We saw with Spenser how poets often gather sonnets into groups, suites or sequences. There are probably a number of reasons – the short form drawn from song is an almost perfect fit for the single thought, the well-turned image, riddle or device, but it makes it hard to follow the narrative urge so strong in the Elizabethan mind; and publication requires a more extensive collection of poetic documents, and the printing industry, of both legitimate and pirated texts, thrives in Elizabethan London.
The sonnet sequence remains a recurrent feature of poetry collections in English. One of Seamus Heaney’s, ‘Squarings’, has attracted a great deal of popular as well as scholarly attention in Ireland. If the individual sonnet requires deft handling, the construction of the sonnet sequence allows – or tempts? – the poet to display larger-scale architectural interweaving. Most complex of all, perhaps, is the crown of sonnets, 14 poems where the last line of one provides the first of the succeeding poem (and in some variants, where a fifteenth poem is composed of the first lines of the other 14.) Ars longa, vita brevis … or, life’s too bloody short.
But we have come to the most famous sonnet sequence of them all, the sonnets of Shakespeare. Published in 1609, they chart the progress (or lack of it) of a mysterious love triangle consisting of the poet – technically, rather, the ‘speaker’ – a male youth, and the famous ‘Dark Lady.’ The sequence is too complex to summarise, but it is built like a great deal of Elizabethan poetry on stock themes and tropes. Shakespeare can be said to transcend those, but I think that misses the point: the great sonnets remake the conventions, exist wholly within them and energise them, embed them afresh in the language.
Here, early in the sequence, we see our old favourite: art preserves the lover’s beauty (or fame, or whatever…) The famous first line is unashamedly the artist at work, riffling through his book of conventional similes and deciding that, no, there are lots of interesting ways in which the young beloved is not in fact like a summer’s day at all. But come to think of it, the sestet says, it is in the very act of making the beloved the subject of the artwork that he outstrips the comparator…
XVIII
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
We’ll look at a couple more of the Sonnets in the next day or two, but you can find the complete collection online here, for instance
These short bite-sized essayettes on the great fourteen-liners in English are part of an ongoing conversation with a friend. If you're interested, the earlier instalments are here, here, here, here and here.