his friend, or lover (“thee”), which
cheers him up, and his happiness is
conveyed partly by the image of the
lark rising from earth to heaven and
singing as it goes; line 11 has an
extra syllable in “arising,” which
leads with no pause to the next line
(an effect known as enjambment,
a continuation of a sentence from
one line to the next). The poet’s
new happiness is conveyed partly
by the emphatic rhythm of “sings
hymns at heaven’s gate,” where it
is natural to stress both “sings” and
“hymns.” Then the new situation
is summed up in the final couplet,
with stresses on both syllables in
“sweet love” and “such wealth,” and
the poem comes to a triumphant
conclusion with the emphatic
rhythms of its last line and the
contrast between the poet’s new
state of happiness in love with
that even of kings.
Not all the sonnets have as
clear a structure as this one.
Italian sonnets
The first sonnets came from
medieval Italy, most famously
written by Francesco Petrarch
(1304–74). Typically they express
hopeless love for an inaccessible
and idealized beloved. Shakespeare
refers to Petrarch in Romeo and
THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN’S MAN 217
Juliet when Mercutio, thinking
that Romeo is still in love with
Rosaline, says “Now is he for the
numbers [verse rhythms] that
Petrarch flowed in” (2.3.36–37).
The first English sonnets were
written by Sir Thomas Wyatt and
the Earl of Surrey in the middle
of the 16th century. Their poems
were included in a popular book
known as Tottel’s Miscellany, also
called Songs and Sonnets, first
published in 1557. Shakespeare
refers to this in The Merry Wives
of Windsor, in which a bashful
young man, Abraham Slender,
wishes he had a copy of it to
hand to help him in his wooing
of Mistress Anne Page. He says
“I had rather than forty shillings I
had my book of songs and sonnets
here” (1.1.181–182).What are sonnets about?
Typically, sonnets are poems of
romantic love, often directly
addressed to an object of love,
but over the centuries poets
have used the sonnet form for
many different purposes. It
has also been common to write
a collection or sequence of
interconnected sonnets all
addressed to the same real or
imagined person. For example,
English poet and soldier Sir Philip
Sidney wrote poems addressed
to his beloved calling himself
“Astrophil” and her “Stella.”
Sidney’s collection was published
as Astrophil and Stella in 1591,
five years after his death, and
many other poets imitated it
in a spate of sonnets from
1591 to 1597.The Italian poet Francesco Petrarca
(commonly known in English as
Petrarch) wrote a series of sonnets
addressed to a woman named Laura,
whom Petrarch admired from afar.So long as men can breathe
or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this
gives life to thee.
Sonnet 18In later Elizabethan times, the
sonnet form came frequently to
be used for religious verse—love
poems addressed to God, as it were.
Shakespeare’s contemporary, poet
and cleric John Donne (1572–1631)
wrote a number of Holy Sonnets,
and one of Shakespeare’s sonnets,
No. 146, is a religious poem. ❯❯Happy air, remain here
with your living rays:
and you, clear running stream,
why can’t I exchange
my path for yours?
Petrarch
Sonnet 227