The Sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines, and is perhaps the most difficult kind of poem to write.
As the sonnet is so bound about with rules, it often makes the thought which it expresses sound a little unreal.
From Provence, Italy had taken up the style, and among the other forms for its expression, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, had devised the poem of a single fourteen-line stanza which we call the sonnet. The whole movement had found its great master in Petrarch, who, in hundreds of poems, mostly sonnets, of perfect beauty, had sung the praises and cruelty of his nearly imaginary Laura.
Historically much the most important feature of Wyatt's experiment was the introduction of the sonnet, a very substantial service indeed; for not only did this form, like the love-theme, become by far the most popular one among English lyric poets of the next two generations, setting a fashion which was carried to an astonishing excess; but it is the only artificial form of foreign origin which has ever been really adopted and naturalized in English, and it still remains the best instrument for the terse expression of a single poetic thought.
"Seldom we find," says Solomon Don Dunce, "Half an idea in the profoundest
sonnet. Through all the flimsy things we see at once As easily as through a Naples bonnet - Trash of all trash!
And what a charming
sonnet he had sent her, with a box of violets, on her birthday!
He opened it, and the first thing he found in it, written roughly but in a very good hand, was a
sonnet, and reading it aloud that Sancho might hear it, he found that it ran as follows:
In the first place, Rodney had written a very full account of his state of mind, which was illustrated by a
sonnet, and he demanded a reconsideration of their position, which agitated Katharine more than she liked.
Early one evening, struggling with a
sonnet that twisted all awry the beauty and thought that trailed in glow and vapor through his brain, Martin was called to the telephone.
He would never exactly reply to Philip's eager questioning, but with a merry, rather stupid laugh, hinted at a romantic amour; he quoted a few lines of Rossetti, and once showed Philip a
sonnet in which passion and purple, pessimism and pathos, were packed together on the subject of a young lady called Trude.
When not engaged in reading Virgil, Homer, or Mistral, in parks, restaurants, streets, and suchlike public places, he indited
sonnets (in French) to the eyes, ears, chin, hair, and other visible perfections of a nymph called Therese, the daughter, honesty compels me to state, of a certain Madame Leonore who kept a small cafe for sailors in one of the narrowest streets of the old town.
In such mouths I might have coupled it with an apt quotation from one of Shakespeare's
sonnets: