SPECIAL ARTICLE.

Press, Volume LIX, Issue 17809, 7 July 1923, Page 13

SPECIAL ARTICLE.

A DIVERSITY OF SONNETS.

WITH CASUAL COMMENT. (S?ICIAIXT WBITTZN TOR "TBB PEEBB.") By W. Douglass Andrews. 11 me dit: e'est un beau metier, Beau maitre, de faire tel chose.' To achieve dullness in a sonnet is an easy feat. One has only to write down the rhyme-words first, and then work cut the lines to fit them. Many poetasters choose this way and have their due reward, for the end of this pay is death. But to achieve perfection, to fit into the brief compass of fourteen lines and a rhyme scheme both limited and difficult a fresh and beautiful thought, suggested it may be by happy accident and linked with the mood of the moment, but so instinct with life as to be free of all the years, an unfailing well-«pring of joy and inspiration, is another and a harder matter. Yet the miracle has Deen wrought a thousand times, and much of the most perfect poetic work cast in this delicately miniature mould. Scorn not the sonnet; oritic, you havo frowned, Mindless of its just honours; with this key Shakcßpearo unlocked his hop,rt- the melody Of this Binall lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound; A thousand times thii pip© did Tasso sound; With it Cambens soothed an exile's grief; The sonnet glittered & gay myrtle leaf Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned His visionary brow; a glow-worm lamp, It cheered mild Spenser, called from fairyland To struggle through dark ways; and when a damp Fell round tho path of Milton, in his hand The thing became o trumpet, whence he blew Soul-animating strains—alas, too few. Lacking the stamp of inevitability, ''composed, almost extempore, in a short ■walk on the western side of Itydal Lake," as Wordsworth characteristicallv labelled it, the familiar lines still bear repetition which, when you come to think of it, is the essential difference of the true sonnet. But the worst of it is, even a great poet may become go adept in the use of this form that lie turns it to most pedestrian uses. "Wordsworth, unhapoily, is not always, nor indeed often, on the level of Bees that soar for bloom High as the highest peaks of Furness fells, And murmur by the hour in foxglove bells. And even in that immortal sequence which Shakespeare gave the world as an eternal challenge to the curiosity of critics there is inequality. Yet to say so is almost a sin, for where else in recorded literature can one find so prodigious a wealth of sustained power? Immediately after that superb opening ' When in tho ohrondolc of wasted time 1 «ee description of the fairest wights, And beauty making beautiful old rhymes - la praise of ladies dead and lovely knights which, seems to defy all possibility of flValry, follows an opening, still more wperb—•

;' t Not mine own fears, nor tho prophetic soul 01 the wide world dreaming on things to come—bearing you on ite outstretched wings into the highest heaven of invention. . And you turn a page or two and light on i*t me not to the marriage of true minds, Admit impediment; love is not love "Which alters when it alteration fizidß, Or bends with the remover to reruov*. But Shakespeare, in spite of the wise moderns who warn us against mol- ' worship, is a star apart. like the "secular bird 1 ' in Milton, or Jupiter Op. Max. in Horace, "he no second knows nor third." To indicate, far les* to exhaust, the felicities of his sonnets, would need a treatise rather than a paragraph. when all is said, there are others to whom after one last quotation we must hasten on. But what shall that last quotation beP Tired with all these for restful death 1 cry. With the bitingly ironic quatrain Art made tongue-tied by authority, \ And folly, doctor-like, controlling ekill,\ And simple truth, rniscajl'd simplicity, \ And captive gocd attending captain .dll? or Like a* the. waves make toward tho pebbl'd shore, with" its melancholy warning— Time doth transfix tho flourish set on youth. And delves the parallels in beauty s browlines which Fitzgerald no doubt had in mind when he wrote his own impassioned version of the world-old lamentAl»3, that spring should vanish with tho Toat° M youth's sweet-scented manuscript should close! or My love is strengthened tho' more weak in seeming with As Philomel in Bummer's front doth ring, Aaa etops her pipe in growth oi riper days. Sot that tho summer is '*** V*™**on 'Xlian when her mournful. hymns <kd i<-^ music burthens ever,-.bough. And aweete grown common 1.-so tb«r dear delight? On the whole none of these, tempting to they are in their various P^* 0 * but for the sake of its unniatchable fourth line — That time of year thou may'et in ™ { h J^°£ When yellow loaves, or n-ne, or lew Vpon h tu!!L bough* *hich shake against the ' choirs, wh«o late *• ' wwt birds sung. , Could pathos ring , momberea image ot an absent joy •» * a more touching appeall' j But is not f ° °7 e Biabethan whose sonnets have become incorporated with the language. whom Lamb, owing,J»roD- " abl/to the*'republican P I ' Hwlitt, oddly enough *n to' the later Sydney, ** JSj Al8»mon whose political brought him to the scaffold, hj» »<£ ° tbing, in this kind, and Drayton, mow <t of whose "Idea" sonnets »™ a *f% **■ to read, achieves in *• very apotheosis, if such ™~™ «?n of a word's application may oe pe "•tted, of a lovers' quarrel, a success *>. triumphant that critics d 0" fc father he wrote the lines at all I ■J} the- main Sidney's work is ta , t }**«, and it was J of hiß sonnets that , - **■»» said in one of his too } n . ;«»h«l essnvs, "The spirit of '&**££ j, -«£ chivalry'-of which ««>"« >' fcj?^ l * l Sj'dney to have beeni»« ', through fT era „ ■ /fl* sweetest and moat gracious of ™ e

all, and one of the three characterised by Lamb as his "favourite," is Come Sleep, O Sleep, the eeitain knot of peace, Tho baiting place of wit, th» talm of wo*, The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's Telease, The indifferent between the high and low; With shield of proof shield me from out the preate Of those fierce darts despair at me doth throw; O make mo in these civil wars to cease: I will good tribute pay, if thou do so. Take thou of me, sweet pillows, sweetest bed. A chamber deaf to noise, end blind to li»fct; X rosy garland, and a. '.veai-r bead. And if t!i<»pe things a; being tliina by right, " ' Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me, Livelier than elsewhere Stella's image see. "Blessings on tho man who first invented sleep, it wraps a round like a cloak," so thought Sancho Panza, and the poets are in the same tale, if we may judge from their frequent apostrophes. The lines quoted above recall two passages in Shakespeare, and they almost bear comparison with them, which is praise indeed. One of these passages occurs in ''Macbeth," where that sensitive soul, newly commenced murderer, wonders so wildly why he cannot have it both ways— Methought I heard a voice ciy, , "Sleep no iiior.;.' Macbeth decs murder sleep," the innocent sleep, Sieep that knits up the ravell'd sieave of care, The death of each dav's life, sore labour's hith, Ealm of hurt minds, great .Nature's second course, Chief nouribher in Life's feast. The other is from the second part of King Henry IV., and beginning in a plaintive minor key, swells .into the organ crescendo, far outsoaring Sidney's farthest reach, of thoso "imperialmoulded lines"— "Wilt thou upon the and giddy mast Seal up thj ship-boy's eyos, and rock his brains In cradle of the rude, imperious Bulge And in the visitation of tho winds, Who take the ruffian billows by the top, Curling their monstrous heads and hanging them With deafening clamour in the slippery clouds, That, with the hurly, death itself awakes. Great lines these, and as readers of Matthew Arnold will remember, among those "lines and expressions of the great masters" he urges us to carry in our minds and "apply as a touchstone to other poetry." But this is a digression from the immediate theme, though not perhaps without excuse in the tercentenary year of the First Folio. Minora canamus. Everyone knows, or should know, the sonnets of Milton, of Wordsworth, ot Rossetti, to name the greatest masters of the craft. But to some at least it will be news that Longfellow wrote 6onnets of high distinction. Some of those were cameo-like appreciations of the greatest poets of the past, of which —it is of course a personal opinion—that on Chaucer is the most memorable.Others, singularly happy in quotable phrase and very beautifully rhythmed, are prefixed to the successive books of the rendering of Dante. On work of such high excellence Longcfellow's claim for a place among the poets is securely based. So we can leave it at that ana turn to the last name on this eclectk list. "We are all familiar with Lamb as an nnapproachaMe essayist in a hazardous kind, but are apt to forget that the high gods gave him also the gift of song. One of the sweetest, lyrics in the language, its imelancholy music magicallv enhanced by its waudering elusive rhythms, is

I have had p'iiyrnates, I have had companions, In my days of childhood, in my joyful schooldays; All, all, are gone, the old familiar faces. One of the wittiest and most ruthless lampoons is 10l Paean 1 Io! sing. One of the closest anticipations of that modern vers libre, whose true name is rhythmic prose, "All are not false.' But none of these are sonnets, the judicious reader will object. True, oh King, but we are coming to the some'a or at least to two of them as exquisite in their phrasing and movement as they are felicitous in their wit. The first of these appeared in "The Examiner" in June, 1819, but the germ of it, as E. V. Lucas, who has penetrated farther into the mysteries of Lamb's heart and life even than that other great "agnizer,"the late Canon Ainger, 13 swift to point out, occurs in. a letter to Wordsworth, dated as far back as 1805. "Hang work! I wish that all the year were holiday. lam sure that indolence, indefeasible indolence, is the true state of man, and business the invention of the Old Teaser who persuaded Adam's Master to give him an apron . and set him a-hoeing. Pen and ink and clerks and desks were the refinement of this old torturer a thousand years after." And so for the sonnet — Who firat invented wonk, and bound the free And holyday-rejoicing spirit down To the ever-haunting importunity. Of business in! the green fields, and the town — To plough, loom, anvil, spade—and oh! most sad To that dry druflgery at the desks' dead wood? Who but the Being uncOest, alien from good, Sabbathless Satan! he who his uuglad Task even plies mid rotatory burnings. That round and round incalculably reel— For wrath divine hath made him lile & wheel— In that red realm from which are no returnings; Where toiling and turmoiling ever and aye He, and his thought, keep pensive working-day. The companion sonnet "Leisure," for which "overhaul your works of Lamb, and when found make a note on,' was printed Jn 1821, and finds an anticipation in the essav called ".New W s Eve," and an echo in "The buperannuated Man," an essay published in 1525 "I have a quiet home-feeling ot the blessedness of my condition. 1 am in no hurry. Having all holidays, lam as though I had none. If time hung heavy upon me I could walk it away. ; if time were troublesome 1 could' read it away. . . . . I ™ longer hunt after pleasure; I let it come to me."

Alas, for the vanity Of poor humanity Under th» sun! Confident anticipations are but too often, what Browne, of Norwich, called them, "a folly of expectation. • Sed dum abest quod avemus id ecupera-re videtui t . , L ... , •Cetera; post aliut, cum contigit illud, avemus, . Et sitis (EO.ua tenet vitai semper hiantis. But a year or two after we find Lamb writin- to a friend, "1 bragged formerly that 1 could not have too much time. I have a surfeit . ... I ama sanguinary murderer of time that would kill time inchmeal just now."