Although he didn’t make this list, John Milton wrote many classic examples of the sonnet form in the seventeenth century. The poem is an interesting example of the Petrarchan sonnet form, because that form – so often associated with male poets objectifying female beauty – is here given a twist, in being used by a female poet to comment on the male gaze. However, it is worth noting that Christina Rossetti’s brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was a painter. No particular artist is intended Rossetti is speaking in general terms about the male artist and the female model. This sonnet is about the male artist’s tendency to objectify his female sitters or ‘models’ for his paintings and sculptures indeed, in one interpretation, the woman is merely a passive object on which the artist projects his fantasies and ‘dreams’. That mirror gave back all her loveliness … We found her hidden just behind those screens, One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans: One face looks out from all his canvases, The sequence charts the breakdown of Meredith’s marriage (his wife was the daughter of the novelist Thomas Love Peacock), although in the sonnet we’ve chosen above, he reflects on deeper evolutionary questions, just three years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.Ĭhristina Rossetti, ‘ In an Artist’s Studio’. George Meredith (1828-1906) pioneered a new form of sonnet, which now bears his name: the sixteen-line Meredithian sonnet, which he used for his Victorian sonnet sequence Modern Love (1862). Pale lies the distant shadow of the tomb,Īnd all that draweth on the tomb for text … What are we first? First, animals and next George Meredith, ‘ What Are We First? First Animals, and Next’. The poem might be compared to Sidney’s own Sonnet 99 from Astrophil and Stella it does, however, stand up on its own as a fine poem in its own right. This poem reflects the blackest moods of depression, with the speaker wishing to join with the night, since they both embody darkness and are natural partners for each other. Not only that, but she was admired by her contemporaries, including the hard-to-please Ben Jonson. Lady Mary Wroth (1587-c.1652) was the first Englishwoman to write a substantial sonnet sequence. Lady Mary Wroth, ‘ Night, Welcome Art Thou to my Minde Distrest’. The sixteenth century was the great century for the sonnet sequence in English literature Anne Locke’s A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner from the 1560s was the first English sonnet sequence, but it was relatively short. the last syllable is a weak stress) at the end of each line, reflecting the effeminate appearance of the Fair Youth. Note the use of ‘feminine’ line endings (i.e. Its opening line, ‘A woman’s face, with Nature’s own hand painted’, immediately establishes the sonnet’s theme: Shakespeare is discussing the effeminate beauty of the Fair Youth, the male addressee of these early sonnets. Sonnet 20 by William Shakespeare is one of the more famous early poems in the Sonnets, after Sonnet 18. 1517-47), who came up with the idea of using the rhyme scheme ababcdcdefefgg which Shakespeare uses in this poem.
Shakespeare and the sonnet form are almost synonymous in English, although the Bard didn’t invent the sonnet form that bears his name: that was Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (c. It burns with passion that to mine is near. That mirrorest her sweet face, her eyes so clear,Īnd of their living light canst catch the beam! O pleasant country-side! O limpid stream, His blithe rays gild the outskirts of thy towers!
O trees, with earliest green of springtime hours,Īnd all spring’s pale and tender violets! O plain, that hold’st her words for amuletsĪnd keep’st her footsteps in thy leafy bowers!
’Mid which my pensive queen her footstep sets O joyous, blossoming, ever-blessed flowers!
Writing in the fourteenth century, Petrarch establishes a number of the key features that would be associated with the sonnet during the Renaissance: the ideals of courtly love, the unattainable and semi-divine woman (Petrarch’s muse was a woman named Laura, perhaps named for the laurels that were a symbol of poetic achievement), and the ‘look but don’t touch’ attitude of the poet. Although he didn’t invent the sonnet form – that mantle goes to a thirteenth-century Sicilian poet named Giacomo da Lentini – Petrarch was the first person to leave a real mark on the form and showcase its wonderful possibilities. Petrarch, ‘O Joyous, Blossoming, Ever-Blessed Flowers!’.