriptions of nature in his sonnets, as did Shakespeare, this was generally incidental to the main theme relating to love or as part of an analogy. For the Romantics, however, Nature is a master theme. Many of the sonnets and poems of the era describe the calm, beauty, power or sublimity of the natural scene and Nature is often personified to emphasise the closeness in the human relationship to it. For example, the analogy between man and nature is drawn in Keats' "The Human Seasons", where the changes in the seasons are compared with the stages of human life.

Form

The two classic forms that the Romantics used the most were the Petrarchan sonnet and the Shakespearean sonnet. The Petrarchan or Italian form usually follows a rhyme scheme of abba abba cde cde. The poem is usually divided into two sections with the first eight lines, an octave, and the last six, a sestet. There is usually a turn in the poem around line nine. The Shakespearean form has a rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg. The end rhyming couplet is often used to turn the idea that has been building through the poem.

The Romantics played with these forms. Since the general topic and focus of the sonnet shifted in this era, it makes sense that the form would also change to mirror the content. A sonnet like Shelley’s Ozymandias uses neither a complete Shakespearian nor Petrarchan rhyme scheme. The pattern of ab ab ac dc ed ef ef, is no less a sonnet than those of conventional patterns. The movement away from set structures could be to mirror the feelings of detachment in the poem.

Charlotte Smith (1749 – 1806) was one of the first Romantics to bring back the use of the sonnet. She is noted for her experimentation with forms, combining In new ways the Petrarchan and Shakespearean forms, picking and choosing the best features of both. Her poem, "Sonnet LVI, The Captive Escaped in the Wilds of America", has end lines that turn the whole poem in a new direction using mostly near rhymes.

The ode might seem a much more likely form for the Romantics, because it is an irregular form and adapted in many ways to the speaker and subject. These elements of the ode were often used to convey rapid changes in thoughts and emotions. However, the sonnet form gave the Romantic poets the best of both worlds. A poem like Shelley’s "Ode to the West Wind" contains violent shifts reflecting the blowing wind, but it consists of sections made up of sonnets. The Romantics prove with this that they could master the ways of their predecessors that they so admire and still move on to something new. The form of the sonnet helps Shelley to contain something that is uncontainable. Following the form of Dante in his Divine Comedy, Shelley uses a unique terza rima pattern to create a structure like the flow of the wind, and yet contain the poem, so there is a sense of closure at the end.