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The Sonnet and its Structure
Both in terms of technical ability and range of content, Shakespeare must be reckoned the most versatile and talented writer to have taken up the pen in the English language. Indeed in the area of sonneteering Shakespeare must be ranked not only as the greatest sonnet writer in English, but also as the principal creator of the English sonnet - known to us in its more common designation as the Shakespearean sonnet. To see the impact he had on the literature of his time it is only necessary to reflect that during the course of the sixteenth century over 300,000 sonnets were written and that of these only 154 were written by Shakespeare, and yet the form itself is named after him.
The sonnet itself was a poetic mode imported from Italy by Sir Thomas Wyatt with his translation of Petrarch's sonnets. The word "sonnet" actually means "little song" and in its Italian form was chiefly identified with the Renaissance humanist Petrarch (1304-1374). He had taken a diffuse lyric and given it a more stable structure.
These lyrics were often bundled together in sequences united by a common theme or subject, which in many cases was that of love - whether requited, unrequited, sought after or rejected. It should however be stressed that the sonnet was not confined to any one theme as we find sonnets written on religious devotion, politics and any variety of other topics. In general, the sonnet can perhaps be viewed as the most inclusive poetic form available.
Indeed it is the case that the sonnet has become defined by its structure. The basic sonnet is a fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter, in three principal rhyming patterns. The widely imitated Petrarchan sonnet consisted of an octave, or eight-line stanza, followed by a sestet, or six-line stanza. The octave was rhymed a-b-b-a a-b-b-a, and the sestet was typically rhymed c-d-e-c-d-e. However it was generally felt that this scheme imprisoned the English language as it stressed words in a different fashion to the Italian.
Gradually changes began to be made, Wyatt used the scheme a-b-b-a a-b-b-a c-d-d-c e-e that gave a greater degree of space for his poetry, and it also broke the form down into the more recognisable English sonnet structure of three quatrains and a couplet. But it was Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who was "the first poet to free the natural rhythms of English speech from the five foot prison of the four iambic line."
His great innovation was to utilise unrhymed iambic pentameter - a form which has become the mainstay of English verse for four centuries. He also established the more common English sonnet structure of a-b-a-b c-d-c-d e-f-e-f g-g. This was the form inherited by Shakespeare - the form that he would make his own so that to this day it bears his name.
Shakespeare's Sonnets
The great achievement of Shakespeare's sonnets is their apparently perfect melding of form and function, subject and style. The reader feels an uncanny sense of effortlessness engendered by the poems. We feel that the poems simply tripped off the tongue of the poet and, if so, the sonnets give us a true insight into Shakespeare as a person, rather than Shakespeare the playwright and poet.
They are some of the most selfless poems ever composed, full as they are of the urge to give his beloved life within the medium of language:
"So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."
Sonnet 18
and:
"O! none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright."
Sonnet 65
It could be claimed that these poems are, in fact, of an ethical nature. They strive for an unheard-of accuracy in the representation of the inner life of the speaker, rejecting any easy compromise with facile emotionalism. This is not to say that they are not artistic - they are, and they employ to a greater degree conceits, metaphor, and linguistic word play than is to be found anywhere else in the English language. The main use of these artistic functions, however, is to stress the impact that one person has on another, and convey in a forceful and imaginative way aspects of a person's identity such as time, decay and beauty:
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate"
Sonnet 18
and:
"In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by."
Sonnet 73
The often-mooted notion of the timelessness of Shakespeare has its source in the marvellous simplicity and beauty of his language in dealing with things which concern us all. His beautiful imagery of life as a fire consuming its youthful strength, and the "death-bed" or bed of ashes on which it will die, is powerful because of its sheer homeliness and simplicity. (The images are simple and easy for the reader to identify with.)
In Sonnet 73 Shakespeare creates a meditation on the influence of time both on the speaker and on the beloved. Time is signalled as the subject immediately by his use of the word in the opening line:
"That time of year thou mayst in me behold"
Shakespeare has elegantly made time both the subject and the object of the poem. Time functions here as a dimension of reality, as a metaphor for the lateness of the speaker's life, and as a season of the year. Shakespeare creates backward moving sections of time that hint at the speaker's past, giving him a continuity of existence and of memory, in reaction to which the poem itself will be created.
In the first quatrain, time is embodied in the speaker in the form of an old withering tree and represented as a season:
"When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon these boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."
In the next quatrain, paralleling the first, the opening line has retreated from the year to the day:
"In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,"
Here time is embodied in the speaker in the form of twilight, echoing the lateness of his life, and as the final period of the day, again an embodiment of time. The compounding of such imagery and conceits to explore the relationship of time to the self and the self's reaction to the inevitable process of decay forces the reader into a confrontation with his/her own self. The way in which Shakespeare enables the reader to enter into such a dialogue with himself is his greatness.
The poem ends with a daring couplet:
"This thou perceiv'st which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long."
Again we are confronted with a plea for an ethical relationship with the other person. The theme is the value of humanity in spite of its transience. This may provide us with enough reason to agree with Dr. Samuel Jonson who declared that: "Shakespeare is above all other writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature, the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manner and of life."
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