Sunday sonnet: John Donne

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John Donne was a very religious man. And he was a spectacular writer who put together poetry that was groundbreaking in his day and still ripe for analysis in this age. Here, today, is one of his Holy Sonnets, one of many complex pieces that illustrate his relationship with God.

This poem was written in 1633. The placements of the commas and apostrophes are accurate, and they demonstrate how poets used to struggle to maintain meter in their works. In this case, as in many poems of the age, the meter is iambic pentameter.


14

Batter my heart, three-personed God; for You
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me,'and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to'another due,
Labor to'admit You, but O, to no end;
Reason, Your viceroy'in me, me should defend,
But is captíved, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly'I love You,'and would be lovéd fain,
But am betrothed unto Your enemy.
Divorce me,'untie or break that knot again;
Take me to You, imprison me, for I,
Except You'enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me.

Rhyme scheme: abba abba cd cd ee

Sunday sonnet: Gerard Manley Hopkins

More dense expression from Mr. Hopkins, an 1877 poem about the wonders of the deity.


"God's Grandeur"

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
- It will flame out, like the shining from shook foil;
- It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
- An all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
- And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
- There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
- Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs---
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
- World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.


Rhyme scheme: abba abba cdcdcd

Sunday sonnet: John Clare

Here is another sonnet in blank verse, though it does not seem to exhibit the proposition/resolution structure that is characteristic of the verse form (unless the shift of the focus from people to the dog in the ninth line qualifies as the "turn"). Or perhaps this work, written between 1837 and 1841, is nothing more than a fourteen-line poem.


"Gypsies"

The snow falls deep; the forest lies alone;
The boy goes hasty for his load of brakes,
Then thinks upon the fire and hurries back;
The gypsy knocks his hands and tucks them up,
And seeks his squalid camp, half hid in snow,
Beneath the oak which breaks away the wind,
And bushes close in snow like hovel warm;
There tainted mutton wastes upon the coals,
And the half-wasted dog squats close and rubs,
Then feels the heat too strong, and goes aloof;
He watches well, but none a bit can spare,
And vainly waits the morsel thrown away.
'Tis thus they live--a picture to the place,
A quiet, pilfering, unprotected race.

Rhyme scheme: blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter.

Sunday sonnet: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Achingly poignant with its imagery of loss, this sonnet was written in 1886.


"The Cross of Snow"

In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
- A gentle face--the face of one long dead--
- Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
- The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
Here in this room she died; and soul more white
- Never through martyrdom of fire was led
- To its repose; nor can in books be read
- The legend of a life more benedight.
There is a mountain in the distant West
- That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
- Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
- These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
- And seasons, changeless since the day she died.

Rhyme scheme: abba abba cde cde

Sunday sonnet: John Milton

Here's a sonnet from the master, John Milton, written in 1658. It tells of a dream in which he saw his wife, who had died in childbirth, and his sadness upon wakening.

Methought I saw my late espousèd saint
- Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,
- Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,
- Rescued from death by force though pale and faint.
Mine, as whom washed from spot of childbed taint,
- Purification in the old law did save,
- And such, as yet once more I trust to have
- Full sight of her in heaven without resraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind.
- Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight
- Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined
So clear, as in no face with more delight.
- But O, as to embrace me she inclined,
- I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.

Rhyme scheme: abba abba cdcdcd

Sunday sonnet: William Blake

I include this sonnet from William Blake, written in 1783, because it haunts me a little with its divine and pastoral imagery. And because it is in blank verse, which is a bit unusual for a sonnet.


"To the Evening Star"

Thou fair-hair'd angel of the evening,
Now, while the sun rests on the mountains, light
Thy bright torch of love; they radiant crown
Put on, and smile upon our evening bed!
Smile on our loves; and, while thou drawest the
Blue curtains of the sky, scatter thy silver dew
On every flower that shuts its sweet eyes
In timely sleep. Let thy west wind sleep on
The lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes,
And wash the dusk with silver. Soon, full soon,
Dost thou withdraw; then the wolf rages wide,
And the lion glares thro' the dun forest:
The fleeces of our flocks are cover'd with
Thy sacred dew: protect them with thine influence.

Rhyme scheme: blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter.

Sunday Sonnet: Gerard Manley Hopkins

And now, a dense sonnet written by Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1877, a poem marvelous in its compact complexity.

"The Windhover"
TO CHRIST OUR LORD

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
- dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
- Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
- As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
- Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,---the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
- Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

- No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
- Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Rhyme scheme: abba abba cdc dcd
It looks at first as if the rhyme scheme should be aaaa aaaa bcb cbc, but a closer examination reveals the a rhymes to be words that end in "-ing" and the b rhymes to be words that end in "-iding."

Sunday sonnet: John Keats

Today, I offer a fantastic expression of the awe a poet feels when reading an exceptional work of literature (in this case, a translation of Homer's works done by George Chapman). Keats's experience was written down in sonnet form in 1816, and I include this poem because I like it, and because it contains a well-known goof on the author's part.

"On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"

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

Rhyme scheme: abba abba cdcdcd

Sunday sonnet: Dante Gabriel Rossetti

For today's sonnet, we turn to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a painter as well as a poet, and his collection called The House of Life. This sonnet was written in 1847 and published in 1870.

A Sonnet is a moment's monument,--
- Memorial from the Soul's eternity
- To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be,
Whether for lustral rite or dire portent,
Of its own arduous fullness reverent:
- Carve it in ivory or in ebony,
- As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see
Its flowering crest impearled and orient.

A Sonnet is a coin: its face reveals
- The soul--its converse, to what Power 'tis due:
Whether for tribute to the august appeals
- Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue,
It serve; or, 'mid the dark wharf's cavernous breath,
In Charon's palm it pay the toll to Death.


Rhyme scheme: abba abba cdcdee

Sunday sonnet: William Wordsworth

Why the sonnet? Because it is a classic structure, and even the likes of William Wordsworth -- who made a name for himself shunning traditional meter -- still found refuge in the sonnet from time to time.

But, don't take my word for it. Here's "Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room," published in 1807:

Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth the prison, into 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.

Rhyme scheme: abba abba cddccd

Sunday sonnet: John Donne

For no other reason than I read it and I liked it, here is a sonnet written by John Donne. It is number four of a series of six sonnets called Holy Sonnets: Divine Meditations (ca. 1609):

At the round earths imagin'd corners, blow
Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise
From death, you numberlesse infinities
Of soules, and to your scattred bodies goe,
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom warre, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despaire, law, chance, hath slaine, and you whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never tast deaths woe.
But let them sleepe, Lord, and mee mourne a space,
For, if above all these, my sinnes abound,
'Tis late to aske abundance of thy grace,
When wee are there; here on this lowly ground,
Teach mee how to repent; for that's as good
As if thou'hadst seal'd my pardon, with thy blood.

Rhyme scheme: abba abba cdcdee