The Victorian Era: History, Society, and Literary Culture
The Victorian Sonnet
According to the introductory material to the “Victorian Era” in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, the novel was the dominant form during the period. As the editors make their case for the primacy of the novel from from the years roughly 1830-1910, they also make a compelling case for the evolution of a particularly Victorian poetic form: the verse novel. What the editors do not take into consideration, however, is the appearance of another particularly Victorian poetic form: the sonnet sequence. The Penguin Book of the Sonnet (2001), for example, includes nearly as many Victorian-era sonneteers as it does sonnet-writers of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth-centuries combined.
The Sonnet Sequence
Perhaps one reason for the primacy of the sonnet form has to do with the appeal of the sonnet sequence: the combination of a seemingly self-contained poetic unit (the individual sonnet) within the narrative possibilities of a sequence of individual lyrics.
As you work with Victorian sonnet sequences (Sonnets from the Portuguese, Modern Love, House of Life, Monna Innominata, “Brother and Sister”), do these things:
- Be able to define a sonnet and a sonnet sequence . As you learn to define sonnet, be certain to distinguish between the Shakespearean and the Petrarchan; what do we expect from the two different sonnets, not just in terms of meter, stanza form, and rhyme scheme, but in terms of content, the order in which certain questions or problems arise and are addressed in the sonnets?
- As you read the sonnets, identify their type, Shakespearean or Petrarchan or other. Ask yourself why the poets may have chosen those particular forms.
- Thematically, how do the sonnet sequences differ from one another?
Sonnet Form Overview
This lecture takes you through the Shakespearean (English) and Petrarchan (Italian) sonnet forms, reviewing rhyme scheme, content expectations, stanza forms, etc. At the 10 minute mark, I review meter, focusing on iambic pentameter: what “iambic pentameter” means, what other metrical feet we should be on the lookout for, and how to scan a line of verse.
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"sonnet: A lyric poem consisting of a single stanza of fourteen iambic pentameter lines linked by an intricate rhyme scheme. (Refer to meter and rhyme.) There are two major patterns of rhyme in sonnets written in the English language:
1. The Italian or Petrarchan sonnet (named after the fourteenth-century Italian poet Petrarch) falls into two main parts: an octave (eight lines) rhyming abbaabba followed by a sestet (six lines) rhyming cdecde or some variant, such as cdccdc. Petrarch’s sonnets were first imitated in England, in both their stanza form and their standard subject—the hopes and pains of an adoring male lover—by Sir Thomas Wyatt in the early sixteenth century. (See Petrarchan conceit.) The Petrarchan form was later used, for a great variety of subjects, by Milton, Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, D. G. Rossetti, and other sonneteers, who sometimes made it technically easier in English (which does not have as many rhyming possibilities as Italian) by introducing a new pair of rhymes in the second four lines of the octave.
2. The Earl of Surrey and other English experimenters in the sixteenth century also developed a stanza form called the English sonnet, or else the Shakespearean sonnet, after its greatest practitioner. This sonnet falls into three quatrains and a concluding couplet: abab cdcd efef gg. There was a notable variant, the Spenserian sonnet, in which Spenser linked each quatrain to the next by a continuing rhyme: abab bcbc cdcd ee.
From Abrams, M.H.; Harpham, Geoffrey. A Glossary of Literary Terms (Page 370). Cengage Textbook. 10th edition. Kindle Edition.
"Following Petrarch’s early example, a number of Elizabethan authors arranged their poems into sonnet sequences, or sonnet cycles, in which a series of sonnets are linked together by exploring the varied aspects of a relationship between lovers, or else by indicating a development in the relationship that constitutes a kind of implicit plot. Shakespeare ordered his sonnets in a sequence, as did Sidney in Astrophel and Stella (1580) and Spenser in Amoretti (1595).
Later examples of the sonnet sequence on various subjects are Wordsworth’s “The River Duddon,” D. G. Rossetti’s House of Life, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, and the American poet William Ellery Leonard’s Two Lives. Dylan Thomas’ “Altarwise by Owl-light” (1936) is a sequence of ten sonnets which are abstruse meditations on the poet’s own life.
George Meredith’s Modern Love (1862), which concerns a bitterly unhappy marriage, is sometimes called a sonnet sequence, even though its component poems consist not of fourteen but of sixteen lines."
Abrams, M.H.; Harpham, Geoffrey. A Glossary of Literary Terms (Page 371). Cengage Textbook. 10th edition. Kindle Edition.
