English Verse: Specimens Illustrating its Principles and HistoryAlden, Raymond MacDonald
General
English Verse: Specimens Illustrating its Principles and History
Alden, Raymond MacDonald
English language -- Versification; English poetry
Surrey experimented with the Italian sonnet as it had been introduced
into England by his master Wyatt, but soon devised a variation from the
Italian form, and wrote a majority of his sonnets in the new English
form (nine out of the sixteen which are printed in Tottel's Miscellany).
This new form is divided, not into octave and sestet, but into three
quatrains, with alternate rime, and a couplet. It produces, therefore,
an effect quite different from that of the legitimate Italian sonnet,
the couplet at the end giving it a more epigrammatic structure.
Surrey's form seems more consonant with common English taste for
simplicity of rime-structure, and, besides being honored by its adoption
by Shakspere, has remained a favorite side by side with the more
"correct" original.[37]
Come, Sleep! O Sleep, the certain knot of peace,
The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release,
The indifferent judge between the high and low;
With shield of proof shield me from out the press
Of those fierce darts Despair at me doth throw.
O make me in those civil wars to cease;
I will good tribute pay, if thou do so.
Take thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed,
A chamber deaf of noise and blind of light,
A rosy garland and a weary head:
And if these things, as being thine in right,
Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me,
Livelier than elsewhere, Stella's image see.
(SIDNEY: _Astrophel and Stella_, xxxix. ab. 1580.)
Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night,
Brother to Death, in silent darkness born,
Relieve my languish, and restore the light;
With dark forgetting of my care return.
And let the day be time enough to mourn
The shipwreck of my ill-adventured youth:
Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn,
Without the torment of the night's untruth.
Cease, dreams, the images of day-desires,
To model forth the passions of to-morrow;
Never let rising Sun approve you liars,
To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow:
Still let me sleep, embracing clouds in vain,
And never wake to feel the day's disdain.
(SAMUEL DANIEL: _Care-charmer Sleep_. 1592.)
Daniel was one of the most skilful of the Elizabethans in the use of the
English form of the sonnet. The greater number of his _Sonnets to Delia_
are of this type. The subject of the present sonnet was a fashionable
one in the sixteenth century (compare Sidney's, quoted above).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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