8.4 The English Sonnet
Have you ever experienced a production of a Shakespearian drama? If not, what’s keeping you?
You might begin by viewing those film clips in the last section. Olivier. Quartermaine. Schofield. Be sure to listen to the rhythms in their delivery. For, after all, a Shakespearian play is not just Drama. It’s also poetry. The lines are written in Verse form. But what does that mean?
We’ve said before that poetry is always about Rhythm, repeated patterns of sound and sense. Of course, any English sentence has its own rhythm. Traditional English poetry crosscuts that ordinary syntactic rhythm with a special, formulaic verse rhythm.
Listen carefully to Olivier’s reading of the St. Crispin speech. He subtly fuses two rhythms into, not one, but a hybrid braiding of rhythms. The plain patter of English phrases and clauses. And the orchestrated conformity of successive lines repeating a strict formula of syllables. With rare skill, Olivier sings the delicately interwoven rhythms of transcendent poetry.
Scanning the Sonnet
Few of us can sing the verse patterns of great poetry with Olivier’s skill. We may need to Scan the verse first and then return to read with rhythmic sensitivity. To Scan a poem is to break down its rhythmical patterns.
Scanning the thousands of lines of a five-act play, of course, is beyond our scope. So let’s turn our attention to Shakespeare’s skills in a much shorter form: the Sonnet. The Italian poet Plutarch’s verse form became all the rage in Elizabeth and England. Scores of courtiers and several major pots competed to pen the littlest 14-line Courtly Love lyric. The best practitioner, of course, was Shakespeare.
So let’s read Shakespeare’s Sonnet # 18 (1609). We’ll follow our standard steps for reading poetry.
Step 1. Read aloud.
Go ahead. Read the Sonnet out loud. Don’t rush. Listen. Hear the rhythms. What patterns do you hear?
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[1] 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 wand’rest 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.
[1] Fair from fair: for Elizabethans, the word fair suggested beauty, health, moral correctness, and light in color
What you pattern do you hear? I’ll bet you hear a Rhyme Scheme. Certain lines end with words sharing a final sound: day/May, Fade/shade, see/thee, etc.
Scanning Rhyme
When we scan we use letters to indicate lines that rhyme. How would you scan these rhymes? Go ahead. Jot the pattern down on a sheet of paper.
Scanning. Jotting.
Scanning. Jotting.
Did you come up with something like this: A-B-A-B; C-D-C-D; E-F-E-F; G-G? I’ll bet you did. Those lines end in rhymes.
OK, they rhyme. So?
Well, notice that the Rhyme Scheme defines the Sonnet’s four Stanzas: Four lines (a Quatrain), four lines, four lines and two lines (a Couplet). In a bit, we’ll see the significance of that structure.
Scanning Meter
Rhyme is easy. Meter is hard. Elusive. Subtle. … Hard.
Meter is a strict pattern of sound units: i.e. syllables. Remember how Haiku had 17 syllables in 3 lines? In English meter, the pattern consists of A) the number of syllables that form a line and B) which of the syllables are stressed.
To Scan meter, read the lines aloud and really butcher the rhythm by HAMMERING the stressed syllables. Try it. Crank on those stresses and whisper the others. Something like this–click and listen.
Each line in the first Stanza has 10 syllables broken into 5 Feet, the smallest unit of meter which functions like a measure in music. And the pattern rises: the 2nd syllable in each Foot is stressed.
Thus we find the famous Iambic Pentameter pattern. Each Iamb contains two, rising syllables: ta-DA. Pentameter just means 5 feet (10 syllables) per line. One can have 3 feet per line (trimeter), 4 feet (tetrameter) or any other combination. The rising Iambic or 2-beat meter is overwhelmingly dominant in English verse. It is almost impossible to consistently sustain other rhythms in English.
Our sample of Iambic Pentameter works out almost perfectly. But beware! Do not assume that good poetry always will. Strong poetry very frequently contains exceptions (e.g. Troches, Spondees, etc.). Go back and Scan Shakespeare’s verse dramas. You will find lots of muscular variations in his Blank Verse.
But wait. We can’t leave it here. Fine poetry subtly interweaves normal speech rhythm with meter and a fine sensitivity to nuances of sense and inflection. It’s like the difference between dutifully playing the notes and letting the music flow. Try again to subtly honor the Meter while finding the passion in the normal syntaxes.
Step 2: Read the plain sense of the words
Once we have heard the verse, we can work out the plain sense of the words. Do not jump forward into symbolic Signification until you are clear on what the surface of the text is saying.
Shall I compare Thee … Obviously, the poetic voice is addressing a beloved. Drawing on our knowledge of the Courtly Love tradition, we easily perceive that Shakespeare is entering the competition among Elizabethan courtiers to demonstrate superior wit in composing extravagant praise for an ideal, distant beloved.
So what strategy does Shakespeare use? He begins with a pair of Stanzas offering extravagantly flattering comparisons between the beloved and the beauties of nature. This is a parody of the banal clichés that Wanna-Be amateurs use: you’re as beautiful as a summer’s day; your beauty shines like the sun. But Shakespeare’s treatment of these comparisons has a twist: while a weak amateur latches onto the beauty of the day and the sun, the master deftly identifies the negatives of the comparisons. But Shakespeare is just getting started.
Stanza 3 challenges all we know about poetic clichés and about life. Human beauty famously fades and decays over time. But somehow the poet is claiming that his beloved’s beauty will not fade or succumb to death. Huh? What can he be saying?
The final Couplet slyly pulls the rug out from under the previous stanzas. The final word is “Thee,” i.e. you. So whose life is going to last “so long as men can breathe or eyes can see”? Can you decode the joke?
The shift between Stanza 3 to Stanza 4 marks a thematic Turn, a Conventional feature of sonnets. Remember the questions I asked in section 3.2 above? Where do the themes shift suddenly and sharply in Petrarch’s sonnet? Consider these lines:
And yet I live! Myself I grieve and scorn, …
In the first 8 lines of Petrarch’s Sonnet, Petrarch professes his poignant love for Laura. Then, in line 8 we learn that Laura has actually died. Through the final 6 lines, the poet expresses guilt and disgust at the fact that he lives on while Laura is “but dust, poor dust.”
In a Petrarchan (or Italian) sonnet, a thematic Turn occurs between lines 8 and 9. Shakespeare followed Petrarch’s lead, but offered a variant. Instead of 3 stanzas—4, 4, 6—moves the Turn down to line 13, thus compressing the concluding Theme into a killer punchline. Have you worked it out?
Step 3: Track patterns of sense and signification
This is where we move into our 3rd step of the process: exploring patterns of sense and Signification that lead beyond the surface and into deeper Themes. In the case of a sonnet, the structure will always help. Sonnets written in English generally fall into one of two structural templates:
Shakespeare’s Sonnet ends in that concluding Couplet which lifts the poem to a new thematic level. The poem’s target is not really a beloved person. Whoever Shakespeare was thinking of—scholars debate this endlessly—has long since lost the battle with time and death. The identity—Thee—that has defied time is the construct of a poem written by, well, by Shakespeare. It’s 500 years later and no one is reading the average Elizabethan courtier. People are still reading Shakespeare. Take that, chumps! Match this!
When I read that Couplet, I think of a basketball star talking trash to lesser players. In the Context of the Elizabethan court, the theme of competition with lesser writers opens the Courtly Love Conventions up to a social dimension.
But we can take things even a step further. Think about the audacity of a human being claiming the capability of defying decay and death even in an artistic composition. Think of Shelley ironically parodying the futile pride of an ancient king trying to defy death with a stone monument that, thousands of years later, lies in fragments among the lone and level sands stretching far away (Section 1.2). The poem dares to elevate conventional themes of love into a profound and disillusioning reflection on existential sorrow.
So there we are. Following our three steps of reading verse, we mined a lot of ore, perhaps more than seemed immediately apparent. Always remember that “deep meaning” grows step by step out of listening and then reading the plain sense of the words.
References
Shakespeare, W. (1609). Sonnet #18. Poetry Foundation https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45087/sonnet-18-shall-i-compare-thee-to-a-summers-day
to analyze the Rhyme and Meter of a poem
a 14-line lyric poem that explores a theme in stanzas with a thematic turn either between lines 8 and 9 (Petrarchan/Italian Sonnet) or between lines 12 and 13 (Shakespearian/English Sonnet).
a Medieval poetic tradition deriving from Arab verse and 12th Century French troubadours in which a poetic voice proclaims a spiritually exalted, chaste love for an unattainable beloved, often the wife of the lover’s liege lord (feu-dal master). A conception of transcendent sexual love that remains influential in modern culture and its arts.
within a poem, a repeated pattern of sounds that end lines, defining stanzaic boundaries and shaping a poem’s themes. Designated for analysis by letters: e.g. a-b-a-b, in which a-lines and b-lines end in rhyming words.
a division of the poem rather like a prose paragraph. Stanzas are labelled according to their number of lines and are often, but not always, defined by rhyme schemes.
a verse stanza of 4 lines
a verse stanza of 2 lines, often ending in a rhyme
a disciplined pattern of sound units throughout the lines of a poem. In English verse, meter is found in the number and a pattern of stressed and un-stressed syllables in a line
a Japanese poetical genre in which 17 syllables deftly evoke a poignant, often seasonal nature scene that shifts with a cutting word into a thematic reflection on life
in English meter, a falling, 2-syllable foot in which the stressed note comes first: TA-da
a metrical foot pairing stressed syllables: e.g. JACK SPRATT … Spondees are generally exceptions to the dominant metrical pattern and serve to slow the rhythm for emphasis.
a secondary level of thematic meaning that opens up beyond the immediate subject of art or literature. E.g. the keys held by the figure of St. Peter in a Christian icon signify Christ’s promise that Peter would hold the keys to heaven and earth (Matthew 6.19).
in a Sonnet, a thematic shift, often a contrast, between the themes of the earlier and closing stanzas
an aspect of art which is expected and understood by the audience in a particular tradition
a pattern of thought, value, and reflection which signifies meaning beyond the specifics of the content in a work of art
a verse stanza of 6 lines
the situation of a work of art in a cultural, historical, or personal setting which shapes media, materials, techniques, and meanings for the artist and also the audience
a standard feature of art in a given genre that is expected and understood in the context of origin: e.g. a content, a style, a signification, a theme