Spiller-Sonnet Sequence

THESO~TSEQ~NCE

A Study of Its Strategies

Michael R. G. Spiller

Twayne Publishers

An Imprint of Simon & Schuster Macmillan New York

Prentice-Hall International London • Mexico City • New Delhi • Singapore • Sydney • Toronto

Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Chronology of Poets and Texts Discussed xiii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 The Sonnet and the Sequence 8

Chapter 2 The Formal Sequence: Folgore da San Gemignano, Anne Locke, John Donne, and George Macbeth 32

.Chapter 3 The Topographical Sequence: Wordsworth, The River Duddon, and du Bellay, Les Antiquitez de Rome 46

Chapter4 The Narrative Sequence: Dante, La Vita Nuova, and Edna St. Vincent Millay 61

Chapter 5 The Lyric Sequence: Petrarch's Rime, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tony Harrison, John Donne, and William Shakespeare 77

ix

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

Chapter 6 The Philosophical Sequence: Christina Rossetti, "The Thread of Life," and Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus 123

Conclusion 139

Notes and References 143

Bibliographical Essay 158

Bibliography of Sequences 164

Index 167

X

Chronology of Poets and Texts Discussed

Writers before the invention of printing have no publication date, and the reader is referred to the standard edition.

Giacomo da Lentino (dates unknown). Sonnets written about 1230-1240. See A Critical Edition of the Poems of Giacomo da Lentino, ed. S. Popolizio (1975 Ph.D. thesis, Ann Arbor: University Microfilms).

Guittone d' Arezzo (1230?-1294). Sonnet sequences written about 1255. See Le Rime, ed. F. Egidi (Bari: Laterza, 1940).

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). La Vita Nuova, ea. 1295, first printed 1576. See Dante: Vita Nuova, ed. D. de Robertis (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1980).

Folgore da San Gemignano (pen name of Giacomo da Michele, dates unknown). Sonnets written 1309-1317. See Sonnetti, ed. G. Caravaggi (Turin: Einaudi, 1965).

Francesco Petrarca or Petrarch (1304--1374). Sonnets written 1330-1370. These are preserved, uniquely, in the author's manuscript, now Vatican Library MS. Vat. Lat. 3195, from which all modern editions derive.

xiii

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

Richard Tottel (?-1594). Editor of Songes and Sonettes (London: Richard Tottel, 1557), which contains no sequences, but has most of the sonnets of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503?-1542) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517?-1547).

Anne Locke (ea. 1533-1595). A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner (London: John Day, 1560), ed. Kel Morin-Parsons, A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner: The Sonnets of An ne Locke (Ontario: North Waterloo Academic Press, 1997).

Joachim du Bellay (1523--1560). Le Premier Livre des Antiquitez de Rome (Paris: Federic Morel, 1558).

George Gascoigne (1542-1577). Suites of sonnets in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573; reprint, London: Scalar Press, 1970).

Edmund Spenser (1552-1599). "Ruins of Rome," in Complaints (London: William Ponsonby, 1591); Amoretti (London: William Ponsonby, 1595).

William Shakespeare (1564-1616). Sonnets (London: Thomas Thorpe, 1609).

John Donne (1573-1631). "La Corona" written about 1608; the Holy Sonnets between 1609 and 1617. Both printed in Poems by]. D. (London: John Marriot, 1633; 2d ed., 1635).

George Wither (1588-1667). Campo-Musae (London: R. Austin and A. Coe, 1643); Vox Pacifica (London: R. Austin, 1645).

William Wordsworth (1770-1850). The River Duddon: A Series of Sonnets (London: Longman, 1820); "Ecclesiastical Sonnets" first published as Ecclesiastical Sketches (London: Longman, 1822).

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861). "Sonnets from the Portuguese" in Poems ... New Edition (London: Chapman and Hall, 1850). The supposed printing of 1847 is a forgery.

George Meredith (1828-1909). Modern Love: And Poems of the English Roadside (London: Chapman and Hall, 1862).

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894). "The Thread of Life" written before 1882, printed in Poems (London: Macmillan, 1890).

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). Die Sonette an Orpheus (Lepzig: Insel Verlag, 1923).

xiv

CHRONOLOGY OF POETS AND TEXTS DISCUSSED

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950). "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree" in The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1923); Fatal Interview (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1931); "Epitaph for the Race of Man" in Wine from these Grapes (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1934).

John Berryman (1914-1972). The "Sonnets to Chris" first appeared as Berryman's Sonnets (New York: Farrar Straus, 1967), and then slightly altered as "Sonnets to Chris" in Collected Poems, 1939-1971, ed. C. Thornbury (London: Faber and Faber, 1989).

George Macbeth (1932-1992). "A Christmas Ring," in The Burning Cone (1970) and subsequently in Collected Poems, 1958-1970 (London: Macmillan, 1971); "Thoughts on a Box of Razors" in Poems from Oby (1982) and subsequently in Collected Poems, 1958-1982 (London: Hutchinson, 1989).

XV

INTRODUCTION

On 6 April1348, a rich merchant's wife died suddenly of the plague in a house in Avignon, in the south of France. One of

her friends knew that she had long been admired by one of the most celebrated poets of the age, Francis Petrarch, and wrote to him in faraway Parma, in northern Italy. The news reached Petrarch on 19 May and from then until the end of his long life in 137 4, he ceaselessly wrote and revised and rearranged sonnets in praise of her. Added to what he had written between the time he first saw her, in 1327, and that disastrous plague year, his poems in her·praise amounted to 366 lyrics, 317 of which are sonnets. Together they make up the sonnet sequence usually known as the Rime Sparse, or "Scattered Poems." But they are not scattered: though they are not all, indeed, about his Laura, the woman whom he praised so often, they have a miraculous coherence that makes Petrarch's Rime one of the world's greatest sonnet sequences.1

Almost six centuries later, a young girl died in Munich of a wasting illness. Wera Knoop, then only 18, had as a child been the playmate of Ruth Rilke, daughter of the man who was then one of the most famous poets of Europe, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Wera's mother wrote to him at his retreat in Switzerland, giving an account of her daughter's death. A month after receiving the letter on New Year's Day, 1922, Rilke began, and in three weeks finished, a set of 55 sonnets inspired by Wera' s death, the Sonnets

1

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

to Orpheus, the greatest sonnet sequence of the twentieth century, and one of the most profound in European lyric poetry.2

The sonnet sequence did not begin with Petrarch, and it has not ended with Rilke; but these two collections, so alike in the circumstances of their creation and so very different in execution and length, may serve to point at some truths about this unusual and unstable genre, the sonnet sequence. Arising out of the invention of the sonnet itself, the sonnet sequence, over more than seven centuries in Western Europe and America, has engaged the attention of some of the greatest poets-as well as a host of others. These poets, among them Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Donne, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Rilke, and Berryman, have used the sequence to explore intense conflicts of feeling and thought, apparently finding satisfaction in the unique combination of fragmentariness and cohesion that the genre offers. Mostly love, or worship of a loved one, is the thread, keynote, or motif of a sequence, and some sort of struggle to know or understand the self is one of the animating forces. Other poets have used the sonnet sequence for other purposes, such as landscape description or philosophizing or political agitation; but its major glories seem to come in the hands of those who use it as the locus of a quest for understanding of the self in a world where a powerful and compelling Other offers a vision of disturbing beauty. It is not fanciful to suppose that if Dante read his Vita Nuova in some Paradisal Mermaid Tavern to Shakespeare, Petrarch, and Rilke, all of them would nod in sympathy and understanding, though otherwise from worlds unimaginably far apart.

The sonnet and the sonnet sequence were born into European literature at the same time, for the first writers of sonnets, a group of courtiers and civil servants employed by the Emperor Frederick II of the Two Sicilies (1208-1250), wrote sonnets to one another in groups of two, three, and more, and these tenzoni, as they are called, are the first sonnets in sequence, appearing in Southern Italy about 1235 C.E. They appear to have been linked by repetitions of rhymes or words, but because they survive to us only in manuscript collections made at the end of the thirteenth century in northern Italy, in which replies have often become detached from what they replied to, we cannot be sure. The first known sequences by a single author are by the Italian poet Guittone d' Arezzo (1230?-1294): a six-sonnet tenzone that is a fie-

2

INTRODUCTION

tional argument between a "donna villana" (a low-born woman) and her lover, and an ''Art of Love," a 26-sonnet sequence on the features of courtly love. It is not known which of these was written first, but they are thought to be prior to 1263.3

The growth of literacy in the cities of the north of Italy at the end of the thirteenth century fostered the compilation, by scribes working to order, of canzonieri (poetry collections), which assembled the sonnets (and other lyrics) of contemporary authors. From that point on, authors responded by themselves producing collections of their verses, including such highly organized ones as Folgore da San Gemignano's "Sonnets on the Months" (ea. 1310; discussed in chapter 2). The first to show awareness of itself as a sequence is Dante's Vita Nuova (ea. 1295; see chapter 4), which takes as its starting point a tenzone that Dante had organized, sending out a sonnet to about eight friends and asking them to reply in kind (three replies survive).

Thereafter the tenzone, the categorical sequence, and the canzoniere (as a loose collection of sonnets by one author) continued throughout European literature. In the Italian municipal academies, or learned societies, of the sixteenth century, a highly developed form of the tenzone, called the catena (chain), involving strict rules of repetition, was practiced by groups of friends. One particular group in Siena, the Intronati (founded 1525), is credited with the invention of the corona sequence, in which each sonnet starts with the last line of its predecessor.4 This is the most highly patterned of all kinds of sequence, and has survived to the present day, though rare (see chapter 2).

Throughout the centuries in Italy to the end of the sixteenth, there is no attempt to develop a theory of the sonnet sequence, and except where a set of sonnets is linked by category or by patterning, authors are content to present sonnets in loose groups, calling them simply sonetti or rime or canzonieri. Any author may indicate in a set of sonnets that he or she regards the set as a set; the model canzoniere sequence in this respect is the Rime Sparse of Petrarch (compiled from about 1330 until his death in 1374). The extensive adulation of Petrarch as a master of the rhetoric of passion, both in Italy and in France and Britain and Spain, meant that after the invention and spread of printing (from about 1470 onward), editions of his sonnets appeared carrying not only numbers (which aids sequential thinking) but also expositions of

3

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

the Rime as autobiographical. This practice popularized the idea that a loose collection of sonnets could function as a whole, giving an account of either the sufferings of a self or of a set of circumstances, such as a love affair. This concept, originating in Italy, entered the literatures of Britain, France, and Spain in the mid-sixteenth century (Germany in the early seventeenth) as a template for native poets to follow, and the sonnet sequence thereafter became a European literary genre, even if the word sequence was not yet used.

The sonnet was brought to Britain in about 1527 by Sir Thomas Wyatt, who developed the couplet ending in the sestet, and quickly taken further by his younger fellow courtier, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who pioneered the divided octave, with a change of rhymes after the first quatrain. Neither produced sequences, but their sonnets were collected into what in Italian terms would be a canzoniere, Richard Tottel's Songes and Sonettes of 1557, generally known as Tottel's Miscellany, the most influential anthology of the century in Britain. The first British sonnet sequence was written by a writer outside the courtly ambit, Anne Locke, whose Meditation of a Penitent Sinner (1560; discussed in chapter 2) offers 26 faultlessly crafted sonnets sequentially arranged as meditations on the verses of Psalm 51; however, she does not appear to have had any imitators. Instead, Edmund Spenser and others in the 1560s were reading and working from the French sonnet sequences of the Pleiade, the first of which was Joachim du Bellay's I.:Olive (1549), a work whose prefaces made it clear that the sonnet sequence was now associated with national prestige. After a certain amount of experimentation with small suites of sonnets in the 1570s (the decade in which the word sequence was first used, by George Gascoigne in 1573),5 single author sequences began to app.ear in print in the 1580s, and the Elizabethan sonnet-sequence craze was launched with the publication in 1591 of Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella (written about 1581).

The last sequence in this phase of sonnet writing was Fulke Greville' s Caelica, published in 1633, though written earlier; it contains 40 sonnets out of more than a hundred poems. Most of the sequences of this period are amatory and a very few devotional. The amatory sequences commonly are titled by the name of the lover addressed, and it is rare to find a title that uses a col-

4

INTRODUCTION

lective term, such as Barnabe Barnes' s A Divine Centurie (1595). The widespread Italian practice of issuing raccolte (anthologies) of sonnets containing sets or sequences by a variety of authors, imitated in France, was not followed in Britain.

In Britain, the sonnet and sonnet sequence fell into neglect and even contempt at the end of the seventeenth century, and had it not been for the accident that Milton, who gave English literature its rival to Virgil and Homer in his epic poetry, wrote a number of meditative and civic sonnets, it might well have disappeared-eighteenth-century worship of Shakespeare was mainly of his dramatic works. As it was, the gentlemanly, or ladylike, sonnet of reflection, friendship, or scenic beauty remained a minor and fairly constant form, producing about 3,000 sonnets in the Augustan age6 but very few sequences-the first is a collection of Miltonic praise sonnets by Thomas Edwards in 1758.

Then with the Europe-wide vogue for "sentiment" in literature, the sonnet sequence returned, with a dozen sequences in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, including, for example, two sets of Sonnets from 'Werter', Goethe's fashionable novel of suffering and unrequited love-by Alexander Thomson (1793) and Ann Bannerman (1800). The Petrarchan sonnet (known as the "legitimate" sonnet) returned in sequences, together with renewed interest in Petrarch and Dante and even (from Wordsworth) Michelangelo, whose sonnets are extremely difficult and mostly homosexual in orientation. It is from Wordsworth, in one of his earliest sonnets, that we have the famous definition of the sonnet as a "scanty plot of ground":

In truth, the prison, unto which we doom Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me, In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground; Pleased if some souls (for such there needs must be) Who have felt the weight of too much liberty, Should find brief solace there, as I have found. ("Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room," 1807, 8-14)

There is even an embryo theory of the sequence there-"pastime, sundry moods, brief solace." Wordsworth' s steady, intelligent, and impressive devotion to the sonnet and the sonnet sequence helped to reestablish it in Britain and America, and

5

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

there is then an explosion of sonnet sequences after 1830, an output sustained until World War I. That longer sequences were not written by Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Longfellow, Browning, Whitman, or Dickinson-the major poetic talents of the century-does not seem to have impaired the devotion of minor writers, and the latter half of the nineteenth century in English and American literature has remained the high point of the sonnet sequence. Its popularity in French, German, and Italian literature was also great-even so iconoclastic a poet as Baudelaire produced a sonnet sequence-and though the range of subject matter is now much wider, and the amatory sequence has ceased to dominate, the Petrarchan template, as I have called it, still functions, offering the appealing combination of particular moods, impressions, or reflections with a larger accumulated experience of a subject. Wordsworth, presenting his last major sonnet sequence, the Ecclesiastical Sonnets in 1822, described its operation with his usual clarity:

For the convenience of passing from one point of the subject to another without shocks of abruptness, this work has taken the shape of a series of sonnets: but the Reader, it is to be hoped, will find that the pictures are often so closely connected as to have jointly the effect of passages of a poem in a form of stanza to which there is no objection but one that bears upon the Poet only-its difficulty?

The favoring by Milton and Wordsworth of the Petrarchan sonnet over the Shakespearean and the high cultural standing of Italian art in the nineteenth century probably encouraged sonnet-sequence writers to prefer the Petrarchan octave and sestet over the Shakespearean three quatrains and a couplet. But though there was passionate debate in the nineteenth century about the merits of the two forms and their subvariants, no one seems to have commented in a sequence on the effect of choosing one or the other upon a sequence. But whether from some self-persuaded sense of harmony with the Italian masters and with Milton, or from a genuine preference for the flow of the Petrarchan form, most practitioners of sequences, in America and in Britain, have favored the "legitimate" sonnet, or, like Auden in his Sonnets from China, chosen a Shakespearean octave with a Petrarchan sestet.

6

INTRODUCTION

The sonnet sequence still seems a promising form: there is a short overview in John Fuller's The Sonnet (London: Methuen, 1972, 45-49), which leads him to the conclusion that there is a "wealth of structural possibilities inherent in the very notion of the sonnet sequence, and still largely unexplored." Most major modern poets have written sonnets, including such apparently anarchic figures as e. e. cummings, but it seems that after the fading out of a rather tired romanticism in British and American sequences between the two world wars, writers of sequences are either ironically erudite-Auden and Berryman-or unusually interested in game playing and pattern making-the corona sequences of George Macbeth or Jose£ Weinheber (Spate Krone, 1936) and the postmodernist sequence of Jacques Roubaud (e, 1967). Tony Harrison's reintroduction of Meredith's 16-line sonnet in his ongoing project, The School of Eloquence (1978), seems likely to keep the sonnet sequence in good literary heart. We still have no satisfactory theory of it, from either critics or practitioners, but we have the thing itself, and Petrarch's cry still hangs in our modern air:

0 anime gentili et amorose, s'alcuna a l'mondo, et voi, nude ombre et polve, deh, ristate a veder quale e il mio male! (Rime. 161.12-14)

(0 gracious and loving souls, if there be such in the world, and you, bare shadows and dust, ah! stay to see what my suffering is!)

What follows, then, is an attempt to develop, if not a full theory, at least a classification of sonnet sequences according to the ways in which poets seem to have tried to assemble them.

In the text, a number of sonnet sequences are discussed using the texts given in the bibliography. Because it is not possible in this book to reproduce entire sonnet sequences, it is assumed that the reader will have a text of each sequence available when reading the critical analysis of it.

7

Chapter 1

THE SONNET AND THE SEQUENCE

Because the sonnet has changed very little over the seven centuries of its life, the sonnet sequence also has kept certain fea

tures, even where there has been no direct imitation of an earlier poet by a later. If a poet respects the integrity or as one might say the sonnetness of the individual sonnet, then what he or she can do with a collection of them is limited. For example, poets who write many sonnets almost never use the sonnet form for long narrative poems: there is no formal reason why a long poem should not be in 14-line stanzas, rhyming as sonnets do, but it has happened only two or three times in 700 years, and we conclude that anyone who wants to write a poetic narrative avoids sonnets, and anyone who gathers sonnets together stops short of making them tell a story. What we might call "a sonnet narrative," such as Sir Philip Sidney' s Astrophel and Stella, is not a narrative in the sense in which his Arcadia is one, nor does Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese narrate the story of a courtship as, for example, does ]ane Eyre, with a speaker just as passionate. The sonnet has been used for a great variety of purposes, but it has always preserved its internal structure and dynamics and that seems to have prevented poets from subduing its small shape to the merest unit of a long tale.

8


To suggest what the sonnet has that makes it resistant to being pure narrative, it will be necessary to discuss the rise and development of the sonnet itself. At the same time, we shall explain the terms that are useful in describing its structure, terms that can then be used freely in the rest of this book.

The Structure of the Sonnet

The sonnet is a stanza of 14lines arranged in two parts, an octave (8 lines) and a sestet (6 lines). The octave usually rhymes ABBA ABBA, but at an early stage, in the thirteenth century, it commonly rhymed ABAB ABAB, and this form persists to the present. Each four lines is called a quatrain. When the sonnet first appeared in English, in the sixteenth century, a new form of octave also appeared, rhyming ABAB CDCD or sometimes ABBA CDDC. When the second quatrain repeats the rhymes of the first, the octave is called an Italian, or Petrarchan, octave; when the rhymes are different, it is an English, or Shakespearean, octave.

Similarly, the sestet usually rhymes CDECDE or, especially at the early-thirteenth-century stage, CDCDCD. Other arrangements are possible, but the way the sentences of the sestet are phrased always suggests that the rhymes should be read in two threes, or tercets, CDE CDE or CDC DCD. This arrangement makes an Italian or Petrarchan sestet, whether there are two rhyme sounds or three and however they are arranged. The one arrangement that almost never occurs in sonnets written in the Italian language is CDCDEE (or CDDCEE). This variation made its appearance in England in the sixteenth century, and the sentences of the sestet are usually written so that the rhymes read as a quatrain plus a couplet. This form is accordingly called an English, or Shakespearean, sestet. The French poets of the sixteenth century often reversed the order of the couplet and quatrain (e.g., ABBA ABBA CC DEDE), but English writers have always preferred to associate the couplet with closure.

Since an "Italian" sonnet can mean either a sonnet written in Italian or a sonnet that rhymes ABBA ABBA CDECDE (or variants as noted previously), I prefer to use the terms Petrarchan and Shakespearean for the forms and retain Italian and English for the respective languages. Today, as in the nineteenth century, it is quite possible to mix Petrarchan octaves with Shakespearean ses-

9

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

tets. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the term legitimate sonnet had a brief vogue in describing Petrarchan sonnets written in English.

It is possible, of course, to arrange the rhymes of a sonnet, and its length of line, and indeed its number of lines, in any way one likes-no Inspector of Sonnets will arrive to take away one's pen and paper for transgressions. What has kept the sonnet so consistent a form is simply that its essence is to have 14 lines rhyming in octave and sestet: if one decides to write a sonnet, then one must respect that pattern or no one will know that a sonnet is what was intended.

That is the point of Austin Dobson' s witty lyric:

I intended an ode, But it turned out a sonnet; I intended an ode: It began a la mode, But Rose crossed the road, In her new Sunday bonnet; I intended an ode, But it turned out a sonnet.l

The point of the poem would be entirely lost if the reader did not know that ABAAABAB is the pattern not of an ode, nor yet of a sonnet, but of a triolet.

Variants arise (and there have been many) where the essential pattern is departed from, but from reading distance, as it were, it must still be recognizable. As poets always know what a sonnet is before they write their own, they know also how far they can depart from the standard form while leaving it still visible on the horizon.

An example may help. In the fourteenth century in Italy, poets began to write sonnets with three lines added, a short line rhyming with the fourteenth, followed by a couplet: ABBA ABBA CDECDE + EFF. The extra snap that the FF couplet gives made this form popular with satirical writers, and a subgenre, the sonetto caudato, or tailed sonnet, became recognizable. Then, of course, multiple tails appeared, threatening to become longer than the original sonnet: ABBA ABBA CDCDCD DEE EFF FGG from Antonio Cammelli about 1500. Thus when John Milton felt particularly satirical, as when he composed "On the New Forcers

10


of Conscience under the Long Parliament," he reached for a tailed sonnet (one may suppose, since it is the only one he wrote), precisely because its variation was by then a generic signal of satirical intent, and produced a sonnet rhyming ABBA ABBA CDE DEC CFF FGG.2 And when in 1862 George Meredith produced his sequence of 16-line poems, Modern Love, rhyming ABBA CDDC EFFE GHHG, and called them sonnets, an anthologizer made sense of the variation by calling them "essentially caudated sonnets."3

The Development of the Sonnet

Happily for students of genres, the human urge to seek out and try various patterns is persistent, and poets' repeated attempts to test themselves against preexisting patterns or forms give genres their history and continuity. However, before we come to the sonnet sequence, one question about the sonnet itself has still to be answered: why was this particular pattern so successful? During the sonnet's development and up to today, there have been plenty of other short poems with fixed patterns, but none has been so much followed as the sonnet, and no other form has been attempted so consistently by major poets. In 1549, Joachim du Bellay, the poet who introduced the sonnet sequence to France, gave the sonnet pride of place and urged his fellow compatriots to

scrap all these old French forms ... like rondeaus, ballades, virelais, chant royal, chansons and other sweet-shop rubbish ... but compose these fine sonnets, the Italian invention which is as learned as it is pleasing, like the ode, but differing in that the sonnet has limitations and rules for its lines, whereas the ode can run on as it will in any sort of verse.4

Perhaps the grass was simply greener on the other side of the Alps; but du Bellay's comment that the sonnet is "non mains docte que plaisante" (as learned as it is pleasing) credits the 14-line sonnet with a kind of gravity or weightiness that needs further explanation. Clearly this quality in the single sonnet, if sustained throughout the centuries, would have much to do with the appeal of collections of sonnets, for both writers and readers.

11

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

The sonnet was indeed invented by a learned, or at least educated, man about 1230 C.E. in southern Italy: Giacomo da Lentino, a lawyer or notary in the service of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, who reigned from 1208 to 1250 over the southern half of what is now Italy. Nothing is known of him beyond his name, his occupation, and the attribution to him of 35 sonnets out of about 125 poems that survive from the mid-thirteenth century; but before that, the sonnet does not exist, and there seems no reason to deny him its invention. Since he was legally trained, probably at the University of Bologna, he would have been accustomed to writing in Latin; what is remarkable is that he should have troubled to invent a new kind of poem in Italian, or at least in the southern dialect of it spoken in his region. He would have known the vernacular poetry written in Proven«;al by the troubadours, whose verse and reputations spread well beyond the south of France, and it is not inconceivable that the cultural hospitality of Frederick' s courtly circle also welcomed the verse of the trouveres of northern France.5 In any event, it seems that that circle encouraged poetry in the vernacular and that da Lentino invented the 14-line stanza that became known as the sonnet (the word sonet exists in Proven«;al but just means "a short poem") as a local contribution.

Since among the sonnets from this period and circle we have sonnets written to da Lentino by named figures who were presumably friends, it is clear that the sonnet was used from the start as a complete poem, and among the long poems of the period, known as cansos or canzoni, not one uses the 14-line sonnet form as a strophe. The sonnet has had from the start two unequal parts, the octave and the sestet, however these are each internally arranged. It also has 11 syllables to a line (which became 10 in English), and 11 or 10 syllables is just about right, in most European languages, for "making a point" -indeed, a later sonneteer said (in 11 syllables) that "each point should take up eleven syllables."6 But because there is a turning point between octave and sestet (often called the volta in Italian), the poet must do something with his or her points that goes with the structural change at the ninth line; and further, because the poem ends at line 14, the poet must produce some sort of a conclusion. The sonnet is, in other words, a dialectic instrument and seems to have been so from the start.

12


An example from Giacomo da Lentino himself may show what this meant in early sonneteering:

Lo basilisco a lo speclo lucente traggi a morire con isbaldimento; lo cesne canta plu gioiosamente quand' e plu presso a lo suo finimento;

lo paon turba, istando plu gaudente, poi eh' a suoi piedi fa riguardimento; 1' augel fenise s' arde veramente per ritornare i' novo nascimento.

In ta' nature eo sentom' abenuto, eh' allegro vado a morte, a le belleze, e 'nzforzo il canto presso a lo finire;

estando gaio torno dismaruto, ardendo in foco inovo in allegreze, per voi, piu gente, a cui spero redire.

(The basilisk is drawn rejoicing to its death in the polished mirror; the swan sings most joyfully when nearest to its end; the peacock is perturbed, just at its most joyful, when it beholds its feet; the phoenix really burns in order to return in a new birth.

These natures I feel I have adopted for I joyfully go to my death, towards beauty, and I urge my song when near my end; being joyful, I change to dismay; burning in fire, I am reborn in joy, because of you, noble lady, to whom I hope to return.f

The rather strange list of animal habits from medieval lore occupies the octave: then, though it could continue through the rest of the sonnet, da Lentino senses that he has to do something with his bestiary and "turns" the sonnet to himself, making point-by-point comparisons until the very last line, when some sort of conclusion has to be reached to explain all this-it is all, of course, "for you, noble lady."

The pattern is difficult to complete neatly, and a number of comments from practitioners down the centuries attest to the

13

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

challenge and satisfaction of completing a poem that might be thought too long for lyric and too short for complex argument. Samuel Daniel (1562-1619), himself a very fine sonneteer (Delia, 1592), stresses the appeal, for the practicing writer, of the sonnet's distinctive structure, in a metaphor that anticipates Wordsworth's "scanty plot of ground":

Is it not most delightfull to see much excellently ordered in a small roome, or little gallantly disposed and made to fill up a space of like capacitie, in such sort, that the one would not appear so beautiful in a larger circuite, nor the other do well in a lesse .... And these limited proportions, and rests of Stanzes consisting of 6, 7 or 8 lines are of that happiness, both for the disposition of the matter, the apt planting of the sentence where it may best stand to hit, [that] the certain close of delight with the full body of a just period well carried, is such as neither the Greekes or La tines ever attained unto.8

The sonnet is a happy compromise, and when the lyrical ("delight") and the argumentative ("a just period well carried") come together, the modern poet may well feel that he or she has a rhetorical instrument finer than those of the ancients.

Even for ages not so inclined to see poesis as rhetorical and competitive, the sense of achievement still registers: Gabriele d' Annunzio said that finishing a sonnet made him feel like Benevenuto Cellini working in gold.9 Whether by happy accident or after various trials, Giacomo da Lentino hit upon a form with unique properties; this testing combination of lyrical impulse with dialectic continuity passes over into the sonnet sequence and is writ large there as the combination of the immediate experience of each sonnet with the cumulative awareness of the whole series.

The Sequence

The Tenzone

The kind of persona shown in the basilisk sonnet of Giacomo da Lentino-one arguing a case to, or before, another party-might be called forensic, and it is in forensic mode, usually on the subject of love, that most of the sonnets of da Lentino and his contempo-

14


raries were written. Now if the structure of the sonnet pushes its writer into a kind of argument, it is not surprising that others should argue in their turn; and, indeed, the first sonnet sequences emerged in the circle of da Lentino exactly in this way, as an exchange of sonnets connected by an argumentative thread. These sequences are called tenzoni and may consist of as few as two sonnets, one replying to the other, or 10 or 20 involving a number of writers. They were written throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Italy, and Dante Alighieri (whose sonnets in the book called La Vita Nuova we examine in chapter 5) shows us how one could be organized:

Thinking over my experience, I thought I would pass it on to many of those who were well-known poets at that time ... and proposed to write a sonnet, in which I would greet all Love's faithful servants, and ask them to judge my experience. So I began the sonnet, "A ciascun alma presa" ["To every faithful soul"]. Replies came in to this sonnet from a lot of people, judging it in various ways, among whom was one whom I reckon first among my friends ... and this was the foundation, as it were, of the friendship between him and me, when he realised that it was I who had sent the poem to him. 10

If Dante preserved all the replies, we do not have them now: only Dante's sonnet and three of the sonnets in answer survive.11

This early kind of sequence, in which various authors contribute to a collection on a common theme, which may be reinforced further by making one sonnet echo the rhymes of another, is actually quite rare in literature, not because it wasn't common practice, but because of the way in which literary texts are transmitted in our culture. Since well before the invention of printing, the most powerful template for organizing a collection of poems has been the personality of the single author. Even anthologies, which by their very nature propose to collect from a large number of authors, tend to use subgroupings in which a single author's poems appear together; in this kind of arranging, the tenzone is an editorial inconvenience. There is good scholarly evidence to suggest that many early tenzoni have simply been dispersed, the individual sonnets being regrouped by scribes under single authors;12 since a sonnet is always a poem in itself, there is often nothing to show that X' s sonnet was originally a reply to a sonnet by Y. Group authorship of sequences reappears

15

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

in the Italian and French literary academies and associations of the sixteenth century as a kind of literary game but has no modern equivalent, unless one counts those occasional detective stories in which successive chapters are written by different authors.

Tenzoni, then, are almost the only exception to the rule that sonnet sequences are the work of a single author. The other exception, apart from literary games among friends, is the collection of dedicatory sonnets often found at the beginning of a Renaissance volume, when friends contribute to praise an author in the front of his or her new book, something that might be regarded as a kind of tenzone but is not, for our purposes, really any kind of sonnet sequence.

The Definition of Sequence

At this point, before returning to the development of the sonnet sequence, we should consider the problems of defining sequence. A working definition is "a collection of poems, dominantly sonnets, linked together intentionally by something other than single authorship." Clearly that covers the tenzone. If we turn to the sonnets of a single author, we may accept that even if an author, such as John Milton, publishes all his sonnets together in a volume, that does not of itself make a sequence. If, however, the author not only places them together but says, or indicates, that they are connected-something a little stronger than "collected" -then the statement of intention creates a sequence.

Normally, an author's intention is manifested by the display of a linking device. This may be formal, as when in what is called a corona sequence the first line of each sonnet is a repetition of the last line of the previous one (John Donne, "La Corona" ea. 1607), or when the syntax of one sonnet leads into the next, or when each sonnet deals with one item in a series, such as the months of the year (Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, The Idler's Calendar, 1889). Common sense tells us that these things do not happen by accident. The linking may be narrative, as when successive sonnets are given related titles (George Macbeth, The Patient, 1992), or when the same characters appear in successive sonnets (Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree," The Harp Weaver, 1923). When the aggregation of sonnets is much looser, the author may signal a sequence simply by saying that it is one

16


(Petrarch, Rime Sparse, ea. 1365) or by giving it a connective title (Wordsworth, The River Duddon: A Series of Sonnets, 1820).

Here we come to the edge of a distinction between collecting sonnets and connecting them. An author may of course think that a collection of sonnets has gTeater unity than appears to the reader. Often, however, when an author's sense of connection is genuine and not merely the impulse of publication, one or more sonnets appear, often at the beginning or the end, in which the speaker takes an overview and uses a word or an image that shows his or her sense of connection: a collection that is called, in the collection itself a story, an account, a book, a poem, a journey, or a memorial is also likely to show some kind of serialism or sequentiality. Elizabeth Barrett Browning entitled her sequence Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), which leaves the question open, but her final sonnet uses a striking image of presenting a bouquet of mixed flowers to her lover, which affirms her view of the unity of her Sonnets (see chapter 5).In the absence of specific mention, we may know from biogTaphical evidence that the author wrote, or treated, the aggTegation of sonnets as a unity. A chance remark preserved in a letter of 1818 by Mary Wordsworth tells us that "William ... has written 21 sonnets (including 2 old ones) on the River Duddon-they all together compose one poem" (de Selincourt 506). This sentence would prompt us, even if the River Duddon sequence were not otherwise signaled as one, to read it as a unity, however complex.

Formally or narratively linked sequences are unproblematic, generally speaking. But in what are often called lyric sequences, where nothing connects the sonnets beyond the presence of a speaking or meditating /I/, the reader's desire to find patterns and sustain connections may be powerfully contributory-something on which the poet can rely. So, for example, George Macbeth, in The Patient (1992), offers a series of 18 sonnets, loosely based on his own terminal hospital care, which are linked in a kind of narrative by their titles, such as "The Healthy Wife," "The Sick Driver," "A Miracle," and "The Consultant." Yet the last sonnet, titled "Shotts" (the name of a Scottish mining village, his birthplace), if read on its own, would seem to have nothing to do with hospitals or death; however, the contextual pressure of the previous 17 sonnets compels a reading that absorbs it into the theme of the sequence. Once we have the hint given by the titles,

17

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

we can ourselves construct thematic and metaphorical links between and among the poems.

This connectiveness supplied by the reader is really all that makes Shakespeare's Sonnets a sequence, if indeed they are, for they have no links demonstrably provided by the author and seem to be a sequence only because of an enterprising publisher, Thomas Thorpe. Apart from small subgroups linked by syntax or topic, the Sonnets of Shakespeare are probably the extreme case: a highly miscellaneous group of sonnets in no chronological, stylistic, or thematic order, with no evidence whatever of authorial intention, welded into a sequence mainly by the fierce determination of readers to see in them a kind of occulted autobiography.

Finally, where there is no attempt to respect the individuality of each sonnet, the term sequence would not normally be appropriate: such cases are rare, given the customary tact that stops poets using the sonnet form simply as a stanza. Nevertheless William Wordsworth wrote a narrative poem, "The Widow on Windermere Side" (1842), in three sonnet-form stanzas, that it would be capricious to call a sonnet sequence. Similarly in Vikram Seth's interesting verse novel, The Golden Gate (1986), the 14-line stanzas (which are not in any case in normal sonnet rhyme scheme) are so entirely narrative that they have no separate identities. A sonnet sequence, whether formal, narrative, or lyric, has to be a collection of sonnets, poems that retain a functioning internal structure and are capable of standing alone-as, for example, when anthologized.

Sequence Length and Arrangement

What of length? In the section that follows, we examine sonnet sequences of very different lengths: John Donne' s "La Corona" has only seven sonnets, and a tenzone need involve only two sonnets, which are undoubtedly in sequence. At the longer end, Petrarch' s Rime Sparse has 317 sonnets, with an additional 49 poems, and there are sequences with even more, though few authors have actually written a longer sequence than Petrarch's 366 poems. If we set aside the special (and rare) case of the twosonnet tenzone, then we can say that a sonnet sequence in practice has anywhere from 3 to 400 sonnets or sonnets combined

18


with other poems. Indeed, the first use of the word in 1573 described a set of three sonnets as "in sequence."13

It often happens within a sequence that subgroups of sonnets appear connected: where a second sonnet follows syntactically or thematically from its predecessor, we might simply call them a pair; but larger groups often occur, and French criticism gives us the useful term suite for this. So, for example, in Petrarch' s Rime, we find a suite of three sonnets, numbers 41 through 43, successively rhyming ABBA ABBA CDC DCD I BMB BMB DCD CDC I ABBA ABBA CDC DCD. It is not clear why Petrarch should have created this sonnet sandwich, but the notion of suite allows the reader to treat these three as belonging more to one another than to what surrounds them. Suites of sonnets generally are short by comparison with the sequences in which they occur, and it may often be unclear whether the suite is the creation of the author or of the reader.

\

In the long history of the sonnet sequence, authors occasion-ally have attempted to use stanzas longer or shorter than the 14-line sonnet proper. The first love-" sonnet" sequences in both France and England were irregular in this way: Maurice Sceve's Delie, published in France in 1544, began a French vogue for sonnet sequences about love but is itself written in a complicated native French stanza called a dizain (10 lines rhyming ABABBCCDBD). Similarly, Thomas Watson' s Hekatompathia of 1582 comes at the start of the English vogue but is written in 18-line stanzas. Since these works were produced in advance of the craze, they can be treated as experiments that had no imitators; more challenging is the work of George Meredith (Modern Love, 1862) and of Tony Harrison (from The School of Eloquence, 1978), both of whom used a 16-line stanza and made it clear that they considered these to be sonnets. What one might call noninnocent variations such as these direct the reader to recall the normal sonnet and its sequence while reading the variant, rather as one can hold a rhythm in one's head while clapping off the beat.

The terms formal, narrative, and lyric, used earlier, seem to describe, even over the long period of the sonnet's development, the range of approaches used by writers of sequences. It is particularly interesting to see that when the sonnet sequence returned in large numbers to English and American literature in the nineteenth century, after a century and a half of disuse, the things

19

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

that authors try to do with it are very much like those of their Renaissance predecessors. There is, as we shall see, plenty of scope for originality. However, one problem always presents itself, in any age or place, because of the nature of the sonnet: the problem of aggregation into a whole of items that are also meaningful separately-a difficulty no other genre, in prose or verse, presents.

To give an analogy from outside literature, most readers will at some time have faced the task of putting accumulated photographs into an album. Each photograph is a formal discrete item, has its own meaning and justification, and may also be framed and viewed on its own. An album unites them all, but in doing so poses problems of aggregation. Certainly, photographs are usually taken by one person (the "author" of the album-few people consistently put photographs taken by others into their albums) and have a viewpoint, both literal and metaphorical. However, their separateness challenges the album compiler to become aware of his or her principles of aggregation. There is formal organization: photographs of the same size tend to appear together, or mixed sizes are found in balanced arrangements; black-and-white photographs usually are separated from calor ones. There are special suites of photographs, such as the sets in which a group is photographed in turn by each member of it, and there are paired photographs, as when a panorama is created by cutting and splicing two shots, roughly equivalent to making a second sonnet carry on the syntax of the first.

Most people who take photographs and preserve them are aware of the need to compose within the frame, and photographs may enter the album because they are formally well (or comically badly) composed. Then there is narrative organization where, either by good luck or because the photographer thought of it at the time the photographs follow a person or group through a sequence, such as that in a wedding or a first day at school. Some amateurs may produce categorical sequences: just as there are sonnet sequences on the months of the year and the seven deadly sins, so a suite of photographs can be assembled by following, say, a garden through the year or a person through various antics representing different kinds of behavior.

But along with these formal or narrative/thematic kinds of aggregation, there is the lyric. Few amateur photographers do

20


not at some time try to take a "picture," that is, a photograph that has aesthetic value-collections of vacation snapshots contain many taken because the scene pleased or moved the photographer. (The importance of the personal response is indicated by the habit on vacation of taking one's own pictures of scenes that are available a few yards away on professionally superior postcards.) Events that are already emotionally charged-a honeymoon or leaving a well-known place for the last time-are particularly likely to impel the taking of "lyrical" photographs. The gathering together of these, often in combination with narrative snapshots, produces a kind of disjointed coherence familiar to anyone who has had to explain a run of photographs to an outsider, in which each photograph can be admired on its own but is also related to its context.

If the reader will grant that the photograph has in some measure replaced the letter in our culture, then the suggestion that a sonnet sequence is a kind of album of meditations and responses, such as once would have been recorded in letter form for preservation at home, may not seem outrageous. The kinds of connectedness that a sequence may have, over and above the connection to a single author, are very much like those that organize other kinds of albums. No other literary genre, except that of personal letters, is in that sense an album.

Formal and Narrative Sequences

Because of the historical circumstance that a lyric sequence, Petrarch' s Rime, provided the most powerful and frequently imitated model for later sonnet writers, the formal and narrative sequences are less common. In this overview, it will be convenient to deal with them first before considering the lyric sequence as generically the most complicated and rewarding kind.

It is impossible to write any poem without being conscious of pattern, but because the sonnet is a prescribed form, its parameters laid down before one starts to write, one is particularly conscious of pattern completion when writing sonnets. The sense that one is playing a game is strong, and within the single sonnet writers have attempted all sorts of challenges, writing sonnets with only one rhyme word, for example, or beginning each line with the word that ended the previous one. In linking sonnets in

21

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

a sequence, close repetition becomes much more difficult and even tedious if long sustained, which may explain why formal linking between sonnets rarely is carried on for more than a dozen sonnets.

Some evidence suggests that in Dante's time, poets writing tenzoni picked up and repeated each other's rhymes, but there are few tenzoni in which such repetitions are unambiguously clear.l4 Petrarch tried it himself in Rime 41 through 43, using the rhymes -ove and -ana in the octave and -arte and -ato in the sestets, and wrote two further sonnets, 100 and 101, with the same rhymes (-ede, -ana, -ore, -anno, -aghe); but the rarity of this in Petrarch and his contemporaries' work suggests that it was not valued. However, in the middle and late sixteenth century, along with the popularity in Italy of "academies" -small gatherings of literati in the main towns, often under the protection of the local bishop or duke-there was a flurry of sonnet sequences in highly ingenious patterns, sometimes with multiple authorship, communicated through the raccolte, or anthologies, fashionable at the time. These sequences, or catene (chains), appear to have produced also the strict corona sequence, in which the last line of one sonnet becomes the first line of the next, and the last of all ends with the first line of the first, completing the circle, or garland, or corona. Some corona sequences of this late-sixteenth-century vogue add a sonnet called the magistrale (master sonnet) in which after 14 sonnets in corona all the repeated lines are united in a single sonnet. (One suspects that the magistrale normally was written first, and the other 14 devised to use its lines.15)

The first sonnet sequence to be printed in the English language, written by Anne Locke in 1560, is a religious sequence, which will be mentioned again later: the second and third, however, come out of a courtly ambience of game playing where poems were written as tests of skill, often in response to topics (or "devises") set by social superiors, and are worth noticing as early attempts to join sonnets. George Gascoigne (1542-1577), law student, novelist, dramatist, critic, and poet, published in 1573 an anthology of his works, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, which declares on its title page that the contents are

gathered partely (by translation) in the fyne outlandish [i.e., exotic] Gardins of Euripides, Ovid, Petrarke, Ariosto and others: and partely by invention, out of our owne fruitefull Orchardes in Englande.16

22


-It was perhaps in this spirit of native emulation of the exotic that he inserted into his romantic novella, The Adventures of Maister El., what he called "this sequence" -the first appearance of the term in English in relation to sonnets:

Of thee deare Dame, three lessons would I learn, What reason first persuades the foolish Fly (As soone as shee a candle can discerne) To play with flame, till shee bee burnt thereby? Or what may move the Mouse to byte the bayte Which strykes the trappe, that stops hir hungry breath? What calles the Byrd, where snares of deepe deceit Are closely caught to draw hir to hir death? Consider well, what is the cause of this, And though percase thou wilt not so confesse, [percase: perhaps] Yet deepe desire, to gayne a heavenly blisse, May drowne the mynd in dole and darke distresse: Oft is it seene (whereat my heart may bleed e) Fooles play so long till they be caught indeed.

It is a heaven to see them hop and skip, And seeke all shiftes to shake their shackles of: It is a world, to see them hang the lip Who (earst) at love were wont to skorne and skof. But as the Mouse, once caught in crafty trap,

And then

May bounce and beate agaynst the boorden wall, [boorden: wooden] Till shee have brought her head in such mishape, That doune to death hir fainting lymbes must fall: And as the Flye once singed in the flame, Cannot commaund hir winges to wave away, But by the heele she hangeth in the same Till cruell death hir hasty journey stay. So they that seeke to breake the linkes of love Stryve with the streame, and this by payne I prove.

I first beheld that heavenly hewe of thyne, Thy stately stature, and thy comely grace, I must confesse these dazled eyes of myne Did wincke for feare, when I first viewd thy face: But bold desire did open them agayne, And bad mee looke till I had lookt to[o]long, I pitied them that did procure my payne, And lov' d the lookes that wrought me all the wrong: And as the Byrd once caught but woorks her woe,

23

For when

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

That stryves to leave the lymed wings behind: [lymed: limed, i.e., with birdlime]

Even so the more I strave to parte thee fro, The greater grief did growe within my minde: Remediles then must I yeeld to thee, And crave no more, thy servant but to bee.[but: except]

Gascoigne, while not a genius, was a fluent and intelligent poet, and this little sequence shows a good grasp of the basic problems of aggregation. The sonnets are in regular Shakespearean form, ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, but are linked by two small tails, 'And then" and "For when," which also rhyme. The rhythmical effect is curious, like a little hop or skip, and did not appeal to later writers. The fondness for animal imagery that Giacomo da Lentino' s sonnet showed is here a means of holding three together: the Fly, the Mouse, and the Bird recur as comparisons, but not in any remorselessly logical way. In spite of that, each of the three sonnets can stand on its own (if one allows the conjunctive adverb when to go into the third sonnet from the tail) and be read as a self-contained unit. Each sonnet is concluded with an epigrammatic couplet, but the final couplet of the third is also the conclusion of the sequence.

Gascoigne is also responsible for the first corona sequence in English, a little later in the same volume. By this date, corona sequences had been published in Italy, and Gascoigne may well have seen a model among his Italian reading. His sequence on the moral tag "Good enough is fast enough" consists of seven sonnets17 and varies from the model Donne followed only by having the last sonnet repeat its own first line at the end. Because of its audible iteration, as well as its tendency to go on at some length, the corona sequence fits well with a ceremonial or philosophical persona and has usually been employed for that kind of subject. Torquato Tasso' s much imitated corona sequence of 12 sonnets, beginning "Era piena l'Italia e pieno 'I Mondo," is in effect a long praise poem, and George Macbeth's modern corona sequence, 'A Christmas Ring" (1970), with 14 sonnets and a sonetto magistrale, retains the traditional sense of ceremony and solemn game.18

Linked with less contrivance, but still formally structured, are sequences one might call categorical, in which the number of son-

24


nets corresponds to the number of items in a set of objects: the months of the year (Folgore da San Gemignano, ea. 1310), the seven deadly sins (Guittone d' Arezzo, ea. 1265), the planets (James VI of Scotland, 1585), or notable figures (Martin Tupper, 1839, subtitled "A Septuagint of Worthies"). The set of objects may of course be the lines of the sonnet itself: the Italians of the late sixteenth century appear also to have invented the 14-sonnet sequence, subsequently practiced by Christina Rossetti in 1882 in "Monna Innominata-A Sonnet of Sonnets" and "Later Life-A Double Sonnet of Sonnets" (28 sonnets).The 14-sonnet sequence, at the author's discretion, can mimic the structure of the single sonnet, having breaks in thought at the fourth and eighth and possibly at the eleventh verses. Such, for example, is George Macbeth's "Thoughts on a Box of Razors" (Poems from Oby, 1972).

The first sonnet sequence written in Enghsh, mentioned previously, is of this categorical kind: Anne Locke's Meditation of a Penitent Sinner, published in 1560 and written shortly before that date. Anne Locke (ea. 1533-1595) was a devout Protestant and friend of John Knox and for a short period was in Geneva, a Marian exile from her home in London. On her return to London, she published, no doubt from her luggage, a translation of one of Calvin's sermons, but remarkably appended to it 26 sonnets in sequence, 5 prefatory and 21 making up the "meditation."

Following established devotional practice, she meditated on the text of Psalm 51, one of the greatest Protestant penitential texts, and hit on the idea of keying each sonnet to a verse of the psalm (it has 19, but she split the two longest verses). The resulting sequence has unity of mood from the psalm and variety and progression from the different stages of the psalmist's vision. But Locke herself had an extraordinarily good ear for meter, as well as a firm grasp of syntax and enjambment that must have come from her own native ability and education; there were no English sonnet sequences before hers, and those that existed in French (which she could certainly read, if not speak, fluently) were of a wholly secular kind that she would not have troubled to encounter. She chose the Shakespearean sonnet form as developed by the Earl of Surrey, ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, and generated from the voice of the psalmist a very powerful penitential persona, intense, inward looking, but also active. Locke's sonnets move with a fluency unmatched till Sidney began to write some

25

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

20 years later. It is also worth noticing that the first two of her five prefatory sonnets are a single 28-line sentence-a remarkable and as far as I know unique achievement in the sonnet game.l9

Psalm 51 is not a narrative, and Locke's technique of meditative expansion would in any case destroy any narrative line. Real narrative sequences, that is, sequences in which the sonnet simply functions as a stanza to tell a story, are very rare, as I have already suggested: nearly all writers prefer to use the sonnets to give glimpses of moments in a narrative that remains mostly concealed; the point of view is usually that of a single character whose thoughts and feelings are foregrounded, making the sequence lyric rather than narrative.

One exception has already been mentioned: Vikram Seth' s verse novel The Golden Gate (1986), though its stanza form is not that of a regular sonnet;20 another, Edna St. Vincent Millay' s "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree" will be discussed at length in chapter 4. That leaves only a few curiosities: the earliest narrative sequence is from the thirteenth century, an unfinished or incomplete Italian sequence of 232 sonnets freely translating and adapting a large part of the long French narrative poem Le Roman de la Rose, by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, 1237-1277. Even here, though the sequence is a version of a French narrative poem with an entirely different formal structure (continuous rhymed verse organized into episodes), individual sonnets tend to offer encounters between the persons of the narrative, responding to the sonnet's capacity to dramatize instants of time or perception. The authorship of the sequence, known as Il Fiore (The Flower), is often assigned to Dante Alighieri, and the text referred to in this book forms part of an edition of Dante's works.21

About 1570, a Neapolitan poet, Ferrante Carrafa, is alleged to have been the first to write a heroic poem in sonnets, called Dell'Austria (Napoli: G. Cacchi, 1572);22 interestingly, a later biographical notice of him comments that "each sonnet of the poem could also stand on its own," emphasizing what I have already drawn attention to, the sonnet's quality of retaining its own internal structure against the flow of continuous narrative. In English, one of the few poets to attempt to use the sonnet as a simple stanza in a long poem is George Wither (1588-1667) who in Campo-Musae of 1643 and Vox Pacifica of 1645 produced two long and rambling political and moral commentaries, hardly

26


narratives, in which the sonnet certainly begins to lose its distinctness. Even Wither, however, calls his poems "musings," acknowledging the fragmenting effect that the unity of 14 lines introduces into larger structures:

My Vessell stirreth not, till that Wind blowes Which never blowes but when, and where, it list: Drie is my Cisterne, till that Fountaine flowes, Whose flowings-forth, I cannot then resist. Somtimes, in me, so low the Waters lie, That every Childe and Beast is trampling on me; Somtime againe, they rise, they swell so high, That Princes cannot make a Bridge upon me. Had King, and Parliament, the other day, Commanded from me that which now I write, To save my life, I knew not what to say Of that, which was inspired yesternight:

And being, now, as full as I can hold, Though none they please, my Musings must be told.

Mistake not tho, as if it should be thought, That by Enthusiasme now I write; Or, that the matter which to me is brought, By GODS immediate dictates, I indite. Far is that Arrogancie from my pen: The Objects of my Contemplation, be The same which GOD affords to other men, Who use aright, the Guifts bestow' d on me. The Muses challenge a peculiar phrase [peculiar: distinctive] And freedomes, not so well becoming those, Who are confined to observe the lawes Of common speech, and tell their minds in prose:

For, whereas these have but one worke to do, I have, in my Intentions, often two.23

Wither is a tedious talker, but though he has little to say, he has inherited from the verse writers of the early seventeenth century a relaxed and fluent conversational mode to say it in. However, I suggest that Wither's is the limiting case for what I earlier called "sonnetness": the distinct structure of the sonnet is just perceptible here in the clinch of the final couplet, and everything else becomes continuous verse. This is not a sonnet sequence, but a

27

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

long poem using sonnet-form stanzas. The same might be said of Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate and of John Fuller's verse fiction The Illusionists (1980), with the qualification that both Seth and Fuller take care not to use a traditional sonnet rhyme schemeFuller's comic Byronic verse narrative uses tetrameters rhyming ABAB CCDD EFFE GG.

After Wither's time, and during most of the eighteenth century, the demands of the age for wit (which drives for brevity) and on the other hand for expository verse (which makes for length and continuity) sent the sonnet and its sequences into disfavor, and sonnet sequences did not reappear in English until the 1780s,24 when British writers responded to the flow of European romanticism. The sonnet sequence had not similarly disappeared in French and Italian poetry but had become much less popular and reflected the increasingly baroque and later rococo fondness for extravagant patternings-a feature beyond the scope of this work.

The Lyric Sequence

When the sonnet sequence came into its second vogue in English at the end of the eighteenth century, the most powerful influences were first, the generation of Elizabethan Petrarchist sonnetsequence writers including Spenser and Shakespeare; and second, Milton, who though he wrote no sonnet sequences, was typical of the moralist/philosopher sonneteer. These made culturally acceptable-and indeed desirable-a lyric sonnet voice inherited from the European Renaissance, and congenial to European romanticism, that one might call"the passionate spectator." The sequence (and also, of course, single sonnets) was projected from the persona of someone who stood slightly outside or above the society that he (or she-many sonnet sequences were written by women) commented on: he or she might be disappointed in love and thus outside the sphere of the beloved, if not an actual outcast. This feature is a readily recognizable Petrarchan persona. On the Miltonic side, the speaker might be a figure of Wisdom, trying to teach social or moral truths from the vantage point of achieved serenity-or in a more satirical vein, perhaps anger or bitterness. This combination of emotional fervor with a kind of sage distancing can be found readily in Dante,

28


Petrarch, Spenser, Shakespeare, or Milton by a Romantic reader. Since these admired authors had all (except Milton) produced sonnet sequences, a considerable number of sonnet sequences in this mode appeared between 1780 and about 1930.25

The eighteenth century, notably short on sonnets and sonnet sequences, nevertheless produced an enormous amount of philosophical landscape poetry. When sonnet sequences came back into favor, one of the things the passionate spectator was likely to spectate upon was topography. The topographical sonnet sequence emerged as a distinct subgenre at this time; indeed, there are more sonnet sequences (and more sonnets) on natural objects and places than on any other single subject. If these had a distant ancestor in the various sonnets of Petrarch composed on, or to, the landscape of the Vaucluse, their subgenre was really a new kind of sequence, pioneered by Wordsworth, whose 34 sonnets regarding the River Duddon (1820), if not the earliest in English, were certainly the most influential topographical meditative sequence.

The idea of using the sonnet sequence to meditate on a succession of objects is a development of the categorical sequence already mentioned and had been strikingly anticipated by Joachim du Bellay (1532-1560) in his sequence of 32 sonnets, Les Antiquitcz de Rome (1558?6 devoted to the ruins of Rome. Though not topographical in the modern sense, since he does not look at individual landmarks, du Bellay shows what Wordsworth also grasped: that the passage from sonnet to sonnet is a movement in space that is the analogy of a movement in time, while each sonnet is a place in which one can look back or forward in historical time. The comparison can be made again with snapshots, each sonnet functioning as a starting image for a lyrical or meditative response; there is also a parallel with the guidebook, well developed in the humanist sixteenth century and the constant companion of the tourists of Wordsworth's age.

Given the powerful and pervasive nature of Romantic nature symbolism, it is often difficult to be sure whether a sequence deals with a real or symbolic landscape: some sequences, such as Words worth's, have strong links with the guidebook, while others, such as Longfellow' s "The Two Rivers," deal with landscapes wholly of the mind and are entirely lyrical. This might be said of Petrarch's sonnets on landscape: it is not accidental that Petrarch

29

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

returns in the nineteenth century .as one of the most admired authors for writers of sonnets and sonnet sequences. That almost any external object can now be the symbol of an internal state, or . that without losing its identity it can exhibit what Coleridge called "the translucence of the general in the special," means that in the sonnet sequence as in verse in general it becomes harder and harder to separate the topographical from the lyrical, the external snapshot from the internal meditation, and the album of scenes from the diary of the soul.

The other kind of sequentiality that became prominent in the nineteenth century was that of the novel. It might be argued that the arrival of the modern novel, and particularly of the Bildungsroman, would displace the sonnet sequence, and so it seems, since only one major novelist, George Meredith, also wrote a major sonnet sequence. George Eliot's short sequence, "Brother and Sister" (1874), of only 11 sonnets, is a curiosity, overshadowed by The Mill on the Floss (1860) and her other novels. It was not that prose was preferred to verse as a narrative medium (though that might be true today), for the major lyrical talents of the century-Wordsworth, Tennyson, the Brownings, and Longfellow-also wrote massive amounts of narrative verse.

However, a reading of sonnets and sonnet sequences does suggest that the importance of what we now call mood, the emergence or dominance of one feeling or state of mind through which to look at the world, and the special cultural value given to intensity of mood after about 1780 in Europe and America-one thinks of the parallel development of the impromptu and the nocturne in music-favored a medium that could present moods without the wrapping of events that a novel requires but that yet retained the dignity of long discourse (as in the song cycle in music).

This nineteenth-century emphasis is not as much of a break with the past as it might seem, because a large number of sonnet sequences before the eighteenth century dealt with love, whether of an earthly lover or of God. Taking Petrarch' s Rime as their model, sometimes several times removed, these sequences image love and desire as an oscillation between frustration and satisfaction, or despair and hope, such that particular sonnets register continuously varying moods in the speaker, held together by an underlying devotion to or search for the Other, the object of desire beyond the self. The Petrarchan pattern

30


proved durable and was imitated by many nineteenth-century and later sonneteers, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti in The House of Life (1881) or Robert Bridges in The Growth of Love (1898).

Looking back over the sonnet sequence's long career, one can see that it has always been associated with, and used for, the registration of what I am now calling mood-a word etymologically close to mode in both general and musical senses. Expressing human moods or (as the Renaissance would have called them) passions and tracing their connection with identity and self-construction has always been one of the functions of literature and particularly of certain genres within it, such as lyric and tragedy. Different cultures legitimize, or as one might say in this context, authorize, the expression of mood in different ways, according to their medical knowledge, religions, or discursive practices: so Guittone d' Arezzo, about 1350, put the socially recognizable gamut of human moods into a sequence of 24 sonnets on the vices and the virtues, in obedience to a theologically centered notion of human personality.27 Shakespeare and Spenser, in their sequences, expose the variety of their own moods as responses to the moods or gestures of a feudal superior (one male, one female), reflecting the notion so widespread in the Renaissance of personality as constructed by systems of allegiance and responsibility (whether to divine or earthly superiors). Wordsworth, believing that personality was formed by environment (as offered by a benevolent Nature), saw mood as embodied in the objects and landscapes of the River Duddon, as if the entire landscape extended in space were, potentially, the collectivity of his self varying in time. Rilke' s mystical identification of the self with the world spirit does not lend itself easily to cultural assimilation, but for a modern sequence writer, such as Tony Harrison, however, the notion of mood is beginning to give way to the notion of sign, by which the varying nature of the self is imaged through the constant change, or deconstruction, of meanings in the universe of signs around the self (from The School of Eloquence, 1978). Thus, more importance is given to fragmentation and less to coherence; yet the sonnet sequence still copes admirably with the urgency of the deconstructive moment set into a chain of continuous change. Dante and Petrarch, both of them familiar with the intense moment that undoes previous meanings, would have sympathized.

31

Chapter 2

THE FORMAL SEQUENCE:

FOLGORE DA SAN GEMIGNANO, ANNE LOCKE, }OHN DONNE,

AND GEORGE MACBETH

Formal Linking

The first sonnet sequence to be written in English, as mentioned in chapter 1, was Anne Locke's Meditation of a Penitent

Sinner, published in 1560. Because this is an unfamiliar text, it is worth reproducing two of her sonnets here to show a particular kind of connectedness that is relevant to the two sequences to be discussed at length in the next section, John Donne's "La Corona," from his Holy Sonnets, published in 1633 but probably written about 1607; and George Macbeth' s ''A Christmas Ring" from The Burning Cone, 1970. M0st sequences work with some kind of I 1/ as the speaker of all the sonnets, however varied the moods or passions of the individual sonnets. If the sequence is a dialogue, as in Guittone d' Arezzo' s six-sonnet "Tenzone con la Donna Villana" ("Conversation with a Low-Class Lady"), written before 1260,1 then the notion of personality applies to two characters instead of a single speaker. This is not the place for a gen-

32

THE FORMAL SEQUENCE

era! discussion of personality in literature, but it must be stressed that well before the rise of the novel the sonnet sequence was acting, like Cicero' s Letters, as the means of presenting the continuity and discontinuity that is the paradox of personality. Dante's Vita Nuova will be discussed in chapter 4; here we look at sequences in which continuity is preserved by formal connections.

One of the earliest ways, in European culture, in which the supposed chaos of human thoughts and feelings could be given coherence was meditation: the individual fixed his or her thoughts on something having either an intense quality (Christ's agony) or a number of discrete stages (the seven joys of Mary). Each stage focused a particular awareness or idea or feeling in the speaker, which given utterance, produced a sense of emotional or intellectual progress. This technique, applied to the sonnet, produces a sequence of the type I have called categorical, in which each sonnet marks a stage and all the sonnets together record the development of an I 1/. The categorical sequence can be secular, and the /I! in that case is likely to be a detached observer, meditative only in the sense that he or she is the source of the thoughts expressed; here, for example, is Folgore da San Gemignano, writing about 1310, on two of the months of the year:

D' agosto si vi do trenta castella in una valle d' alpe montanina, che non vi possa vento de marina, per sitar sani, chiari come stella;

e palafreni da montare 'n sella, e cavalcar la sera e la mattina: e I' una terra e 1' altra si vicina, ch'un miglio sia la vostra giornatella,

tornando tuttavia in verso casa; e per la valle corra una fiumana, che vada notte e di traente e rasa;

e star ne! fresco tutta meriggiana: la vostra borsa sempre a bocca pasa, per la miglior vivanda di Toscana.

Di settembre vi do deletti tanti: falconi, astori, smerletti, sparvieri, lunghe, gherbegli, geti con carnieri,

33

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

brachette con sonagli, pas to e guanti; bolz' e balestre dritt' e ben portanti,

archi, strali, ballotte e ballottieri; sianvi mudati guilfanghi ed astieri nidaci e di tutt'altri uccel volanti

che fosser buoni da snidar e prendere: e l'un a l'altro tuttavia domando, e possasi rubar, e non contendere, quando con altra gente rincontrando; la vostra borsa si acconcia a spendere, e'n tutto abbiate 1' avarizia in bando.

(I give to you in August thirty towers within an Alpine valley mountainous, where never the sea-wind may vex your house, but health as clear as starlight shall be yours.

And horses shall wait saddled at all hours, That you may ride at morning or at eve: Each place so near the next one you'll perceive, A one-mile trip that doesn't tax your powers

Will always get you back to home and bed. A valley, parted by a rivulet Which day and night shall flow sedate and smooth, Will let you pass your middays in the shade, And there your open purses shall entreat The best of Tuscan cheer to feed your youth.

I give you in September great delight: Falcons and merlins, every kind of hawk, With jesses, laces, game bags all in stock, Hounds with their bells, and gauntlets strong and tight;

Crossbows with bolts that hurtle out of sight, And bows and arrows, bullets and shot-cases; Your falcons have been managed through their paces, With hand-reared goshawks, skilful in their flight,

And every kind of bird for hunting down. Let everyone be free in their requests, And if you're robbed, it shouldn't raise a frown; When meeting strangers, courtesy suggests Your purse must flow as if it were their own: Let meanness be what everyone detests.)2

Folgore' s 12 sonnets on the months (very readably translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti) were addressed to a group of Sienese

34

THE FORMAL SEQUENCE

nobles, as his dedicatory sonnet says, and the speaker thus takes on the role of a host welcoming guests of leisure and means. Even as early as the late thirteenth century, it is plain that the categorical sonnet sequence is close to other genres that combine descriptions of single items with an overall persona, including the guidebook, the tourist brochure, and the diary (particularly the diary of the seasons, as in Edith Holden's Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady [London: Michael Joseph, 1977]). In all of these, as in Folgore' s sequence, the reader is conscious of a subtle relationship with a speaker who is not merely knowledgeable about the area (whether of time or space) but is also offering it with certain assumptions about how it will be used, and even advice on how to behave. The figure of the wise (and here also genial) observer will recur in sonnet sequences ever afterward.

Here the formal linking of the sonnets categorically-one per month-is reinforced by the use of the name of the month in the first line, and in all except the first sonnet, in the first three words. This kind of linkage has the effect of assuring the reader that he or she is getting somewhere: a display of goods or a process of teaching is under way. As the reader jumps the gap from sonnet to sonnet, he or she will tend to look for connections, categorical, syntactic, or thematic, and receive impetus to move on to the next stage.

Folgore da San Gemignano, though he has ambitions to be the guide, philosopher, and friend of those he addresses, could hardly be called meditative; Anne Locke's sequence of 1560 is designed for spiritual guidance and points toward the more intricately connected sequences of John Donne and George Macbeth. Her title, A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner: Written in maner of a Paraphrase upon the 51 Psalme of David, announces her stance and method: she is the first writer in English, and the first that I know of in Europe, to key the sonnets of a sequence to the verses of another text. This can be regarded as the first use of titling material-material that goes above or alongside the sonnet-to guide the reader. The following pair of sonnets, in reasonable type facsimile, will show her approach:

Loe prostrate, Lorde, before thy face I lye With sighes depe drawne depe sorrow to expresse, 0 Lord of mercie, mercie do I crye: Dryve me not from thy face in my distresse,

35

Cast me not away from thy face and

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

Thy face of mercie and of swete relefe The face that fedes angels with onely sight, The face of comfort in extremest grefe Take not away the succour of thy sprite, Thy holy sprite, which is myn onely stay, The stay that when despeir assaileth me, In faintest hope yet moveth me to pray, To pray for mercy, and to pray to thee. Lord, cast me not from presence of thy face, Nor take from me the spirite of thy grace.

But render me my wonted joyes againe, Which sinne hath reft, and planted in theyr place Doubt of thy mercie ground of all my paine. The tast that thy love whylome did embrace My cheerfull soule, the signes that dyd assure My felyng ghost of favour in thy sight, Are fled from me, and wretched I endure Senselesse of grace the absence of thy sprite. Restore my joyes, and make me fele againe The swete retorne of grace that I have lost, That I may hope I pray not all in vayne. With thy free sprite confirme my feble ghost, To hold my faith from ruine and decay With fast affiance and assured stay.3

take not thy holy spirit from me.

Restore to me the camforte of thy saving helpe, & stablishc me with thy free spirit

This pair of sonnets, linked antithetically in a "not-A-but-B" pattern, are of course prayers to God, but uttered, as prayers often are, to be overheard by the reader, just as David' s psalms were intended. Locke fixes the reader's mind, along with the speaker's, on a text rather than an image or conceptual item such as a month of the year and then develops a response to that text. But the text is itself sequential in that each reader is likely to have a copy of Psalm 51 at hand (it was one of the best known and most translated Protestant texts) and will read Locke's sonnets in a process of departing from and returning to David' s, verse by verse. This is an analogue of the meditative method, which involves both the regard of an external object and a movement into one's mind.

The reader will notice that although the two sonnets deal with separate feelings, Locke linked them to create a pair. Formal linking is one solution to the problem of interweaving one's sonnets without losing the identity of each, and the corona sequence takes this formal intricacy to an extreme, as we see in John Donne' s

36

THE FORMAL SEQUENCE

devotional sequence, "La Corona" (ea. 1607). Like Locke's, these sonnets are prayers, addressed to God, the Virgin Mary, Christ, and fellow worshipers by a single 11/, and are keyed, not certainly to a quoted text, but to the gospel narratives of Christ's life, alluded to in the six titles of sonnets 2 through 7: 'Annunciation," "Nativitie," "Temple," "Crucifying," "Resurrection," and 'Ascention." This series is a meditation on Christ's life. However, because it is also an utterance directed to God and to the Holy Family, it acknowledges and praises them at the same time as it reveals the anxieties of the speaker-and praise requires art.

In Renaissance writing, the strategies of praise literature were many and various, but they almost always involved the speaker in offering his or her art as a gift in addition to the content of that art. This creates the speaker, in the midst of his or her poetry, as a self-conscious artist, aware of the patterns he or she creates. Anne Locke does not show this awareness: because of her strong Calvinist conviction of sin, she maintains the fiction that her utterance is "confused crye" and "oft repeted grone," and her speaker is simply not allowed to be aware that what she says is being said in fluent rhyme. Because it is impossible for an author writing sonnets (or any kind of verse) not to be aware that he or she is doing so, Locke's speaker is just as much a fictional creation as Donne's but is one that does not draw attention to the art of the sonnet sequence while uttering it.

The Formal Sequence

John Donne, "La Corona"

Donne, by contrast, begins his sequence by drawing attention to his art. The sequence is titled "La Corona," and the first line (italicized, like the first and last lines of each sonnet in the 1633 text) is "Deigne at my hands this crown of prayer and praise." The sequence thus begins with the lines "Deigne at my hands this crown of prayer and praise I Weav' d in my low devout melancholie" and ends 'And if thy holy Spirit, my Muse did raise, I Deigne at my hands this crowne of prayer and praise." The unusual reference to "weaving" a crown both reminds the reader of the etymology of text and directs him or her to examine its construction (we shall see George Macbeth similarly draw attention to his art) as an inter-

37

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

lacing of items-in this case, lines. As is necessary in a corona sequence, the last line of each sonnet is the first line of the next, with the last line of all, as shown previously, being the first line of the first. It is as if the sonnets, like plaques of gold in a crown, slightly overlap, coming full circle at the end.

The speaker of Donne' s sequence, like the speaker of Anne Locke's, adopts a position not uncommon in religious poetry, known as abjection, in which the speaker represents himself or herself as disabled or incapable or insecure, to be rescued only by the grace of God (or, in a secular context, by the grace of the beloved). This crisis of selfhood is voiced appropriately in single sonnets or lyrics that can be regarded as "sighs" or cries or groans, as can be seen in Locke's sonnets. But in a sequence, and particularly in a corona sequence, the foregrounding of art and artifice required to continue and sustain the sequence also establishes the speaker as someone capable of construction and thus not abject insofar as his or her art exists. This is exactly what Donne draws attention to: if he manages to complete his sequence, he says in the last sonnet-which of course is proof that he has completed it-it will be because the Holy Spirit has raised his muse from its "low devout melancholie." An intricate sequential art form here becomes the visible proof of the effectiveness of imputed righteousness:

0 strong Ramme, which hast batter' d heaven for mee, Mild lambe which with thy blood, hast mark' d the path; Bright torch, which shin'st, that I the way may see, Oh, with thy owne blood quench thy owne just wrath, And if thy holy Spirit, my Muse did raise, Deigne at my hands this crow ne of prayer and praise. 4

A strong sense of trying to overcome is perceptible in Donne' s writing: his /I/ is a persona for whom resistance to chaos means preservation of self. In the corona sequence, one sign of such resistance is successful reworking of the last line of each sonnet: for as the reader reaches it, he or she knows by the rules of the game that it must begin the next, and looks to see how it is done. Donne is not always successful in reworking his lines, but the transition between "Crucifying" and "Resurrection" is neat, and gives a strong sense of a positive step forward (because what looks like a repeat is not a repeat, but a new beginning):

38

THE FORMAL SEQUENCE

Now thou art lifted up, draw mee to thee, And at thy death giving such liberall dole, Moyst, with one drop of thy blood, my dry soule.

Moyst with one drop of thy blood, my dry sou le Shall (though she now be in extreme degree Too stony hard, and yet too fleshly,) bee Freed by that drop.5

Because repetition (including puns) is a feature of Donne's mature style, it happens that the repetitive element of a corona sequence reinforces the kind of lexical doubling he is so fond of, and the movement from sonnet to sonnet on the same line is mirrored inside each sonnet by the movement from phrase to phrase on the same (or the antonymic) word:

Ere by the spheares time was created, thou Wast in his minde, who is thy Sonne, and Brother, Whom thou conceiv'st, conceiv'd; yea thou art now Thy Maker's maker, and thy Father's mother, Thou'hast light in darke; and shutst in little roome, Immensity cloysterd in thy deare wombe. 6

The extravagant artifice of the corona sequence here is integrated 'into the persona of the speaker, whose obsessive repetitions and replayings of words are part of his or her attempt to order the world and the text and art at the same time.

Donne once referred to his own writing as "my verse, the strict Map of my misery," and though this was not said in respect of his sonnets, it is observable that when the speaker of a sonnet or sonnet sequence notices himself or herself as the contriver of the poetry, a metaphor of mapping or arranging or mastering often appears. Donne is a weaver or a goldsmith in his sequence; Edna St. Vincent Millay, whom we shall encounter later, sees herself as something between a sorceress and an alchemist:

I will put Chaos into fourteen lines And keep him there; and let him thence escape If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape Flood, fire and demon-his adroit designs Will strain to nothing in the strict confines Of this sweet Order, where, in pious rape,

39

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

I hold his essence and amorphous shape, Till he with order mingles and combines. Past are the hours, the years of our duress, His arrogance, our awful servitude: I have him. He is nothing more nor less Than something simple not yet understood; I shall not even force him to confess; Or answer. I will only make him good?

The problem of aggregation, mentioned in chapter 1, is particularly likely to force itself on the attention of the writer of a sonnet sequence and make him or her metaphorize the narrative voice in some metapoetic way, as we shall see from time to time in examining sequences in detail. When this happens, it reveals what the writer thinks about the poet's task of controlling experience.

George Macbeth, "A Christmas Ring"

For George Macbeth (1932-1992), the corona sequence "A Christmas Ring" offered a challenge and a game, and like Donne, his speaker draws attention to Macbeth's artifice in the course of the sequence:

Then, I envisaged these sonnets, in a mode Intricate as mahjong. (1.3-4)8

Macbeth had a strong interest in pattern and randomness and made several verse and prose experiments in pattern construction. He wrote two other sequences, "Thoughts on a Box of Razors," in Poems from Oby (1982), and the sequence already referred to in chapter 1, an untitled group of 17 sonnets written with great bravery and humor about his own terminal motorneuron disease (The Patient, 1992). His later poetry became simpler; in his earliest sequence, 'A Christmas Ring" (The Burning Cone, 1970), he opted for the most difficult sequence pattern: the corona with sonetto magistrale, a 14-sonnet sequence ending with an extra sonnet made up of the 14 first lines of each one, which are also the last lines of the previous sonnet. These lines are italicized in Macbeth' s printed text, as they are in Donne' s.

Since in an increasingly secular society the practice of meditating on one's sins has lost cultural endorsement, Macbeth creates a speaker representing himself not in abjection but in idleness,

40

THE FORMAL SEQUENCE

snowed in at Christmas, aware of all the moral problems of the world in the embarrassed way we are at that season, but still writing "only for Chinese pleasure, to pare time I In a warm room" (1.10-11). The sequence's pattern is thus first seen as pastime, mere game, a notion reinforced by the use in_ each sonnet up to the twelfth of the refrain "On the ... day of Christmas" from the well-known (and itself highly patterned) song "The Twelve Days of Christmas." (In the same spirit of leisured pastime, Folgore di San Gemignano had used the refrain "in ... month, I give you .... ") However, as in Donne' s sequence, each sonnet also has a title, keyed to episodes of Christ's life, beginning with "The Conception" (1) and ending with "The Glory" (15). Only three do not obviously belong: "The Milk'' (4), "The Waste" (5), and "The Visitor" (6), but the meditative purpose of the sequence is signaled clearly, just as by the cotext in Locke's sequence and the titles in Donne' s.

But Macbeth inhabits a culture in which, by long familiarity with Romantic poetry, poets are expected to revalue the world around them, and one in which, also, signs and meanings are problematic, deconstructed by the poet's vision. (We think this very postmodern, but it is probable that all great poets intuit the instability of signs, though they may not always choose to emphasize that in their writing.) The device of the sonetto magistrale then acquires a new possibility: formally, it must (in any sequence) accomplish a reassigning of meaning, as each line that had two meanings by virtue of ending one sonnet and also by beginning another has a third time to enter into meaning in a final recombining. As it ends the sequence, however, it also shows by recombining the 14 lines that final meaning is provisional; that these lines have already meant something else, twice, undermines their capacity to be conclusive at the end. The "teaching sonnet" is actually the least possessed of sure meaning, and we are not certain whether its intense difficulty is due to its meaning a great deal or its inability to mean much at all:

The Glory On the first day of Christmas, when it snowed, Strafing each flake, immigrant to his beak, A blackbird scattered his incense in the road, Max leapt to extol him, with a grief-hewn cheek, [Max, Tabitha: his cats]

41

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

Extending paws by water, where some flowed Hard by the drain-cope. Red specked from a leak, Where the tired crab-apple cleared its load, I heard Christ's agony in the garden shriek.

Above his fur, snow-grey, the New Year crossed, As, near its child, that nail-bright star by night, Over the ice. On crisp leaves, Max trod light

Across a bald earth, graved in pewter frost Near to where Tabitha strayed, smokily neat Under chrysanthemums. I heard Christ's wings beat.

This difficult sonnet shows signs of strain, understandable when one realizes that given Macbeth' s choice of the Petrarchan sonnet (ABBA ABBA CCD EED), each of the rhyme words must have a minimum of 9 and a maximum of 19 rhymes in the sequence. Although rhymes can be repeated, Macbeth is diligent in avoiding this repetition.9 One noticeable consequence of this is that almost all Macbeth' s rhymes are monosyllables, as easiest to work with, which give a certain concreteness to the verse. Again, the sheer difficulty in English of finding so many rhymes for a given word forces odd or unusual words into prominence at the ends of lines. For example, the curious phrase "grief-hewn cheek" (1.4) has been prompted by the appearance of the word beak, originally ending the last line of sonnet 1 and the first line of sonnet 2, which is also tied to leak (sonnets 5 and 6) and shriek (sonnets 7 and 8).

The lexical pressure that this exerts happened to suit Macbeth' s mode of working. He examined his own conflicts and anxieties through an often violent resymbolizing of the outer world, in which hyperbolic words of intense local effect are pressed into service. Here the violence of lexis passes from sonnet to sonnet, linking them in mood, via a repeated line that is itself twisted violently to re-mean, both in transition between sonnets and in the sonetto magistrale:

Max hunched, then sprang at leaves, Leaving me shaking blood-stock from my sleeves, Hard by the drain cope, red-specked from a leak.

Hard by the drain-cope, red-specked, from a leak A spider staggered. Along snow-swept stones

42

THE FORMAL SEQUENCE

He stalked, circled in glory, as a freak Ordained by nature. (5.12-6.4)

The sequence takes reader and speaker on a progress through the house and garden and surroundings of Macbeth' s home, a progress that is also a song ("On the first day of Christmas") and a puzzle ("intricate as mah jong") and a process of surrealization, as the titles of the sonnets and the images convert Max, the cat, into the Devil, a blackbird into Christ, and Macbeth's other cat, Peter, who died, a surrogate Christ, perhaps St. Peter. There are also a spider, a hedgehog, and Max's sister, Tabitha. Each sonnet is a moment of vision or an incident with symbolic meaning, all of which add up to a recognition of Christ's sacrifice and presence as, "like a round, I I felt my poem snarl towards its end, swallowing Christ's wings" (14.8-10).

Crabbed, oblique, and occasionally clumsy, Macbeth' s sequence can stand alongside Donne' s as an example of the creative use of the most formal of formally linked sonnet sequences. The repetition that is the essence of the corona form can be simply sonorous and ceremonial, as in Joshua Sylvester' s corona sequence of 11 sonnets to the Muses prefaced to his translation of Du Bartas' s Divine Weeks and Works (1605); and both Donne and Macbeth are indeed concerned with praise. But the curious refashioning of meaning that repetition involves can be seized by a poet questioning identity or anxious for assurance and made to contribute to a more insistent taking apart and refashioning of words and ideas, as both Donne and Macbeth do. Finally, unless the repetitions are incompetent or inert, as in George Gascoigne' s sequence (1573) or that by Lady Mary Wrath (1621),10 there will be a sense, in ending where one began, of coming home, as Donne well knew. In the last sonnet of his sequence, Macbeth declares that "on the first day of Christmas ... I heard Christ's wings beat" -an achievement he was far from when the sequence began. As Rilke said in the nineteenth of his Sonnets to Orpheus, "Einzig das Lied uberm Land I heiligt und feiert." ("Song alone circles the land, I hallowing and hailing.")

The reader will have noticed that in Macbeth' s sequence, unlike Donne's, there are narrative elements. Donne's sequence alludes to a narrative (or narratives, since he is referring to more than one gospel) but is not itself one. Macbeth' s sonnets each contain a narrated event (e.g., "I set the pierced Yale to the jagged lock, I And coughed indoors" (3.9-10), and these events are con-

43

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

secutive on the 12 days of Christmas at least; however, it is clear that the events in the sonnets are there as occasions for the experience the sonnet presents and not because they explain or connect with each other. Indeed, the reader will have considerable difficulty "finding out what happened." The speaker's primary focus is on his own developing perceptions, both as perceiver and as poet (lyric), and not on recording events as circumstances or as the experience of others (narrative).

The modernist and postmodernist novel, with its determinedly disjunctive and fracturing approaches to the continuities of time, place, and character that were so important to the nineteenth-century realist novel, has at any rate made us all aware that there is no easy distinction between narrative and lyric, objective and subjective, external and internal, meaning and signing. The sonnet sequence, by its very nature an aggregation of discrete poems that are themselves poised between lyric and dialectic, has from its inception as a genre deconstructed the clarity of the antitheses in the preceding sentence and, in particular, that between narrative and lyric.

I have already drawn attention in chapter 1 to the fact that poets who want to tell stories hardly ever use the sonnet to do so, even if they are themselves sonneteers; but poets who write sonnet sequences, and in doing so make some metapoetic remark about their own endeavor, curiously often try to represent the sequence as some kind of narrative. Half a dozen examples will show the gestures that typically occur:

I am not I; pity the tale of me. (Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella, 1581)

Here I unclasp the book of my charged Soul, Where I have cast th' accounts of all my care. (Samuel Daniel, Delia, 1592)

Not Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn The living record of your memory. (Shakespeare, Sonnets, 1609)

Thus in my love, Time calls me to relate My tedious travels, and oft-varying fate. (Michael Drayton, Idea, 1619)

Look forth! that Stream behold, That Stream upon whose bosom we have passed,

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THE FORMAL SEQUENCE

Floating at ease while nations have effaced Nations. (Wordsworth, Ecclesiastical Sonnets, 1822)

None now would mock my penning, could they see How down the right it maps a jagged coast. (Robert Bridges, The Growth of Love, 1876)

However, four of these-Daniel, Drayton, Wordsworth, and Bridges-manage to combine with the idea of continuous narration the feeling of varying or rapidly altering content-" a jagged coast." The sense from poets separated by centuries that a sequence is somehow one thing and yet many different things at odds with one another is at the heart of its attraction.

45

Chapter 3

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL SEQUENCE:

WoRDSWORTH, THE RNER DvDDON, AND DU BELLAY, LES ANTIQUITEZ

DE ROME

The topographical sequence, already referred to in chapter 1 as one of the most popular nineteenth-century kinds of son

net sequences, poses a problem of ordering between that of the categorical sequence and the lyric. Faced with a landscape, whether natural or made by human hand, the poet does not often have a determinate number of objects to describe, such as Folgore da San Gemignano' s months of the year or Guittone d' Arezzo's deadly sins; but at the same time he or she will sense that there are different things to be described, or different viewpoints, literal and/or metaphorical, to be adopted. The sonnet sequence is the formal analogue of variety in unity, beloved as an aesthetic principle of pictorial composition since the sixteenth century. The examples of Words worth's The River Duddon sequence (1820) and Joachim du Bellay's Les Antiquitez de Rome (1558) show the sonnet sequence adapted to the problem of imposing a unified personal vision on an external multiplicity of things. The program, as it were, of the sequence comes from out-

46

THE ToPOGRAPHICAL SEQUENCE

side, from the variety of the world, just as in the rather more mechanical categorical sequences; the unity of the sequence comes from the imposed single vision.

Wordsworth thought much and increasingly about the sonnet and its sequences as he matured, and his remark (apropos of his Ecclesiastical Sonnets of 1822) that a series of sonnets gives "the convenience of passing from one point of the subject to another without shocks of abruptness" 1 points to exactly what a good topographical sequence should do. In declaring that "Duddon, long-loved Duddon, is my theme!" (1.14), Wordsworth chose an external object that, much more than the Church of England or the Italian landscapes of his "Memorials of a Tour in Italy" (1837), had the power to unify: for a river needs only the slightest gesture from the poet to become a symbol of human life or of time or of mutability or, indeed, of the flow of poetry itself. "Pure flow the verse, pure, vigorous, free and bright, I For Duddon, longloved Duddon, is my theme!" (1.13-14).

The way in which, in the first sonnet, the Duddon is preferred to Horace's Blandusian spring, as well as to "Persian fountains" and '1\Ipine torrents thundering," establishes the speaker as one familiar with geographical space and literary time. As he moves down from the source of the river to its mouth, moving also from the "morning light" of the first sonnet to a kind of evening tranquillity in sonnet 33, he will also move about in time and space, constantly linking human life to the stream with that musical regret for the flux of things that we call elegiac. In the lovely fifth sonnet, the speaker makes the river almost conscious of the growth along its banks of human life-and by implication, a watcher over its fleeting, which the children in their innocence cannot know:

Sole listener, Duddon! to the breeze that played With thy clear voice, T caught the fitful sound Wafted o'er sullen moss and craggy moundUnfruitful solitudes, that seemed to upbraid The sun in heaven!-but now, to form a shade For Thee, green alders have together wound Their foliage; ashes flung their arms around; And birch-trees risen in silver colonnade. And thou hast tempted also here to rise 'Mid sheltering pines, this Cottage rude and grey;

47

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

Whose ruddy children, by the mother's eyes Carelessly watched, sport through the summer day, Thy pleased associates:-light as endless May On infant bosoms lonely Nature lies.

The wonderful sense of movement in this very skillfully enjambed sonnet enacts the sense of a wanderer moving through the foliage along the river until he spies the children, on whom, from a distance of age as well as space, he speaks the last line and a half in wistful benediction.

As noted, in a proper sequence there is a need to respect the sonnetness of each sonnet; in a topographical sequence, this almost compels the speaker to stand still while he or she speaks, or looks, or thinks about, its subject. The problem of aggregation of sonnets into a sequence makes the move from one sonnet to the next occur between sonnets, with at the most a back reference from one sonnet to its predecessor-Wordsworth himself does this four times, at the start of sonnets 10, 16, 23, and 33. The corona form is one formal way of chaining sonnets together, so that the movement through the sequence is highly visible; otherwise, poets find considerable difficulty in giving a reader the sense that each sonnet develops from its predecessor. Indeed, numbering of sonnets in a sequence is popular from the sixteenth century onward, whether decided by the publisher or by the author, precisely to assure the reader that each sonnet, so clearly bounded in its own form, is also part of a larger whole. But Wordsworth's almost instinctive dynamic sense, which informed all his renderings of what (dynamically) he called "the goings-on of the universe," is visible not only as movement within each sonnet, as in the fifth sonnet quoted previously, but as a perpetual onward thrust.

At the start, it seems that the sequence will be organized by the development of the Duddon--from spring to rill (4), from rill to brook (9), from brook to stream (12); but after that, though the river clearly increases, its stages to the estuary are not itemized, perhaps because though English has many words for small flows of water, it does not distinguish kinds or sizes of rivers. What instead unrolls is a pageant of human activity along the banks of the Duddon: as the speaker moves on, different kinds of habitation appear and suggest images of different phases of human life, from the cottager and her children in sonnet 5, past the young

48

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL SEQUENCE

lovers of sonnet 10 to the hamlets of Donnerdale (13), prehistoric sites (17), a chapel (18), a shepherd community (23), a ruined house (27), a church (31), and finally the modern world of "hamlets, towers and towns" (32). There is a strong sense of the onward growth of humanity, from childhood by the youth of the river, to maturity and eventual death "where all his unambitious functions fail," at the point of union with the sea.

This movement of the speaker downstream, with a rest in the midday heat from sonnet 24 to sonnet 28, is a maturing of his experience just as it is a widening and deepening of the river. Movement, indeed, physical both through the day and through the 25-mile course of the river, and rhythmic and syntactic from sonnet to sonnet, is what unifies the sequence. In the third sonnet, the speaker presents his verse as a more traditional "painting" or" monun1ent"-

How shall I paint thee?-Be this naked stone My seat, while I give way to such intent; Pleased could my verse, a spe&king monument, Make to the eyes of men thy features known. (3.1-4)

-but abandons this in the following stanza in favor of a view (both literal and metapoetic) of the stream as analogous to the chain of sonnets itself:

A Protean change seems wrought while I pursue The curves, a loosely scattered chain doth make. (4.3-4)

Despite the constant presence in the lexis of Miltonic and eighteenth-century gestures and stances, this is a Romantic way of organizing a sequence. It is tempting to think (in the absence of contemporary comment on the theory of sequences? that the new popularity of the sonnet sequence at the beginning of the nineteenth century had much to do with the gradual preference for a meditative persona over an argumentative one: the kind of "loosely scattered chain" of thought for which the eighteenth century had used blank verse found a new embodiment in the sonnet sequence.

Wordsworth accentuates the looseness of his thinking by giving titles to particular sonnets within the sequence: 14 of them (including the '"After-Thought") are titled, and the effect is to sug-

49

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

gest, typographically, a sudden shift of attention to a new object: "The Stepping Stones" (9), 'American Tradition" (16), "Seathwaite Chapel" (18). This reinforces the presence of the outside world, maintaining the discreteness of the sonnets in tension with the unity of the speaker's presence. (It may be noticed here that titles for individual sonnets, especially when, as here, they also carry numbers, are rare, possibly because of their disjunctive effect.) But against this outer world Wordsworth uses a metapoetic voice, the device that reasserts the presence of the speaking I 1/ as controller or fashioner of the sequence: again and again a sonnet begins with a reference to the utterance itself, so that the reader is reminded that the speaker is in the midst of a process of speaking:

How shall I paint thee? (3.1)

On, loitering Muse-the swift Stream chides us-on! (12.1)

Such fruitless questions may not long beguile Or plague the fancy. (16.1-2)

Sad thoughts, avaunt! (23.1)

And sonnet 33, titled "Conclusion," with its explicit identification of the river at the end as a leader and a wanderer, brings the m eta poetic and topographical voices together-the poet becomes like the river, and his verse like the stream, as he requested at the start:

And may thy Poet, cloud-born Stream! be freeThe sweets of earth contentedly resigned, And each tumultuous working left behind At seemly distance-to advance like Thee; Prepared, in peace of heart, in calm of mind And soul, to mingle with Eternity! (33.9-14)

Although the poet cannot actually enact a meeting with eternity-unless, like Gray in his Elegy, he wrote an epitaph for himself-his final sonnet, entitled 'After-Thought" and italicized in its published form looks back on both the river and his previous speaking self from a vantage point not unlike that of Petrarch in the last great canzone of his Rime, sub specie aeternitatis:

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39 AFTER-THOUGHT

I THOUGHT of Thee, my partner and my guide, As being past away.-Vain sympathies! For, backward, Duddon! as I cast my eyes, I see what was, and is, and will abide: Still glides the Stream, and shall for ever glide; The Form remains, the Function never dies; While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise, We Men, who in our morn of youth defied The elements, must vanish;-be it sol Enough, if something from our hands have power To live, and act, and serve the future hour; And if, as toward the silent tomb we go, Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower, We feel that we are greater than we know.

This powerful sonnet, with its resonances of Milton, Moschus, Burns, and Shelley,3 not only gathers together all the themes of the sequence but metapoetically evaluates it: its form, of course, of which the reader is now fully conscious, remains, and is something from Words worth's hands that lives and acts. If the reader has enjoyed it, he or she may even feel that the sequence has glided past and communicated some of its greatness. The close symbolic identification throughout of water and verse makes this not fanciful, and as far as the concerns of this present book go, raises the River Duddon sonnets above the level of the average topographical sequence: its combination of the discrete and the continuous is one of the most satisfying in the run of English sonnet sequences.

Du Bellay: Les Antiquitez de Rome

The pioneer of topographical sequences, however, is not a Romantic poet at all: Joachim du Bellay's Les Antiquitez de Rome appeared in 1558, a compact sequence of 32 sonnets with a dedicatory sonnet to Henri 11 of Prance--one less than Wordsworth's River Duddon sequence. Du Bellay (1523-1560) had written the first French sonnet sequence, I.:Olive (1549), closely modeled on Petrarch' s Rime, and in the wake of a journey to Rome he composed the first French sequence on a nonamatory subject and the

51

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

first topographical sequence in European literature. It was accompanied by what the title page calls "Un Songe ou Vision sur le Mesme Subject" (''A Dream or Vision on the Same Subject"), a set of 15 sonnets, each of which recounts a vision of a fantastic object or person, emblematic of the fall of Rome. (Fascinating though this latter sequence is for the student of Renaissance literature, my interest here is in the nature of sequences, and this discussion will be confined to Les Antiquitez.)

I have chosen to discuss du Bellay after Wordsworth, because although du Bellay precedes the English poet by nearly three centuries, his sequence actually seems to take further than Wordsworth's the loosening of the categorical structure beloved of the Renaissance encyclopedic mind. Indeed, it could be argued that du Bellay's sequence is simply lyrical, in that no single "antiquity" of Rome is described clearly even to the extent that Wordsworth describes, say, Seathwaite Chapel or the Plain of Donnerdale. Instead a more generalized, elegiac, meditative voice, alert like Wordsworth' s to the passage of time, the fleetingness of human affairs, and the decay of grandeur, talks in a variety of ways about the ruins of Rome collectively.

To hold this diffuseness together, du Bellay used a formal device that, though it must now be reckoned a literary curiosity, reveals much about the way the sonnet sequence presented itself to one of its earliest users. After a dedicatory sonnet to King Henri 11, the sequence alternates sonnets of 10-syllable lines with sonnets of 12. This pattern, 10-12-10-12, is the pattern of a wellknown Latin and Greek verse form, elegiac meter, which alternates 10- and 12-syllable lines (allowing for the fact that Latin and Greek verse was quantitative, not syllabic, and that we should more properly talk of lines of five and six feet). Now du Bellay on his title page declared that the Antiquitez de Rome contained "une generale description de sa grandeur et comme une deploration de sa ruine" ("a general description of Rome's grandeur and a kind of lament for her decay"), and the association in the humanist mind of elegiac meter with elegiac subject matter strongly suggests that he meant his 32-sonnet sequence to be thought of as a long poem in which each sonnet functioned like a line of Latin elegiac meter.

This sense that a sonnet can be regarded as a single line of a macropoem surfaces again in sequences that contain 14 sonnets-

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a sonnet of sonnets, as Christina Rossetti titled one of her sequences-and is also implicit in the corona sequences, a sixteenth-century humanist invention, in which each sonnet contributes a line to a concluding sonnet, as in George Macbeth's ''A Christmas Ring," discussed in chapter 2. Recent scholarship has pointed out that in the 1558 edition, readers would have seen the sonnets laid out four to an opening of the book, 10 above 12 faced by 10 above 12, actively encouraging the pairings of 10 and 10, 12 and 12.4 The extreme artificiality of the construction of the sonnet itself tends to generate playfulness of this kind in sequence writing.

Like Wordsworth, du Bellay also inserts a metapoetic presence into his sequence, though for purposes appropriate to humanist rather than Romantic poesis. We noted earlier that Wordsworth allows his speaker to become conscious of the parallel between writing or speaking poetry and the flow of the stream that is the subject of his sequence; similarly du Bellay lets his speaker show awareness, in the presence of the ruined monuments of Rome, of the similarity between a poem and a museum or gallery: as the Forum of Rome contains its ruins, so his poem will contain them for display:

AuRoy Ne vous pouvant donner ces ouvrages antiques Pour vostre Sainct-Germain ou Fontainebleau, Je les vous donne (Sire) en ce petit tableau Peint, le mieux que j' ay peu, de couleurs poetiques: Qui mis sous vostre nom devant les yeux publiques, Si vous les daignez voir en son jour le plus beau, Se pourra bien vanter d' a voir hors du tu m beau Tire des vieux Romains les poudreuses reliques Que vous puissent les Dieux un jour donner tant d'heur, De rebastir en France une telle grandeur Que je la voudrois bien peindre en vostre langage: Et peult estre qu'alors vostre grand'Majeste, a mes vers, diroit qu'ilz ont este De vostre Monarchie un bienheureux presage.

(Not being able to present to you these antiquities For your Saint-Germain or Fontainebleau, I give them to you, Sire, in this small picture, Painted, as best I can, in the colours of poetry:

53

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

And it, issued under your name for public scrutiny, If you graciously look on it in its finest hour, May well boast that it has brought out of the tomb The dusty relics of the old Romans. May the Gods one day grant you so much time That you rebuild in France a like magnificence For me to paint in your native tongue: And perhaps then your gracious Majesty, Thinking back on my poems, may say that they have been A happy presage of your Monarchy.)5

The Renaissance did not develop any effective theory of the sonnet sequence, despite writing many of them: the sonnet was usually regarded as a low- or middle-ranking form in the hierarchy of genres,6 a valuation reinforced, as Petrarchan love sequences proliferated, by the fact that amatory verse, in whatever form, was also low or middling.

Du Bellay does not anywhere in this sequence refer to his verse as sonnets, and his use of the term tableau (1.3) with its accompanying singular verb ("pourra"), following the title page references to "une generale description ... une deploration" [my italics] strongly suggests that the notion of sequence was much less important than that of collectivity. Like a large painting, in which a number of classical antiquities are seen in detail, his "poem" will serve instead of the actual objects in the corridors of Henri' s royal palaces: the era of the collector monarchs was beginning, but it was still more usual to assert the grandeur of one's reign by huge tapestries or frescoes-such as can be seen in Fontainebleau to this day-depicting the ancient world than by the assembly of actual fragments of it. It is into this matrix of "magnificence" that du Bellay wishes to insert his own "petit tableau," "small" because of deferential modesty and also because it is obviously not an epic or a long ode, the ceremonial poems that took highest place in Renaissance literary ranking.

It is worth pointing out here, following du Bellay's presentation, that while all sonnet sequences have a public function if the authors publish them, the topographical or "guide" sequence has perhaps a more ostensible public role: to introduce strangers to a site, and point out its features, is implicitly (and maybe explicitly) to glorify that place. Even Wordsworth, who meditates in his poetry usually as a private man, presents his River Duddon se-

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quence as "a speaking monument" that will "make to the eyes of men thy features known" (The River Duddon, 3.2-4), and in his first sonnet prefers the Dud don to the waters of Horace' s Latium, Persia, or the Alps. There was a nascent tourist industry in Rome in du Bellay's time, and he used some of the contemporary guide materiaf for his sequence; Wordsworth's age similarly used the sonnet sequence as a kind of tourist album (later to be reinforced by Victorian topographical photography).

But of course du Bellay was not describing a native French site, but Rome, and this fact connects with the meditative looseness of his sequence, a feature in tension with its strict "elegiac" patterning. Reading it along with Wordsworth's, one notices the remarkable continuity of the meditative persona, which the subject of Rome produces in du Bellay's sequence rather as the ruined house, the disused chapel, the prehistoric sites, and the flow of the river itself do for Wordsworth.

As we have noticed in discussing the corona sequence of Donne, the formal tension between the separateness of each sonnet and the wholeness of the sequence-what I have called the problem of aggregation-shows itself when the speaker of the sonnets becomes conscious of the fashioning of the whole sequence. This does not have to happen (see Anne Locke, chapter 2), but given that a sonnet sequence is essentially both discrete parts and a unified whole, like no other literary genre, this double consciousness is in practice constant throughout sonnetsequence writing, though it is up to the poet to decide how far to develop it. Du Bellay's sequence shows this duality in a relatively straightforward way: later writers, such as John Berryman or Tony Harrison (discussed in chapter 5) develop it into a crisis of identity.

Du Bellay's subject, the ruins of Rome, is seen through the eyes of a speaker intensely responsive to its fallen grandeur, and because of his sense that he beholds an obliteration first and foremost, no single building or antiquity is identified in the entire sequence. Only by an effort of imagination can the visitor see "de ce qu'on ne void plus qu'une vague campaigne" ("in what seems now only a waste prospect") (33.1) what used to rise there:

Toy qui de Rome emerveille contemples Lantique orgeuil, qui menassoit les cieux,

55

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

Ces vieux palais, ces monts audacieux, Ces murs, ces arcs, ces thermes et ces temples, Juge, en voyant ces ruines si amples, Ce qu' a range le temps injurieux, Puis qu'aux ouvriers les plus industrieux Ces vieux fragmens encore servent d'exemples. (27.1-8)

(Thou that at Rome astonisht dost behold The antique pride, which menaced the skie, These haughtie heapes, these palaces of olde, These wals, these arcks, these baths, these temples hie; Judge by these ample ruines vew, the rest The which injurious time hath quite outworne, Since of all workmen held in reckning best, Yet these old fragments are for paternes borne. [tr. Spenser])

This invitation from a wise guide to make a comprehensive judgment links the aesthetic value of the ruins of Rome firmly to the humanist vision of the modern world as the successor to Rome: the palaces of Saint Germain or Fontainebleau will use Rome as a pattern but will supersede it. The guide has a view of Rome as embedded in the flow of time: its decay does not make its previous grandeurs and achievements futile but reminds us that human life is cyclic and that reconstruction is always necessary. The fragments pass to later ages as patterns, or as seed corn:

Comme le champ seme en verdure foisonne, De verdure se haulse en tuyau verdissant, Du tuyau se herisse en epic florissant, D' epic jaunit en grain, que le chaud assaisonne: Et comme en saison le rustique moissonne Les ondoyans cheveux du sillon blondissant, Les met d' ordre en javelle, et du ble jaunissant Sur le champ despouille mille gerbes fa~onne: Ainsi de peu a peu creut I' empire Romain, Tant qu'il fut despouille par la Barbare main, Qui ne laissa de luy que ces marques antiques, Que chacun va pillant: comme on void le glaneur Cheminant pas a pas receuillir les reliques De ce qui va tumbant apres le moissoneur. (30)

(Like as the seeded field greene grasse first showes, Then from greene grasse into a stalke doth spring,

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And from a stalke into an eare forth-growes, Which eare the frutefull graine doth shortly bring; And as in season due the husband mowes The waving lockes of those faire yeallow heares [i.e., ears/hairs] Which bound in sheaves, and layd in comely rowes Upon the naked fields in stackes he reares: So grew the Romane Empire by degree, Till that Barbarian hands it quite did spill, And left of it but these olde markes to see, Of which all passer by doo somewhat pill; [destroy] As they which gleane, the reliques use to gather Which th'husbandman behind him chanst to scatter. [tr. Spenser])

The meditative speaker uses the single sonnet's structure to mirror the flow of seasonal time-the smooth rhythms of the long 12-syllable lines (in French) and the reiteration of words and rhymes chaining the octave together suggest the inevitability of the process, controlled by the steady deliberateness of the comparison-" comme ... ainsi" I "like as ... so." Spenser' s translation of the final two lines weakens du Bellay' s force: the gleaners pick up, not what the husbandman scatters, but "the remains of what kept falling behind the mower." The mower is time, and the barbarians its agents, and the modern poet and his readers-among whom is the King of France-the gleaners.

If that is how the universe works-and the massive rhetorical assertiveness of each sonnet, sympathetic to the past glory of Rome but enforcing the lessons of its fall, suggests that it is-then the poet who shapes the sequence is like any other builder of structures, fated in his turn to be obliterated. The usual humanist response to the metaphors and symbols of mutability was to take refuge, with Horace, in having built in verse a "monument more lasting than bronze."8 This can have the effect of introducing an ironizing of the speaking subject, whose utterance thus becomes the one exception to the universal laws the utterance is designed to demonstrate. It is noticeable in Shakespeare's Sonnets that an uncomfortable oscillation exists between faith in the permanence of verse and despair over its inadequacy, fragmenting badly the unity of the sequence, if sequence indeed it is.9

Du Bellay, like Wordsworth in his 'After-Thought" (quoted previously), unifies his sequence with a concluding sonnet, in which the constructor of the sequence looks back on it in the light of all

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THE SONNET SEQUENCE

that, as speaker, he has experienced. In answering, tactfully, exactly the question about the immortality of verse that any reader must now be asking, he links his own poetry with the poetry of the past through the synecdoche of Apollo's lyre and reinforces the cyclic theme of rise and fall by concluding that as Roman glory crumbles, he begins the process of marking the new glory of its successor, France. The meditative, elegiac speaker of the sonnets is thus framed by the metapoetic speaker of the dedication and the last sonnet (33), who takes up his perceptions and his concerns with a modest, but definite, gesture of self-endorsement:

Esperez-vous que la posterite Doive (mes vers) pour tout jamais vous lire? Esperez-vous que l'oeuvre d'une lyre Puisse acquerir telle immortalite? Si sous le ciel fust quelque eternite, Les monuments que je vous ay fait dire, Non en papier, mais en marbre et porphyre, Eussent garde leur vive antiquite. Ne laisse pas toutefois de sonner, Luth, qu' Apollon m' a bien daigne de donner: Car si le temps ta gloire ne desrobbe, Vanter tu peux, quelque bas que tu sois, D' avoir chante, le premier des Fran<;ois, I.:' antique honneur du peuple a longue robbe.

(Do you hope that posterity Will [my poem] read you for all time? Do you hope that the work of one single lyre May acquire such immortality? If under heaven anything endures, The monuments of which I have made you speak Would have kept their antique worth alive Not in paper, but in marble and porphyry. Yet do not cease to sound, My lute, whom Apollo deigned to give me, For if Time does not strip away your merit, You may well boast, humble though you are, That you were first among the French to sing The renown of the nation of the long robe.)10

This beautifully judged sonnet closes the frame around the whole sequence, yet by questioning rather than asserting re-

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spects the meditative insights within the frame. Like Wordsworth's 'After-Thought," which pays homage to and calls on the strength of Milton in its last line, this sonnet resonates with the poetry of Virgil (whose permanence is unquestionable): in the first book of the Aeneid, Jupiter prophesies the future rise of the Roman state, itself to rise as the successor to fallen Tray, and in lending the authority of Olympus to the next cycle of human empires, concludes that even the vengeful Juno will think better of her wrath and

mecumque fovebit Romanos, rerum dominos, gentemque togatam. (1.281-82)

(with me will cherish The Romans, lords of the world, the people of the toga.)

In echoing this sonorous and famous line, du Bellay's poetspeaker aligns himself, modestly but unmistakably, with the poet-prophet of imperial Rome and gathers up his "antiquitez" as a finished work to present to the new monarch of the new empire. By treating his work as a single poem, and offering it to his king, du Bellay might have turned the sonnet sequence into a much more public and ceremonial genre, "excelling all, that ever went before" as Spenser said of him in his own sonnet appended to his translation of du Bellay' s poetry.11 His early death probably prevented the appearance of a second book, but du Bellay's 33 sonnets, while retaining the meditative persona at their center, make one of the stateliest and most public of sequences, lyrical in impulse, topographical in subject matter, but national and ceremonial in a way that no other poet has managed.

Had Milton written a sonnet sequence, there might have been an English rival: formally at least, if not on poetic merit, Wordsworth' s Ecclesiastical Sonnets make the attempt. This massive sequence, first published in 1822, contained 132 sonnets in its final form in 1850 and is one of the longest English sonnet sequences. Its opening sonnet makes it clear that Wordsworth thought of it as a progression from his River Duddon sequence, and as a kind of historical narrative tracing the history of religion in Britain from those Druids whose presence he had noticed in the seventeenth River Duddon sonnet up to his own day. For our purposes, the Ecclesiastical Sonnets probably constitute the most

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THE SONNET SEQUENCE

convincing demonstration of the unaptness of the sonnet sequence to work other than lyrically, except over short stretches: Wordsworth, who is one of the greatest lyric poets in the world, and a superlative narrative poet in the free blank verse form of the Prelude and the Excursion, fails almost entirely to impose unity on the combined lyric and narrative contents of the Ecclesiastical Sonnets. The tension between his determined attempt to write as a historian, with proper use of historical sources, and his maintenance of his own powerful reflective persona is too great, and the whole sequence fragments, both thematically and formally.

Petrarch, wisely, it might seem, chose not to attempt any kind of narrative of his love for Laura in his Rime; Spenser, a narrative poet of extreme sophistication, avoided it in his Amoretti (1595); Sidney, who was a formidably clever novelist, likewise made no attempt at coherent narrative in Astrophel and Stella (written 1581); Shakespeare (though his intentions are admittedly not known to us) avoided sequential narrative in his Sonnets; and though it is rash to argue that something is impossible simply because no major author has succeeded with it, it does seem that the discrete sonnet maintains a lyric or meditative persona so strongly that aggregating a large number of them along.narrative lines poses insuperable problems.

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Chapter 4

THE NARRATIVE SEQUENCE: DANTE, LA VITA NVOVA, AND

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

We can now move further from the narrative sequence toward the lyrical by looking at two sequences that narrate

in different ways and lie at opposite ends of the narrative/lyric spectrum: Dante Alighieri's Vita Nuova, written about 1292, and Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree," published in The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems in 1923, the year in which she received the Pulitzer Prize. The first is a collection of wholly separate first-person lyrics not originally intended to form a sequence, which have been wrapped as it were in a narrative packing; the other is a severe and short third-person narrative with no explanations at all, like a fragment of a short story. Almost all they seem to have in common is their use of sonnets.

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), like John Milton, is much more celebrated for his epic poetry than for his sonnets; but he was a very capable sonneteer, as a number of tenzoni involving him show, and engaged in sonnet exchanges with a group of friends, mostly Florentines like himself, who are collectively known as

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THE SONNET SEQUENCE

the stilnovisti (New Stylists). Since in praising the "new style" in his Divine Comedy Dante mentions Guittone d' Arezzo, he may well have known the older poet's sonnet sequences, even if he did not think much of Guittone' s style; but in gathering together his own sonnets for circulation in the 1290s, he evidently decided to do something quite different from Guittone's categorical sequences on the arts of love, the vices, and the virtues. To understand what he did, and the impact of it on the sonnet-sequence genre, we need to know something of the stilnovisti' s use of the sonnet.1

Dante's Vita Nuova

Although they continued to use sonnets for letters, arguments, and satire as their predecessors had, the stilnovisti developed a theory of idealized love according to which the Lady acted as a kind of divine messenger, though retaining her earthly reality: she could by her glance or her greeting transform the nature of her lover, who became her worshiper and through her the worshiper of the Divine radiance. This idea has connections both with the Proven~al concept of fin' amors , the devotion owed to a high-born lady by her lover, and the Christian idea of supervenient grace, by routes that it is beyond the scope of this book to trace.2 In northern Italy at the end of the thirteenth century the stilnovisti produced a new kind of poetry alongside the old, in which, and particularly in sonnets, the speaker as lover recorded the moment of epiphany, the moment when his vision of the world was transformed by a look or a gesture from his lady. It was not necessary to speak to the lady herself: the emphasis was on the instant, and internal, transformation of the lover:

Tanto gentil e tanto onesta pare la donna mia quand' ella altrui sal uta, eh' ogne lingua deven tremando m uta, e li occhi no 1' ardiscon di guardare.

Ella si va, sentendosi laudare, benignamente d'umilta vestuta; e par che sia una cosa venuta da cielo in terra a miracol mostrare.

Mostrasi si piacente a chi la mira,

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THE NARRATIVE SEQUENCE

che da per li occhi una dolcezza al core, che'ntender no la pub chi no la prova:

e par che de la sua labbia si mova un spirito soave pien d' amore che va dicendo a 1' anima: 'Sospira!' (Dante, Vita Nuova, 26)

(My lady looks so gentle and so pure when yielding salutation by the way, that the tongue trembles and has nought to say, and the eyes, which fain would see, may not endure.

And still, amid the praise she hears secure, she walks with humbleness for her array, seeming a creature sent from Heaven to stay on earth, and show a miracle made sure.

She is so pleasant in the eyes of men that through the sight the inmost heart cloth gain a sweetness which needs proof to know it by:

and from between her lips there seems to move a soothing essence that is full of love, saying for ever to the spirit, "Sigh!" [tr. D. G. Rossetti])

This sonnet shows neatly how the octave/sestet division is used to move from observation to rationalization but, more importantly, shows how the stilnovistic sonnet tends to concentrate on a single intense moment, even if philosophically backed up: "Sigh!" The stilnovisti were fond of emphasizing the reaction to the lady's greeting as lack of speech, a kind of dumb wonderment, so that, paradoxically, the sonnet itself becomes the record of a failure to be able to speak.

For anyone contemplating a sonnet sequence, then, as Dante did in the 1290s, the normal kind of connectedness that operated in what I have called the forensic sonnets of Guittune d' Arezzo and others before him-the connectedness of argument, explanation, and debate-could not be supplied by the sonnets themselves without altering their essential function, that is, to testify to an epiphanic moment in all its luminousness. The first sonnet in the Vita Nuova, indeed, originally was used by Dante as the basis of a tenzone, as noted previously: he sent it out to friends with an invitation to them to write back with an explanation of the sonnet. This would have made a suite, or small sequence, of debate sonnets; but that was not, finally, what he chose to do. Instead of making his sonnets part of social interaction, Dante

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THE SONNET SEQUENCE

made them records of moments in his own personal development and then wrote a prose commentary from the vantage point of his older, maturer self to enclose and explain them.

It has to be said that this was not an experiment that later writers repeated-for various reasons, Dante's Vita Nuova was not well-known to later European poets, but even after the revival of interest in Dante in the nineteenth century in France and Britain and America, no one attempted a self-development sequence with a prose commentary, and the peculiar achievement of the Vita Nuova belongs to the history of the genre of autobiography more than to the sonnet sequence. However, the history of autobiography intersects with that of sonnets because of Petrarch, who knew Dante's Vita Nuova and also its two great predecessors, the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius (which combines prose and verse) and the Confessions of St. Augustine (prose).3 By creating a chain of sonnets (and other kinds of lyric) that were narrated as stages in the creation of a self, Dante influenced Petrarch to insert into the European consciousness a developed form of the sonnet sequence as a way of expressing the tension between coherence and incoherence in the /1/. This was, and has remained, a central kind of narrative of self, through Baudelaire' s Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) to John Berryman's Sonnets to Chris (1947, 1966) and Tony Harrison's The School of Eloquence (1978). And Dante's Vita Nuova directly influenced later Romantic poets, such as the Rossettis, in the same direction.

The work consists of 26 sonnets (two irregular), one shorter poem called a ballata, and three longer, more philosophical poems called canzoni, together with one canzone stanza. (Though there is no proof of this, it may be from this mixture that Petrarch in his turn obtained the notion of combining sonnets with canzoni and shorter lyric forms, thereby offering a model for the sonnet sequence that some later writers chose to follow.) Each poem is either preceded or followed-sometimes both-by a prose comment explaining its circumstances and its meaning. The specific circumstances of each sonnet are part of the longer prose narrative that relates how Dante saw and fell in love with Be a trice, how his love progressed, and the effect of Be a trice's death on him.

To say Dante is to raise by implication the question of who that Dante was, for Dante's prose commentary brings into plain view

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what is always present, but often hidden, in a lyric performance: the two /1/s of the narration (cnonce) and of the narrating (enonciation). The /1/ who speaks in a sonnet (or any lyric) is always potentially aware of another I 1/ at a small distance, a past self or another aspect of the self, but it is unusual to find the two distinguished as clearly as they are here, in, for example, the introduction to the sonnet "L:amaro lagrimar che voi faceste" ("The bitter tears you used to shed"), in Vita Nuova 37:

After I had spoken thus to myself, addressing my own eyes, the most huge and wrenching sighs assailed me. And so that this struggle that I was having should not remain known only to the wretch that felt it, I decided to compose a sonnet, and to express in it this terrible condition. So I wrote this sonnet, which begins, "The bitter tears ... "

The /1/ in the last two lines, the composer of the sonnet, is already at some distance from the person who so distressingly sighed, and whose speech to his own eyes is the subject of the sonnet. This person is even objectified by Dante the poet by another name: "the wretch that felt [this struggle]." (The prose commentary then provides a third /1/, the author/editor who is arranging these poems and commenting on them.)

In this poetic duality, the uttering /1/, the one writing the poem, who may at any time by metapoetic intrusion draw attention to his or her creative role, is the constructor of the uttered /1/, and any pretense that the utterance is spontaneous is exactly that, since what is being said, however immediate it seems to the reader, is always in the past with respect to the I 1/ who writes the poem. This is true of all lyric verse, not just of sonnets; but since the sonnet sequence has a unique capacity to present the fragmented, intense, momentary experiences of the /I/ in the context of a progress through an assemblage of separate parts, the tension between the ordering, continuing /I-who-speaks/ and the fragmented, past I 1-who-was/ is particularly evident, even when the poet does not explicitly foreground his or her creative role.

Though many of the sonnets have narrative elements as they recreate a particular moment, the main task of narration is undertaken by the prose commentary. Dante has in fact tackled the problem of organizing the lyrical elements into a narrative whole by using verse for the first and prose for the second. By putting

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THE SONNET SEQUENCE

his sonnets within a commentary, Dante makes himself (as author/editor) and his readers continuously aware of both aspects of the sonnet: its integrity and sonnetness, as a registration of the intense experience of I 1-who-was/, a poem on its own; and second, its place in an unfolding Bildungsroman, the Vita Nuova itself. Since the stilnovistic sonnet was concerned characteristically with inner transformation (though social sonnets for all sorts of occasional purposes continued to be written), Dante clearly felt, as his commentary makes plain, that each sonnet was in the nature of an esoteric experience that required glossingsome more easy of access than others. The Vita Nuova begins with a sonnet so obscure that Dante felt able to use it as a way of attracting like-minded friends. The verse portions of the Vita Nuova are unmistakably private, or at the most intended for close friends, and it is the Dante of the commentary who reveals them or sends them out.

The narrative construction of the Vita Nuova thus has the odd effect of making the sonnets (and the other poems) intensely nonnarrative: confessional, intimate, even esoteric. Narrative has to come from outside, to surround and gloss them. Even at the end of the work, when Dante writes a sonnet specifically at the request of two ladies, he makes it partly withhold its meaning:

Oltre la spera che piu larga gira, passa'l sospiro eh' esce del mio core: intelligenza nova, che 1' Am ore piangendo mette in lui, pur su lo tira.

Quand' elli egiunto la dove disira, vede una donna, che riceve honore, e luce si che per lo suo splendore lo peregrino spirito la rnira.

Vedela tal che, quando'l mi ridice, io nolo in tendo, si parla sottile al cor dolenta, che lo fa parlare.

So io che parla di quella gentile, pero che spesso ricorda Beatrice, si ch'io lo'ntendo ben, donne mie care. (Vita Nuova, 41)

(Beyond the sphere which spreads to widest space Now soars the sigh that my heart sends above; A new perception given by grieving Love Guideth it upward in untrodden ways.

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When it is come where it desires to be, It sees a lady who is honoured there, And shines so brightly in her splendour fair, The pilgrim spirit gazeth wonderingly. It sees her such that, when it tells me this, I cannot grasp what subtly it doth teach To the heart's grief, that causes it give speech. I know that of my Lady it doth tell, Because it oft recalleth Beatrice: So that, my ladies, I do know that well. [adapted from D. G. Rossetti])

This is the great vision of Beatrice in glory that Dante was to realize fully in his Paradiso (Canto 31.70-93); here, in the shorter form of the sonnet, he offers his experiencing self, imaged as a sigh infused by Love with intelligence, as a kind of messenger back to his poetic self, the one who records, who fails to speak clearly enough to be fully understood. This semiotic blockage, the sliding of the signified I 1/ under its signifier, is the force that fragments the sonnets into their separate parts but also the force that drives the organizing I 1/ to go on speaking until, as George Macbeth says, his poem "snarls towards its end" -or as Donne puts it, the muse raises him enough to complete the crown of praise.

For poets writing after the mid-nineteenth century, Dante's model was available for a sonnet sequence dealing with suffering and insight;4 up to that time, Petrarch (as we shall see) provided the principal European model for the sequence, developing and sophisticating its capacities on the basis of the stilnovistic experiment. However, Petrarch did not provide a prose commentary, but used only lyrics-sonnets and other varieties of poem-in sequence. The problem of narrating, of providing continuity, had to be solved in other ways.

It can be said here that one interesting result of suppressing, or eliminating, a prose commentary is that readers seem to want to construct what one might call a ghost narrative: picking up metapoetical signs from the author, they will begin to surround his or her text with commentary and speculation, as if the fundamental lyrical strength of the sonnet were read as a narrative deficiency. This happened in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to Petrarch, whose editors published his sonnets in editions that often contained lengthy conjectural biographies of himself and

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THE SONNET SEQUENCE

Laura and surrounded each sonnet with complicated glosses "explaining" its meaning in biographical terms. The enormous biographical attention paid to Shakespeare's sonnets is wellknown; Spenser' s Amoretti, Meredith' s Modern Love, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, and many others have attracted critical commentary that (legitimately or not) reinstates what is felt to be a missing narrative.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Unless they are used merely as stanzas, as mentioned in chapter 1, sonnets are not well fitted for narration: there is simply not enough space in a sonnet for the circumstantiality that the realistic novel has trained readers to expect, and if a sonnet is narrating, it is not using the structural features that make it what it is. The obliqueness and compression of the twentieth-century short story offers a more congenial model, and it is perhaps in that area that we should look for analogues to the narrative sonnet sequence. One of the best in this rare subgenre is Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree" published in The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (1923).

Millay (1892-1950) wrote many sonnets in her poetic career5

and produced three sequences, each in a different mode: "Epitaph for the Race of Man," in Wine from These Grapes (1934), a sequence of 18 sonnets of a philosophical/meditative kind; shortly before that, Fatal Interview (1931), 52 Shakespearean sonnets in which a female speaker recounts the growth and decay of her love; and earliest of the three, "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree" (1923), 17 almost Shakespearean sonnets in third-person narrative mode, again focused on a woman's experience.

To understand this last sequence, as well as the other two, it is relevant to recall that Millay in her New England childhood was brought up to be both a poet and an independent woman: her mother educated all her three daughters in literature and music, and Millay as a Vassar student (AB 1917) wrote and acted in plays with the expectation of earning her living by her pen and her acting. She was able to spend some time after graduating in the Bohemian life of Greenwich Village, with the American intellectual's expected visit to Europe (1921-1923). Not only did the

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work of these years gain her the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, with a popular reputation that she never lost, but it also brought her several love affairs, a close sympathy with and admiration for the women's rights movement, and, through the premature death of one of the leading suffragettes, Inez Milholland, marriage in the same year to her widower, Eugene Boissevain, Millay' s husband until his death in 1949.

Sometimes poets who are successful early in their own lifetimes gain success and recognition at the price of innovation: and Millay, though intellectually radical and a feminist, was stylistically quite conservative. In that respect her two later sequences are perhaps less interesting than her early narrative attempt but still have something to show about narrative. "Epitaph for the Race of Man" is a post-Spengler survey of the rise and fall of humanity, suffused by a Romantic evolutionary vocabulary that owes much to Tennyson's "In Memoriam." But the tightness of the sonnet form makes Millay conduct her survey in glimpses of moments, and the necessity of summing up or judging within the small space of the sonnet calls forth an Augustan wit and rhythm. The result is securely in a poetic mode anchored in meditative verse from Spenser through Milton to Tennyson but apt to seem a little archaic and sonorous rather than profound:

xvi Alas for Man, so stealthily betrayed, Bearing the bad cell in him from the start, Pumping and feeding from his healthy heart That wild disorder never to be stayed When once established, destined to invade With angry hordes the true and proper part, Till Reason joggles in the headsman's cart, And Mania spits from every balustrade. Would he had searched his closet for his bane, Where lurked the trusted ancient of his soul, Obsequious Greed, and seen that visage plain; Would he had whittled treason from his side, In his stout youth and bled his body whole, Then had he died a king, or never died.

Compare with that a sonnet from W H. Auden' s not dissimilar reflective philosophical sequence, Sonnets from China (1938):

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THE SONNET SEQUENCE

Our global story is not yet completed, Crime, daring, commerce, chatter will go on, But, as narrators find their memory gone, Homeless, disterred, these know themselves defeated.

Some could not like nor change the young and mourn for Some wounded myth that once made children good, Some lost a world they never understood, Some saw too clearly all that man was born for.

Loss is their shadow-wife, Anxiety Receives them like a grand hotel, but where They may regret they must: their doom to bear

Love for some far forbidden country, see A native disapprove them with a stare And Freedom's back in every door and tree. (Sonnets from China, xvi)6

Without losing generality or sonorousness, Auden' s sonnet is also colloquial, precise, and rhythmically alive, creating a democratic, rather than archaic, speaker. The problem of stance and viewpoint-and hence of the style that creates them-is more acute in a philosophical sequence, because the speaker is created by his or her subject matter as a wise observer, a teacher; it is rarely successful, since at least the mid-nineteenth century, to teach from a stance well back in time. To deconstruct previous stances and work from there, as Yeats (not a sonneteer) and Auden did, is admissible and even desirable, but Millay's rather mannered acceptance of neoclassical syntax and Romantic lexis is pleasing rather than powerful.

This combination is what in British literature is called Georgian, and it appears again in her amatory sequence, Fatal Interview. We shall return to this problem of amatory language in discussing Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, because they both belong to a subgenre of sonnet sequences in which a woman addresses her lover, to complain or to praise or to do both-what after Thomas Hardy's sequence in that kind we might call the "she-to-him" sequence? Since here Millay is following the progress of a failed love, from illusion to disillusion, the changes in the woman's view of herself and her lover explain the sonnet-to-sonnet discontinuity. This time the mixture of inherited

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styles is serviceable: the speaker is able to articulate romantic passion, pastoral idealism, and witty or satirical disillusion as different aspects of her single personality, reflecting Millay' s interest in and sympathy for the woman enslaved by her own passion but intelligent and strong enough to break free of it.

One superb and funny sonnet images the woman's perception of herself as a Jane Austen heroine wronged: Elizabeth Bennet, perhaps, after being seduced by Mr. Darcy:

I, being born a woman, and distressed By all the needs and notions of my kind, Am urged by your propinquity to find Your person fair, and feel a certain zest To bear your body's weight upon my breast: So subtly is the fume of life designed To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind, And leave me once again undone, possessed. Think not for this, however, the poor treason Of my stout blood against my staggering brain, I shall remember you with love, or season My scorn with pity-let me make it plain: I find this frenzy insufficient reason For conversation when we meet again.

Beneath the wit lies Millay's empathy with "the spirit, independent and sometimes disillusioned, of the modern woman,"8

and it was this empathy that impelled her to speak for the inarticulate in her narrative sequence, "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree." In these 17 sonnets, the speaker, nominally third-person omniscient, and not marked by gender, tells part of the story of a New England woman who had married a childhood sweetheart, only to find in married life that she loved him "not at all": she leaves him, and then, when he falls sick, returns to be with him until he dies. The sequence opens when "she came back into his house again, I And watched beside his bed until he died, I Loving him not at all" (1.1-3) and ends when she looks upon his body after the doctor's last visit. Events before her arrival are given through her reminiscences or the speaker's omniscient recall. There is nothing spoken, except a single sentence to the doctor.

In a sense, this is a nonlove story, which has as its raison d' etre the compassionate revealing of the woman's state of mind-in

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THE SONNET SEQUENCE

that it closely resembles D.H. Lawrence's "Odour of Chrysanthemums." As in Lawrence's story the miner's wife is not articulate about her feelings, Millay's narrative contains much patient observation of symbolic detail by the narrator, who can suggest awareness by juxtaposing things in time or space:

So she came back into his house again And watched beside his bed until he died, Loving him not at all. The winter rain Splashed in the painted butter-tub outside, Where once her red geraniums had stood, Where still their rotted stalks were to be seen; The thin log snapped; and she went out for wood, Bareheaded, running the few steps between The house and shed; there, from the sodden eaves Blown back and forth on sodden ends of twine, Saw the dejected creeping-jinny vine, (And one, big-aproned, blithe, with stiff blue sleeves Rolled to the shoulder that warm day in spring, Who planted seeds, musing ahead to their far blossoming). (I)

This masterly sonnet is almost a microversion of the technique of the whole sequence and a brilliantly compact piece of sonnet narration. As far back as Dante, the lesson had been learned that the sonnet was particularly fitted for the epiphanic moment: the octave to record a circumstance and the sestet to unwrap its inner meaning. And since for the stilnovisti the meaning was meaning for the individual perceiver (usually the /1/ of the sonnet), the sonnet should focus from the viewpoint of that individual.

Here, the octave gives the circumstances, including, since this is the first sonnet of all, the introductory who/when/where/ why, compactly achieved in eight lines. Because we know that this is a sonnet and that we may expect a sestet to tell us what it means, we respond to the shift in time in ll.S-6 ("Where once ... I Where still") as if it were a meaning shift, between two states of being, as indeed it is. The contrast of times and states that the sestet reveals is thus anticipated in the octave.

The sonnet turns at the ninth line, but with casual skill, Millay lets the movement made by the woman, running, carry the sentence itself across the end of the eighth line into the ninth, as if she ran without quite seeing where she was going. Then, sud-

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denly, she does see, "there," both herself as she is (dejected, creeping) and as she was, pregnant in spring, planting seeds, and looking ahead where now she can only look back. The parentheses in Millay's text indicate the speaker's first access to the mind of the woman. Henceforward the speaker may at any time represent the woman's thoughts in free indirect speech.

The sonnet is complete in its representation of two states of being held in the woman's mind; at the same time, the warm optimism of the last line demands some sort of answer, and it comes with the opening of the next sonnet, so that the contrast between the two is progressive. The sonnet also announces the narrative strategy of the whole sequence, by starting as it plainly does in medias res: this narrative will work through flashbacks and symbolism. Millay had probably learned this skill from a sonneteer whom she much admired, George Meredith, whose own narrative sequence, Modern Love (1862), opens in the same way:

By this he knew she wept with waking eyes: That, at his hand' slight quiver by her head, The strange low sobs that shook their common bed Were called in to her with a sharp surprise.

It was probably also Meredith who suggested to Millay the use of the pronouns he, she, they, and so forth instead of names: in a narrative sequence in which the circumstantiality is much reduced, withholding names gives a representativeness to the figures that in its turn encourages the reader to accept less realistic detail. Millay declined, however, to try to imitate Meredith' s embedding of a first-person narrative (Modern Love, 3-48) inside a third-person one (Modern Love, 1-2, 49-50), a daring but disorienting innovation in the sonnet sequence.9

The sharply observed details that exist are evocative of a rustic and indeed New England setting (Millay herself lived at Steepletop, a farm in New York State), and many critics have seen Millay as an imitator also of Robert Frost. She acknowledged a debt to Meredith, but not to Frost. Similar sharp observation of natural detail, in the mode of Tennyson' s Mariana, from two poets who were both New Englanders might be expected: but there is something in Frost's distinctive manner of narrating that Millay appears

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THE SONNET SEQUENCE

to have adopted, whether consciously or unconsciously, inside her sonnets. Frost was a fine sonneteer, though he wrote no sequences, but he was more often a narrative or dramatic poet, specializing in vignettes of New England life that yielded some emotional or philosophic insight. Many of these, including "Home Burial," begin in the sudden manner of Meredith or Millay:

He saw her from the bottom of the stairs Before she saw him. She was starting down, Looking back over her shoulder at some fear. She took a doubtful step and then undid it To raise herself and look again.

But in his narratives and monologues Frost developed a technique of meandering and colloquial syntax, sharpening now and then into epigram, that gives the illusion of a laconic but wise country speaker, a favorite urban myth that begins with Virgil' s Eclogues:

Hyla Brook By June our brook's run out of song and speed. Sought for much after that, it will be found Either to have gone groping underground (And taken with it all the Hyla breed That shouted in the mist a month ago, Like a ghost of sleighbells in a ghost of snow)Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed, Weak foliage that is blown upon the bent Even against the way its waters went. Its bed is left a faded paper sheet Of dead leaves stuck together by the heatA brook to none but who remember long. This as it will be seen is other far Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song. We love the things we love for what they are.10

This almost-sonnet (15 lines, rhyming ABBA CC ADD EEF GFG) is close in stance and viewpoint and procedure to Millay' s, as in the fifteenth sonnet of her sequence:

There was upon the sill a pencil mark, Vital with shadow when the sun stood still

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At noon, but now, because the day was dark, It was a pencil mark upon the sill. And the mute clock, maintaining ever the same Dead moment, blank and vacant of itself, Was a pink shepherdess, a picture frame, A shell marked Souvenir, there on the shelf. Whence it occurred to her that he might be, The mainspring being broken in his mind, A clock himself, if one were so inclined, That stood at twenty minutes after threeThe reason being for this, it might be said, That things in death were neither clo\ks nor people, but only dead. (15)

The meandering and slightly dazed nonsense logic of this sonnet is sympathetically following the mental movements of the woman: the octave of the sonnet follows her gaze and the sestet interprets what she sees. There is a continuing narration not just of things and movements around the house but also of consciousness and feeling. Millay altered the sonnet very little-all are Shakespearean sonnets rhyming ABAB CDCD EFFE GG (xi has EFEF)-but her use of an fourteener at the end emphasizes the dreariness and bewilderment of the central character, whose only spoken words are in the fourteener of the second-last sonnet: "She said at length, feeling the doctor's eyes, I 'I don't know what you do exactly when a person dies.' "

Like Tennyson' s Mariana, which it often recalls, the sequence is a triumph in the realization of atmosphere and feeling; but unlike Mariana, this heroine has a changing consciousness as she moves about, and each sonnet offers a variation on her perception of her predicament, using frequently the "turn" of the sonnet to move from description to explanation. The narrator rarely intrudes, and since the focalization and viewpoint of the sequence is invariably the woman's, the narrated comments pass as the heroine's thoughts. Progression, even if bewildered, and development require a conclusion, and the last sonnet takes her farewell of the dead man with a detachment and independence that the ambiguous last word only slightly ironizes:

Gazing upon him now, severe and dead, It seemed a curious thing that she had lain Beside him many a night in that cold bed,

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And that had been which would not be again. From his desirous body the great heat Was gone at last, it seemed, and the taut nerves Loosened forever. Formally the sheet Set forth for her today those heavy curves And lengths familiar as the bedroom door. She was as one who enters, sly and proud, To where her husband speaks before a crowd, And sees a man she never saw before-The man who eats his victuals at her side, Small, and absurd, and hers: for once, not hers, unclassified. (17)

This is not a long narrative poem, nor is it a collection of sonnets: it is a proper narrative sonnet sequence, not as sophisticated as Meredith's but making full use of the sonnet form in a loose, modern way, relaxing it sufficiently to track the movement of the character's mind without letting it cease to be a sonnet. Not as powerful as Auden or as innovative as Berryman, Millay still has the distinction of having carried the sonnet narrative successfully on into the twentieth century.

Millay' s "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree" is almost alone in being spoken by a third-person narrator, and even that narrator, as we have seen, uses a form of free indirect speech to render the experiences of the "she" whose actions are being narrated. In Meredith's Modern Love, the first-person speaker, a man in a state of considerable mental distress and excitement, is introduced in the third sonnet (a "sonnet" of 16lines) as breaking into a narrative in which he has constructed himself as "he," and thereafter, until the forty-eighth of the SO sonnets, this I I/ is a constant presence, both narrating and narrated. In the long history of the sonnet sequence, and whatever the thread that holds it togethertopography, religion, praise of famous people, love, political reform, a life story-the presence of a passionate speaker whose thoughts and feelings alter from sonnet to sonnet is constant.

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Chapter 5

THE LYRIC SEQUENCE: PETRARCH'S RIME,

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, TONY HARRISON, }OHN DONNE,

AND WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Petrarch's Rime and the Unstable /I/

W ith the exception of the anonymous narrator of the sequence Il Fiore (mentioned in chapter 1), a compassionate

speaker has been a component of all the sequences mentioned so far, but in what is properly called the lyric sequence, the most common of all, the nature of the speaker tends to become part of what he or she is speaking about, providing an intricate dance of subject and object about each other that has a lot to do with the way we have learned to think about personality. That the lyric sequence was, and still is, the most common of all in European literature is due to one man, Francis Petrarch, whose own

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sequence, the Rime Sparse or simply Rime, provided the benchmark and the template (if a sequence can be both at the same time) for European sonneteering and sequence writing from his own time to the twentieth century. Across 600 years, John Berryman in his own sequence pays Petrarch homage:

Swarthy when young; who took the tonsure; sign, His coronation, wangled, his name re-said For euphony; off to courts fluttered, and fled; Professorships refused; upon one line Worked years; and then that genial concubine. Seventy springs he read, and wrote, and read. On the day of the year his people found him dead I read his story. Anew I studied mine. Also there was Laura and three-seventeen Sonnets to something like her ... twenty-one years ... He never touched her. Swirl our crimes and crimes. Gold haired (too), dark-eyed, ignorant of rimes Was she? The old brume seldom clears.

Two guilty and crepe-yellow months, Chris! be our surviving actual scene.

(Sonnets to Chris, 75)1

And (apart from the extended last line), this is of course a Petrarchan sonnet, ABBA ABBA CDE EDC. Berryman' s biography of Petrarch-a model of its kind!-also shows the Petrarchan sonnet in action: first the observation of experience in the octave, and then reflection upon it in the sestet, with particular relevance to the I I/ who speaks-in this instance, Berryman in an adulterous affair ("two guilty and crepe-yellow months") with the goldenhaired woman to whom he wrote Sonnets to Chris, paralleling the adulterous love of Petrarch for his Laura (he was not married, but Laura was).

Though the forms and the cultural renderings of human love and sexual desire have changed a good deal over 600 years, that Berryman in 1947 used Petrarch as a precursor suggests one reason for the persistence of the sonnet sequence: poets have always wanted to write about love, going right or going wrong, and ever since Petrarch wrote his "three-seventeen sonnets" (and 49 other poems) of the Rime in Laura's praise, he was the miglior fabbro of the amatory sequence. After his death in 1374 (found by hisservants dead at his desk, as Berryman says, in the upstairs room of

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his high house in Arqua among the Eugenean Hills), Petrarch's Italian poetry was neglected for a time; then it was revived, for reasons that have much to do with Italian regionalism and not much with the problems of sequences, by his admirer Cardinal Pietro Bembo (1470-1547),2 and it became the standard of eloquence for Italian writers in the sixteenth century.

As Italian culture in turn became the culture to be envied and imitated all over Europe, so Petrarch became the master poet of Europe for those who wrote of love; the Petrarchists turned out hundreds of thousands of sonnets, and many hundreds of sequences, in his style. In Britain and America, after neglect in the eighteenth century, romantic poetry reinstated both Petrarch and Dante, and the sonnet sequence revived again, and is still with us, as Berryman' s Petrarchan gesture shows.

But Petrarchan love is not just adoration of a mistress, an external and magnetizing Other: Wordsworth, himself a writer of fine sequences, remarked of Shakespeare's sonnets that "with this key I Shakespeare unlocked his heart," and when Berryman, in the sonnet referred to, said that Petrarch wrote "sonnets to something like her" (Laura), he touched on what is obvious even in the Vita Nuova: that when poets write to their loves, they write as much about themselves desiring as about the desired one. The love experienced, or hoped for, rather than the person who can gratify it, is usually the focus of attention, and the work of the sequence lies often in the gap between desire and the Other. Thus the speaker who stands for the poet, the I 1/ of the sequence, is the real object/subject of his or her own discourse, and it is this preoccupation of the sonnet sequence that Petrarch announces in the prefatory sonnet of his Rime:

Voi eh' ascoltate in rime sparse il suono di quei sospiri ond'io nudriva'l core in sui mio prima giovenil errore, quand'era in parte altr'uom da quel ch'i'sono:

del vario stile in ch'io piango e ragiono fra le vane speranze e'l van dol ore, ove sia chi per prova intenda amore spero trovar pieta, non che perdono.

Ma ben vegg'io or si come al popol tutto favola fui gran tempo, onde sovente dime medesmo meco mi vergogno;

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e del mio vaneggiar vergogna e'l frutto, e'l pentersi, e'l conoscer chiaramente che quanto piace al mondo e breve sogno. (Rime, 1)3

(You who listen in scattered verses to the sound of these sighs with which I nourished my heart during the errors of my first youth, when I was partly a different man from what I am now: for the varying style in which I weep and argue between vain hopes and fruitless grief, where there may be someone who from experience understands love, I hope to find pity, not just pardon.

But I see clearly now how to the world at large I was a byword for a long time, for which often I am ashamed within me for my very self; and of my vanities, shame is the fruit, with repentance, and the clear knowledge that whatever pleases the world is a fleeting dream.)

This is not one of the greatest sonnets ever written (though it is enormously sophisticated), but given the reputation and influence of Petrarch, it is surely the most important sonnet in the world for the development of the sonnet sequence. Petrarch worked on the Rime, adding, changing around, and revising the sonnets and other poems for nearly 40 years from about 1335 to his death in 1374,4 but during most of that time this sonnet stood as the introductory poem. Whatever he intended to do in his sequence, this was the reader's entry into it, and thus, in a way, the entry into all the sequences that follow. And as critics and students of Petrarch agree that this opening sonnet sets the pattern for what follows, we shall take some time here to examine its ideas.

With all due deference to Dante, whose Vita Nuova Petrarch probably knew, though he never mentions it, it is established here for the first time that a sonnet sequence can be organized by its own sonnets rather than by a prose commentary. The use of metapoetic comment-sonnets in a sequence talking about the sequence-establishes at the start, and as often as the trick is repeated, the presence of a narrating I 1/ in charge of the poesis, and this presence, brooding over the sonnets, guarantees a kind of continuity. Here Petrarch establishes, for his readers, certain pointers to reading what follows:

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I. The sequence recounts a personal development: it is the history of an individual, who has been in different states at different times (lines 1-4).

2. The sonnets actually record the voice of that individual as he suffers, and his differences are their differences (lines 5-6).

3. The individual as he is now can, and does, revalue what the earlier Ill felt or thought (lines 9-10).

4. This is a revaluation that the reader is encouraged to accept and share in insofar as he or she can treat the sonnets as mirrors (lines 7 -8).

5. The narrating I 1/ is wise-or wiser than the earlier self, and the poetry thus becomes an ordered experience of disorder (lines 12-14).

It would not be too much to say that something like this organizational and reading procedure has been explicit or implicit in sonnet sequences ever since. Not all authors choose to show a metapoetic presence, of course: we would be much more confident in our reading of Shakespeare's sonnets, for example, if we had a similar opening sonnet from him; but the narrating I 1/ and the narrated Ill so well represent the features of continuity and variation constitutive of the sonnet sequence that it is rare to find no narrating presence at all.

In a narrative sequence, the narrating presence is more concerned with events or with the thoughts of others than with his or her own, and this is true even of the rather disturbed I 1/ of Meredith' s Modern Love, who is more absorbed in the social ironies of his situation than in his own inner state. What Petrarch does, again for the first time in European poetry, is establish an interior discourse as the dominant discourse of the sonnets, with which he virtually creates the lyric persona. Reading the preceding sonnet, the reader will have noticed that as the proemial sonnet of a sequence of poems wholly devoted to the praise of one woman, it does not actually mention her at all but instead focuses on the multiple personas of the speaker. Borrowing from the stilnovisti the idea that what is of importance is the transformation of the lover (even if that is later seen as "a youthful error"), Petrarch moves on in the sestet of the sonnet to a second transformation, his wiser self aware of his folly.

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So far, this is orthodox penitence for the sins of the flesh; but though we find this idea movingly and quietly expressed in the last lines of the last great poem of the sequence, the canzone "Vergine bella" (366), that is not what the whole sequence shows. What it shows, under the narrating I I/' s direction, is the instability of the psyche, its oscillation between states, and the whole discourse of the sequence is what he says it is, a "varied style in which I weep and argue." If the reader looks carefully at the meaning of the pronoun I each time it occurs, he or she will notice that one particular I (line 5) is the most complex and undecidable of all, both narrating and narrated, and "in two minds," as we say, both simply overcome with passion ("piango," "weep") and also articulately proclaiming itself ("ragiono," "argue"). It is on the unstableness of that I, its at once wonderful and damnable unstableness, that Petrarch focuses his incredible talent and sings it through all the glories and clouds of a lifelong absorption in "something like Her" (my capital, not Berryman's). And that alcoholic reprobate, himself tormented by his own inadequacies, put the problem in the form of a question that stands as the proem to his own Rime, Sonnets to Chris:

He made, a thousand years ago, a-many songs for an Excellent lady, wif whom he was in wuv, shall he now publish them? Has he the right, upon that old young man, to bare his nervous system & display all the clouds again as they were above?5

Petrarch had no doubts: throughout his long life he constantly revised, reassembled, and sent out to friends the "baring of his nervous system." The paradox that he declares himself ashamed of loving a woman whom he dedicates his verse to commemorating is one that the sequence does not try to resolve: it is a nervous system, not a moral system. Every now and then the sequence is punctuated by a sonnet that reflects on the failure of poetry: one of the instabilities of the psyche is to doubt the value of speech in the act of speaking, and sonnet sequences in particular have the capacity to dramatize psychological instability as semiotic trauma (as we shall see more clearly in the work of Tony Harrison):

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Mentre che'l cor dagli amorosi vermi fu consumato e'n fiamma amorosa arse, di vaga fera le vestigia sparse cercai per poggi solitari et ermi; et ebbi ardir, cantando, di dolermi d' Amor, di lei che si dura m'apparse, ma L'ingegno et le rime erano scarse in quella etate ai pensier novi e'nfermi.

Quel foco e morto e'l copre in picciol marmo che se col tempo fosse ito avanzando come gia in altri, infino a la vechiezza, di rime armato ond'oggi mi disarmo, con stil canuto avrei fatto parlando romper le pietre et pianger di dolcezza. (Rime, 304)

(While my heart was consumed by the worms of love, and burned in its flame, a wandering wild creature's scattered prints I sought on wild and unfrequented hills. And while I sang, I had the nerve to complain of Love, of the woman who appeared so cruel to me, but my wits and my verses were scanty in that age for new and unstable ideas. That fire is dead, and a small tablet covers what had it through time gone on growing [as it does in others] into old age, armed with the rhymes which today I shed, with the style of age, I would have by speaking made break the stones and weep with sweetness.)

Since the narrating I I/ usually knows (as here) that he or she is narrating in verse, the speaker is naturally preoccupied with the problems of textuality, rather than sexuality, while his or her narrated self will have gone through the agonies of feeling and the disturbances that the sonnets record. (In Dante's Vita Nuova, correspondingly, the problems of the text are the concern of the prose narrator.) The problem of the adequacy of speech and symbol may, then, as in Petrarch's Rime, be foregrounded intermittently by the narrating I I/, which helps to hold the sequence together. Failing to speak well enough, or saying the wrong things, or using art for the wrong ends-all themes that occur in

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Petrarch' s poems and that are present also in the corona sequences of Donne and Macbeth, discussed earlier-are the equivalent on the metapoetic level of failing to love well enough, or loving the wrong (or a cold-hearted) person, or using love for the wrong ends (for lust instead of ideal love) on the level of the narrated I I/, who may do or feel all those things. Many sequences, therefore, have moments in which the speaker observes his or her own performance, whether disapprovingly (Petrarch) or approvingly, as here in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's concluding sonnet to Sonnets from the Portuguese:

Beloved, thou hast brought me many flowers Plucked in the garden, all the summer through And winter, and it seemed as if they grew In this close room, nor missed the sun and showers. So, in the like name of that love of ours, Take back these thoughts which here unfolded too, And which on warm and cold days I withdrew From my heart's ground. Indeed, those beds and bowers Be overgrown with bitter weeds and rue, And wait thy weeding; yet here's eglantine, Here's ivy!-take them, as I used to do Thy flowers, and keep them where they shall not pine. Instruct thine eyes to keep their colours true, And tell thy soul, their roots are left in mine. (xliv)6

Here, by using the ancient trope in which poems are flowers, Elizabeth Barrett (as she then was), metaphorizes the sonnets she has just written for her lover, Robert Browning, to read as a collection of flowers gathered from an unweeded garden-the poetry is in some sense unsatisfactory, because her past life has much that she regrets, but she can at least offer him devotion (eglantine) and constancy (ivy). As the thoughts/flowers have unfolded at various seasons, this collection records a personal history; the "heart's ground" is a site of suffering as well as of love.

But the reader (Robert Browning in the first instance) can learn from this sequence about the poet and himself (he has brought flowers to her), and in the subtle and forward-looking thirteenth line, she points out that responsibility for the order and sense of the sequence rests with the reader-her subjective

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wholeness depends on his reading aright what she was, and knowing that what she was is connected still to what she is ("their roots are left in mine" [soul)). As for Petrarch, a semiotic fear, if not trauma, arises in the speaker upon realization that he or she exists as a text and therefore must be both preserved ("keep them") and read ("Instruct thine eyes") in order to live.

Similarly Edmund Spenser (1552?-1599) begins his sonnet sequence, the Amoretti (1595), with a sonnet spoken by one who has an overview of the sufferings "written with teares" by himself at a slightly earlier stage; we are to assume he has gathered them together for presentation, and using the convention by which the book or verses are treated as a messenger (here a kind of hostage) sent to the lady, he as it were supervises the messenger's departure, on whose proper "handling" his own life depends:

Happy ye leaves when as those lilly hands, which hold my life in their dead doing might, shall handle you and hold in loves soft bands, lyke captives trembling at the victors sight. And happy lines, on which with starry light, those lam ping eyes will deigne sometimes to look and read the sorrowes of my dying spright written with teares in harts close bleeding book. And happy rymes bath' din the sacred brooke, of Helicon whence she derived is, when ye behold that Angels blessed looke, my souls long lacked food, my heavens blis. Leaves, lines, and rymes, seeke her to please alone, whom if ye please, I care for other none. (Amoretti, lf

The sequence text as confused sounds (Petrarch); the sequence as varied flowers and weeds (Elizabeth Barrett); the sequence as a group of prisoners of war (Spenser)-all these metaphors proceed from a narrating or editing I I! who is presenting his or her own past as a kind of disorder that can with goodwill be read into wholeness or continuity-or, if that fails, as Petrarch feared it might, then be read with forgiveness.

This strategy, which Petrarch seems to have invented for organizing his sequence, creates and perpetuates what one might call the confessional lyric sequence. To confess is inevitably to look

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back and represent/re-present one's past, and at the moment of confession one is, or should be, wiser than one has been. Even the anarchic John Berryman, at the end of his "some hundred sonnets" (actually 117), escapes from himself as lover into himself as sonneteer-though he waits until the "changing" at the sestet of his last sonnet before he does it:

The weather's changing. This morning was cold, as I made for the grove, without expectation, some hundred Sonnets in my pocket, old, to read her if she came. Presently the sun yellowed the pines & my lady came not in blue jeans and sweater. I sat down and wrote.

(Sonnets to Chris, 117, 9-14)8

Petrarch's Rime and Symbolism

There are other ways of holding a sequence together, even in the absence of a poet-persona acting as architect; Petrarch was a master also of these ways. He had the advantage over most later sequence writers of a very long life, in which he was able to rework and rethink his sonnets: we have many of his worksheets, as well as some part-autograph manuscripts of his various versions of the Rime, so that we can trace most of the changes he made. The first point to make is that sonnets, if properly written and capable of standing independently, can be changed around and still make sense, something that is not true of, say, the chapters of a conventional novel. They are more like the entries in a diary, which can be changed from date to date-it is not unknown for diaries to be altered or reworked to suggest a new version of events. So with the loosely connected sonnets of a sequence: they may be shifted quite dramatically and frequently.

Petrarch' s Laura died of the Black Death in Avignon on 6 April 1348, and after her death Petrarch decided to assemble the sonnets he had written in her praise while she lived, and add others, presenting the collection in two sets, one up to her death, the sonnets "in vita di Madonna Laura," and the remainder after it, "in morte." As we know' from his worksheets, this did no: mean that sonnets could not change from the "in vita" group to the "in

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morte" group and vice versa. Although throughout the Rime some sonnets contain dates, all of these except two lying in chronological order in the final version he bequeathed to us, many sonnets were temporally unfixed and the moods or feelings expressed were not in his mind always keyed to a particular moment, or even to Laura alive as distinguished from her angelic self. To allow this temporal freedom, some other kind of linking was needed, and what Petrarch provided-though few later writers have had the genius to imitate it-was the continuity of symbolism.

Explaining Petrarch's symbolism has occupied many critics through the ages and will no doubt continue to do so; my interest is limited here to his symbolism as it controls the sequence and affects later writers. To take only one example for the moment: in Berryman's final sonnet, the reference to "making for the grove" where "the sun yellowed the pines" is heavy with Petrarchan associations--Petrarch repeatedly used trees, the sun, and the calor of gold as symbols both of his poetry (Apollo, the sun god, whose tree is the laurel) and of his love (Laura, whose tree is the laurel, and whose hair is golden). It actually becomes difficult to write about trees without involving these ideas: here is Joachim du Bellay, beginning the vogue of the sonnet sequence in France with I: Olive (1549), clearing much symbolic undergrowth:

Je ne quiers pas la fameuse couronne, Saint ornement du dieu au chef dore, Ou que du dieu aux Indes adore Le gai chapeau la tete m' environne.

Encore moins veux-je que I' on me donne Le mol rameau en Cypre decore; Celui qui est d'Athenes honore Seul je le veux, et le ciel me l'ordonne.

0 tige heureux, que la sage deesse En sa tutelle et garde a voulu prendre Pour faire honneur a son sacre autel!

Orne mon chef, donne-moi hardiesse De te chanter, qui espere te rendre Egal un jour au Laurier immortel. (I.; Olive, 1)9

(I do not seek for the famous crown, The holy regalia of the god of the golden hair, [Apollo/laurel]

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Or that the revelling wreath of the god worshipped in the Indies [Bacchus/vine twigs] Should circle my head. Much less do I wish to be given The sweet branch of the rites of Cyprus; [Venus/myrtle] The one that is honoured in Athens Is all I want, as heaven decrees. [Athena/the olive]

0 happy tree, that the wise goddess Has taken under her watch and protection To honour her holy altar,

Adorn my brow, give me the strength To sing of you, as I hope to make you One day the peer of the immortal Laurel. [Petrarch/Iaurel tree/Laura])

This elaborate emblematic verse establishes the speaker and his view of his sequence right at the start: his verse will be Petrarchan (1.14) and will praise his lady throughout (11.12-14), but he does not claim to be an accomplished poet (11.1-2), he will not write coarse or wanton verse (11.3-4), and he will not write in view of marriage (11.5-6). His is an ideal devotion marked by wisdom and purity (11.7-12). The European Renaissance developed an extremely complex symbolic vocabulary, much of which was independent of Petrarch; from our point of view it is noteworthy that Petrarch developed an extensive natural symbolism, much of which derived from a circumstance of his own life.

In 1337, 10 years after he first saw his Laura, he bought a small house and garden 20 miles to the east of Avignon, in the spectacular valley at the source of the River Sorgue, Vaucluse (vallis clausa, "the closed valley"). Barely 300 yards from his house, the Sorgue rises in a mysterious, green-shaded basin at the foot of immense sheer cliffs and flows rapidly down to the plain among trees and fertile meadows. Though there is no evidence that Laura was ever there, Petrarch repeatedly imagined himself seeing her, or searching for her, by those waters and among those hills and woods; and these became an analogue of her and of himself, through the dominant myth of Apollo and Daphne, the god of poetry who pursues, and the beloved who eludes in the flesh, only to turn at the end into the laurel, the tree of poetry:

Si traviato e'l folie mi' desio a seguitar costei che'n fugae volta e de'lacci d' Amor leggiera et sciolta vola dinanzi alien to correr mio,

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che quanta richiamando piu 1' envio per la sicura strada men m' ascolta, ne mi vale spronarlo 0 dargli volta eh' Am or per sua natura il fa restio; et poi che'l fren per forza a se raccoglie, i'mi rimango in signoria di lui, che mal mio grado a moret mi trasporta; sol per venir allauro onde si coglie acerbo frutto, che le piaghe altrui gustando affligge piu che non conforta. (Rime, 6)

(So astray is my wild desire to pursue her who has turned in her flight and loose and free from the ties of Love flies ahead of my slow running,

that the more in recalling him I send him by the safe path, the less he listens to me, nor is it any use to spur him on or turn him round, for Love by his nature makes him restless

and then when he forcefully takes the bit between his teeth, I stay in his power, so that against my will he bears me to my death;

and we come only to the laurel, that bears bitter fruit, which when tasted afflicts wounds more than it heals them.)

(It is worth noting here that Rilke also used the myth of a lightly dancing woman and a god of poetry, Orpheus, in his sonnets.) If this seems like an esoteric poem, then in a sense it is availing itself of what any sonnet sequence can have: a set of symbols and meaning generated in the course of the sequence by repetition and allusion. If these symbols are valid in a semantics outside the sequence, like the myth of Apollo and Daphne, then the writer can be more oblique; if they are private, then they must be explained as the sequence develops, such as those in George Macbeth's "Thoughts on a Box of Razors" (Poems from Oby, 1982). Once we grasp that razors lying in a box are like rhyming lines in the poet's mind, the whole sequence is organized on a metapoetic level, but this, being a privately invented symbol, has to be made explicit, as it is in the sixth sonnet:

Razors need razor-like precision. These Don't quite have that. This boxfulleans on rhyme.

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I see the brook of recollection freeze, And feel the cross of parting, like a crime. I could abandon rhyme, though. Force a sly Sixth line decision to be less exact. A sort of gearchange, as it were, in fact. That would be fluid, like a flow of thigh.

I don't suppose I'll do it, though, nor try. Good rhymes can cut you. They can make you cry.

Remembering does that too. So when I Remember blue Gillette, and rusting blades, A kind of guilty subjugation shades. I see my father's car, and cases packed.10

Macbeth' s sequence here is not amatory but loosely meditative about memory and the wholeness of personality in time. This issue, or topic, is also profoundly Petrarchan: as he grew older, Petrarch became increasingly occupied with the hereafter and used the narrating I 1/ to represent the present time, while the narrated I I/ was the past, and his desire for Laura (alive or as the donna angelicata) reached into the future. The I !-who-speaks/ thus occupies "now," the present point of the reader and the speaker, and the sonnets themselves range through past and future, both inside individual sonnets and as one goes through the sequence. To order the past (by narrating it) and the future (by envisioning it) is to secure the wholeness of the I I-who speaks/, and-if one follows Petrarch' s lead-the sonnet sequence is a kind of battle for existence.

Shakespeare's sonnets, where the metapoesis is subdued but definite, exhibit this very strikingly; and the notion that the sequence (whether amatory or religious) is a proclamation, or an elocution, or an eloquence-a speaking out-of the self is one that remains with Renaissance poets and passes down to romantic writers, especially when, as with Baudelaire, defiance becomes one of the social gestures expected of the poet.

Horreur Sympathique De ce ciel bizarre et livide, Tourmente comme ton destin, Quels pensers clans ton ame vide Descendent? reponds, libertin.

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-Insatiablement avide De I' obscur et de I' in certain, Je ne geindrai pas comme Ovide Chasse du paradis Latin

Cieux dechires comme des greves, En vous se mire mon orgeuil; Vos vastes nuages en deuil

Sont les corbillards de mes reves, Et vos lueurs sont le reflet

. De l'Enfer ou mon coeur se plait. (Les Fleurs du Mal, 82)11

(From this strange and livid sky, Tortured like your destiny, What thoughts fall into your empty soul? Answer, freethinker.

-Insatiably greedy For what is hidden and uncertain, I shall not whine like Ovid Banished from his Roman paradise.

Skies sundered like shores, My pride mirrors itself in you; Your huge clouds in their grief

Are the hearses of my dreams, And in your gleams is reflected the Hell where my heart rejoices.)

Here Baudelaire as speaker addresses himself, just as Petrarch addresses Love, and his self replies with an outburst that looks back to an urban past (Ovid) and forward to a Romantic expulsion into a wilderness (Ovid again, and also Petrarch and Satan), leaving the narrating speaker of the first quatrain poised uncertainly in the present. Les Fleurs du Mal (or at least the first section called "Spleen et Ideal") is not a highly ordered sequence, but the use of the present to stand on, as here, to look at the past with repentance and the future with defiance is a kind of motif.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Female Speaker

The use of the lyric sequence to constitute a self in the face of threat (from within or without) is something that certainly

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appealed to Petrarch, but it applied particularly to women sonneteers, and there is a set of confessional lyric sequences that, as I have already said, one might call the "she-to-him" sequence type.

We have already looked at Anne Locke's sequence (1560), which though not gender specific is certainly an attempt by a woman speaker to discover or recover her identity as a living soul, addressed to the Ultimate Him; Lady Mary Wrath's sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621), a set of suites of 74 sonnets and 20 songs in all, while not uniformly or constantly addressed to 'Amphilanthus," is an attempt by a woman in love to come to terms with her own (unrequited) passion and with the phenomenon of male response to it. Written in imitation of her uncle's Astrophel and Stella, it works wholly within Petrarchan conventions but reverses the gender roles. It has a certain amount of ironic wit and is a predecessor in that way of Edna St. Vincent Millay's Fatal Interview (1931), mentioned in chapter 4.

Mary Robinson's Sappho to Phaon (1796), popular with anthologizers at the beginning of the nineteenth century, is a 44-sonnet sequence in the same tradition-though "Sappho" was by tradition a woman self-asserted through her verse and thus not as such oppressed. Thomas Hardy's four-sonnet sequence "She to Him" of 1866, obviously not by a woman but impersonating one, moves from bad Shakespearean pastiche to something within striking distance of Hardy's consummately skillful lyric verse, and as Hardy often did later, speaks for the wronged or betrayed woman.

Christina Rossetti's Manna lnnominata (1881) declares in its preface that it imagines the utterance of one of the ladies of the stilnovisti "had such a lady spoken for herself," but it also pays generous tribute to its predecessor and model, the finest of all these sequential assertions of a woman's identity and self, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. These 44 Petrarchan sonnets were the first Victorian amatory sequence and were written before her marriage in 1846 to Robert Browning, but not shown to him till three years later, and published in 1850.

The title, Sonnets from the Portuguese, reflects Elizabeth Barrett's shyness: she hesitated to reveal the sonnets to her husband, and he in turn had reservations about "putting one's loves into verse," so that by agreement they presented the sonnets as if they

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were translations. Elizabeth Barrett previously had written a poem based on the story that the Portuguese epic poet Camoes has been silently loved by a court lady, Catarina, who died at 20 without revealing her passion. Her poem, "Catarina to Camoes," was written in 1831, in songlike stanzas, and insofar as it belongs to a genre, it is that of Ovid' s Heroides, the classical model for poems from a wronged or repentant woman heroine to her lover. However, this idea suggested the modest subterfuge of her own sonnet sequence, and Catarina suggested the Portuguese of the title.12

But the genre that lies closest to the sequence, and provides its special kind of connectedness, is the letter. Because of the circumstances of her domestic confinement between 1838 and 1846, when she married Robert Browning, and because of her growing reputation as a poet in these years, Elizabeth Barrett became a most accomplished letter writer, and these letters were not, as Petrarch' s were, rhetorical exercises in the spirit of Cicero or Seneca but lively and often intimate written converse with friends and admirers-of whom one finally became her husband and lover. Almost uniquely, then, this sequence is addressed to a present and future lover, not an imagined or absent or idealized one, and while the vocabulary may be that of Catarina or any romantic heroine, the movement of the voice inside the sonnets and between sonnets is that of conversing, as one does in letters to those one loves, with someone who hears one's voice as he or she reads.

Elizabeth Barrett was already a skillful sonneteer when she wrote this sequence, and though at times the Petrarchan model (ABBA ABBA CDCDCD) makes her hunt for a rhyme, she enforces her passion against the structure of the sonnet, letting it hold her in place as she argues, breaks off, tries an epigram, looks for the right word, calls for a response from him-in short, engages with her addressee, as Petrarch never did. These are dramatic lyrics, in the sense in which the word is used of Robert Browning's poetry:

Yet love, mere love, is beautiful indeed And worthy of acceptation. Fire is bright, Let temple burn, or flax. An equal light Leaps in the flame from cedar-plank or weed.

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And love is fire; and when I say at need I love thee ... mark!. I love thee ... in thy sight I stand transfigured, glorified aright, With conscience of the new rays that proceed Out of my face towards thine. There's nothing low In love, when love the lowest: meanest creatures Who love God, God accepts while loving so. And what I feel, across the inferior features Of what I am, cloth flash itself, and show How that great work of Love enhances Nature's. (x)

It is always difficult to talk about a sequence via single sonnets, but this splendid and subtle sonnet is representative of the bonding techniques that hold the sequence together. The sense of a lively speaking voice engaging its addressee should be clear: Elizabeth Barrett' s use of enjambment, pressing her emotions through the end of one line into the next and overrunning the octave by half a line into the sestet, is a developed technique that English sonneteers had learned from Milton and the great Romantic poets. Along with this urgency goes a new use of metaphor: anyone reading the first quatrain might think they were reading a translation from Dante's Vita Nuova, so strong is the language of light and fire as symbols of love; but in Dante the transfiguration of the lover (imagined or desired) is a final effect and a total condition. For Elizabeth Barrett, the purpose or value of this transfiguration is to make the self cohere in a "flash" that is directed toward the beloved as an erotic welcome.

Again and again in this sequence, the language of religion and of worship of an ideal beloved, familiar from Dante, from Petrarch, and from the English Renaissance sonneteers, is used to enhance gestures, movements of the eyes or the body between two people sitting (as we know that Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett often did, greatly to the annoyance of her father) close together.

This sequence uses the transcendent to enhance the erotic and the physical, whereas its predecessors work in the reverse direction, and Elizabeth Barrett' s extraordinary skill in enforcing the movement of the speaking voice is responsible for maintaining this illusion of physical proximity. Donne can do this, though not in his sonnets, and Sir Philip Sidney also; Elizabeth Barrett does it with an inherited and powerful vocabulary of idealism and tran-

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scendence-something that distinguishes her from Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose ironic detachment is too pervasive for idealism to bond her sonnets together.

To call this a tactile sequence is too simple. All the senses are involved, but the passionate observer of herself and her lover always seems to be so close to him as to touch or be touched. Consider the strong tactility of the closing lines of sonnet 35, which adapt Genesis 8:9 (and possibly also, given the eroticism of the sequence, Canticles 5:2) to make vibrant with significance the clearly imagined sensation of holding safely a wet bird:

Alas, I have grieved I am so hard to love, Yet love me, wilt thou? Open thine heart wide, And fold within, the wet wings of thy dove. (35.12-14)

The final image of the dove belongs also, it might seem, to the traditional way of asserting the self that we have called abjection, in which the self is created by being desirous of an Other whose recognition is sought (or, perhaps, angrily refused, as in Shakespeare's sonnets to his Dark Lady). The self confesses to being dependent on, and thus constituted by, the approval of the Other. Certainly Elizabeth Barrett allows her speaker to assert that she is weak, unworthy, and if worthy at all, only by permission, as it were:

Even so, Beloved, I at last record, Here ends my strife. If thou invite me forth, I rise above abasement at the word. Make thy love larger to enlarge my worth. (16.11-14)

Yet partly because her sequence is not unified by any single myth or image cluster, Elizabeth Barrett can image herself in ways that are very much at variance with any simple adoration. Consider this sonnet together with the Shakespeare sonnet that it echoes:

Accuse me not, beseech thee, that I wear Too calm and sad a face in front of thine; For we two look two ways, and cannot shine With the same sunlight on our brow and hair. On me thou lookest, with no doubting care,

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As on a bee shut in a crystalline-Since sorrow hath shut me safe in love's divine, And to spread wing and fly in the outer air Were most impossible failure, if I strove To fail so. But I look on thee ... on thee. Beholding, besides love, the end of love, Hearing oblivion beyond memory! As one who sits and gazes from above, Over the rivers to the bitter sea. (15)

Accuse me thus: that I have scanted all Wherein I should your great deserts repay, Forgot upon your dearest love to call, Whereto all bonds do tie me day by day; That I have frequent been with unknown minds, And given to time your own dear-purchased right; That I have hoisted sail to all the winds Which should transport me furthest from your sight. Book both my wilfulness and errors down, And on just proof surmise accumulate; Bring me within the level of your frown, But shoot not at me in your wakened hate;

Since my appeal says I did strive to prove The constancy and virtue of your love.

(Shakespeare, Sonnets, 117)

What Rosalie Colie once memorably called Shakespeare's "particularly brainy, calculated incisiveness" is well displayed here: this is a forensic sonnet in a sequence dominated by argument. The speaker is talking at, rather than to, his addressee, and the lexis and syntax are cumulative, producing a clever punch line in the couplet. Elizabeth Barrett' s sonnet is rather more unexpected: though it contains many archaisms and Shakespearean phrases, it does not move as Shakespeare's sonnet moves, but with no concern to make a case or argue a point, seems to go into a dream at the end. One can hear the voice, as always, and it tails off hesitantly before returning with a strange and unsettling image, quite unlike anything Shakespeare would have set at the end of a sonnet:

But I look on thee ... As one who sits and gazes from above,

Over the rivers to the bitter sea.

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The effect of this image of a woman looking out from a height upon the ocean is to make the regard of the lover who thinks her a bee shut in a crystal seem precious and unreal. Suddenly a sonnet that seems to be arguing that the lovers are different and that she is weaker and wholly restricted goes into the recesses of her mind and reinstates her as a sibylline figure of great power, looking from above, calmer and sadder, because wiser, than her lover.

This subversion of a stance-abjection turned into subjection-is recurrent in the sequence and can make Elizabeth Barrett seem coy, affecting a weakness that elsewhere she denies. (It might, of course, be said that in her life, by leaving her room to marry and elope with Robert Browning, that was precisely what she exhibited.) Any single sonnet might justify this objection. But as the sequence progresses and moves from hesitation and a kind of pathetic gratitude toward erotic welcome and self-discovery as a woman capable of love and sexual fulfillment, the apparent inconsistency is actually the emergence of the persona who speaks as the writer of the sequence at the end, who has written poetry equal to Browning's, and who now exchanges with him like for like. This is not a narrative sequence, but its movement keeps in being, seen in flashes (to use her own word), the proper lover of the Beloved, who when she has fully emerged, signs off her sequence with a firm hand, offering it as the index of her self:

take them [the poems], as I used to do Thy flowers, and keep them where they shall not pine. Instruct thine eyes to keep their colours true, And tell thy soul, their roots are left in mine. (xliv.ll-14)

As always, there is a sense of speaking to someone physically close. No other sonneteer manages this peculiar intimacy: the Petrarchan legacy of distance between speaker and beloved is elsewhere too powerful.

If there is a myth dominating this sequence, it is one of which, perhaps, Elizabeth Barrett was aware more as reality than literary figure: the Rapunzel type of the woman enclosed, attracting, but unreachable. Insofar as this is a modernization of Daphne (the woman fleeing and unreachable), it is a continuation of Petrarchan themes; but because it articulates, and triumphantly overcomes, a quintessential Victorian female predicament, memorialized by both male and female artists and writers and used by

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many as a metaphor for poetry itself (see Tennyson's The Lady of Shalott), it became one of the most popular of all her works and a model for later writers (e.g., Christina Rossetti, Manna Innominata). Its success helped to reinstate the amatory, confessional sonnet sequence as a literary genre.

Tony Harrison, from The School of Eloquence

At first sight, nothing could be less like Sonnets from the Portuguese than Tony Harrison' s aggressively modern sequence from The School of Eloquence, published in 1978 and written, for good measure, not even in 14-line sonnets, but in 16-line ones, rhyming like Meredith's in four quatrains. Compared with his predecessors' sonnets, everything is looser and more irregular; but as we shall see, the basic pattern and main themes remain surprisingly traditional.

The collection consists of 67 sonnets, usually rhyming in quatrains but sometimes in couplets and sometimes in a mixture of the two. They are arranged in three numbered but untitled sections of 14, 35, and 18 sonnets, respectively, and within each section each sonnet has a title and sometimes an epigraph. There are several suites of two and three sonnets in the sequence, and the last section concludes with a complicated suite of sonnets, "Art and Extinction," consisting of six items, the first of which, titled "The Birds of America," is itself a suite of three sonnets, each with is own title. With a kind of academic wit apparently at odds with his Leeds upbringing (the tension between the two is a major subject of the sequence), the first 16-line poem after the epigraph turns out to be an extract from Milton's Latin poem '1\d Patrem," carefully printed to look like one of Harrison' s own poems. Harrison is also ferociously addicted to punning titles, so that the movement of reading the sequence is not only linear but also tangential. The sonnets are not serially numbered, except for the suites, and will be referred to here by section and title.

Harrison's cleverness, as was suggested, is part ofhis subject matter. As surely as Dante or Petrarch or any of the other writers we have examined, he focuses on moments in the being-or becoming, if one wishes to give a post-Rilke and post-Heidegger context to the modern sequence--of his self. The self has its

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desired Other, and though this is not a conventional amatory sequence, it is very much about love, love of his home in Leeds and of his parents. Like Petrarch, Harrison begins with a poem not about love but about language and identity-though as the reader will just have encountered the extracts from Milton's Ad Patrem referred to earlier, Harrison's title here, "On Not Being Milton," brings Milton's love for and acknowledgment of his own father into the ambience of the sonnet:

On Not Being Milton for Sergio Vieira & Armando Guebuza (Frelimo)

Read and committed to the flames, I call these sixteen lines that go back to my roots my Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, my growing black enough to fit my boots.

The stutter of the scold out of the branks of condescension, class and counter-class thickens with glottals to a lumpen mass of Ludding morphemes closing up their ranks. Each swung cast iron Enoch of Leeds stress clangs a forged music on the frames of art, the looms of owned language smashed apart.

Three cheers for mute ingloriousness!

Articulation is the tonguetied' s fighting. In the silence all round poetry we quote Tidd the Cato Street conspirator who wrote:

Sir, I Ham a very Bad Hand at Righting. 13

This dense, allusive, and witty sonnet is also a metapoetic start to the sequence, identifying it obliquely as a "cahier" -notebook or account book. It places the sequence within a cultural and political struggle, being dedicated to two of the Angolan guerrilla fighters, and thus underscores the pun that identifies poetry with revolution: writing/righting. The challenge is to become articulate without losing one's native speech: to accept that one's regional dialect is "thick" or "lumpen" is to betray one's identity and sell out to the condescension of the ruling class (referred to

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in the echo of Thomas Gray's "Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest"). But Milton, of course, became articulate without losing his revolutionary fervor and paradoxically became liberated through the most elite of all tongues, academic Latin; perhaps obstinate adherence to one's dialect speech is a kind of Luddism. "Three cheers for mute ingloriousness!" is a witty encapsulation of what is, at the outset of this sequence, an intensely problematic situation for the speaker.

Harrison was, and as speaker of his sequence is, in love with those who as a family sustained him-father, mother, and uncles. His father, as he reminds the reader often, did not read books (Two; ''A Good Read"); his mother disliked the kind of books her son wrote (Two: "Bringing Up" -the title suggests both nourishing and vomiting); and as for his uncles, an epigraph tells the inquiring reader

How you became a poet's a mystery! Wherever did you get your talent from? I say: I had two uncles, foe and HarryOne was a stammerer, the other dumb.

The would-be poet could express his love for his family and his culture and class only by reaching a level of education and articulation ("The School of Eloquence") that divided him from those he loved: the result was often anger and frustration and discontent, as he says in "Confessional Poetry" (Two), using Sir Philip Sidney's device of an intrusive reader at his elbow:

But your father was a simple working man, they'll say, and didn't speak in those full rhymes. His words when they came would scarcely scan.

Mi dad's did scan, like yours do, many times!

That quarrel then in Book Ends II between [Book Ends li-the poem on the previous page] one you still go on addressing as 'mi dad' and you, your father comes across as mean but weren't the taunts you flung back just as bad?

We had a bitter quarrel in our cups and there were words between us, yes,

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I'm guilty, and the way I make it up's in poetry, and that much I confess. (lines 5-16)

"To make it up in poetry" is of course both to fictionalize and to reconcile, and this metapoetic intervention identifies the sequence as both confessionaVpenitential and the product of artifice. As the sequence progresses, the gap between origins and present identity is bridged, as in Petrarch, by elegy. The sonnet on his father's cremation, "Marked with D" (Two), is well-known and often anthologized (though it gains immensely from being read in sequence); the sonnet on his mother's cremation, one of the most moving of modern lyrics, is less well-known and, coming as it does immediately after "Bringing Up," is full of irony as well as pathos:

Timer Gold survives the fire that's hot enough to make you ashes in a standard urn. An envelope of coarse official buff contains your wedding ring which wouldn't burn.

Dad told me I'd to tell them at St James' s that the ring should go in the incinerator. That 'eternity' inscribed with both their names is his surety that they'd be together, 'later'.

I sign for the parcelled clothing as the son, the cardy, apron, pants, bra, dress-

the clerk phoned down: 6-8-8-3-1? Has she still her ring on? (Slight pause) Yes!

It's on my warm palm now, your burnished ring!

I feel your ashes, head, arms, breasts, womb, legs, sift through its circle slowly, like that thing you used to let me watch to time the eggs. (Two)

As in Petrarch' s Rime 348, the speaker's sense of loss is marked by a sensuous itemization, leading down the sonnet to a loneliness "amid the wastes of time." Where Harrison exploits the macabre symbolism of the egg timer (Old Father Time, the egg of creation,

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sands of time) to define his own precariousness "as the son," the naked and blind I I! of Petrarch can look, tentatively, toward a hereafter, but the similarities are more powerful than the difference:

Da'piu belli occhi, et dal piu chiaro viso che mai splendesse, et da'piu bei capelli che facean l' oro e'l sol parer men belli, dal piu dolce parlare et dolce riso, da le man, da le braccia che conquiso senza moversi avrian quai piu rebelli fur d'amor mai, da'piu bei piedi snelli, da la persona fatta in paradiso

prendean vita i miei spirti; or n'a diletto il Re celeste, i suoi alati corrieri, ed io son qui rimaso ignudo e cieco. Sol un conforto a le mie pene aspetto: ch'ella che vede tutt'i miei penseri m'impetre grazia ch'i possa esser seco. (Rime, 348)

(From the fairest eyes and the brightest face that ever shone, and from the finest hair that made gold and the sun seem less fair from the sweetest speech and sweetest smile, from the hands and arms that without movement would have conquered the most rebellious against Love, from the beautiful light feet, from the body created in Paradise

my spirits drew life; now in them delights the King of Heaven, and his winged messengers, and I am left here naked and blind. One solace only do I look for for all my misery: that she who knows all of my thoughts will obtain grace for me, that I may be with her.)

What is being confessed to, in both sequences, is not so much things done and regretted as a kind of existential undermining by time, as the sands run through. This haunted Shakespeare, who likewise lamented, while trying to defy, "Time's fickle glass, his sickle hour"; the sense that /I/ is, now, at a vanishing point was perhaps more familiar to ages like Petrarch's or Shakespeare's, more surrounded by symbols of memento mori. But Harrison, too, has his struggle to reclaim identity from oblivion

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through speech, the more bitter in that poetry is not what once it was, the favorite of kings and nobles:

Silence and poetry have their own reserves. The numbered creatures flourish less and less. A language near extinction best preserves the deepest grammar of our nothingness. (Three: "t' Ark," 11.1-4)

The "language near extinction" is on one level the Leeds dialect that recurs throughout the sequence, the speech of those who could not speak for themselves preserved by a speaker who had left their speech behind. Unlike Petrarch, Harrison does not conclude his sequence with religious resignation and penitence, nor like Elizabeth Barrett, with the hope of a bright future, but (as in a postmodernist age one might expect) with the semantic trauma, as I have called it earlier, with which he began. The last section (Three) begins with a sonnet called "Self-Justification"not a religious pun this time, but a semiotic one, referring to his uncle Joe, the stammerer who became a printer and

handset type much faster than he spoke. Those cruel consonants, ms, ps and bs on which his jaws and spirit almost broke flicked into order with sadistic ease.

Since Harrison's own existence as a poet now depends on his poems being printed and read, he and his uncle are alike in finding their "voice" through

... aggression, struggle, loss, blank printer's ems by which all eloquence gets justified.

The reader is looking, quite literally, at justification on the page, and the visual semiotic pun enforces the existential point as the sequence moves into its last section: to speak is to exist. Similarly, to have spoken, or signed, is to have existed; and as the sequence moves through time, from Harrison' s origins and schooling through the aging and deaths of his relatives to his own establishment as a poet, each sonnet takes a moment of existence, often through a symbolic item, such as a cap or a photograph or a habit of behavior, and by giving it a sign gives it being. Often in

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the last line or quatrain, the point of that being is suddenly made, articulated as a problem of identity (the epigrammatic clinch of the Shakespearean sonnet), even if (as here) it has sixteen lines:

Illuminations (ii) We built and bombed Boche stalags on the sands, or hunted for beached starfish on the rocks and some days ended up all holding hands gripping the pier machine that gives you shocks. The current would connect. We'd feel the buzz, ravel our loosening ties in one tense grip, the family circle, one continuous US! This was the first year on my scholarship, and I'd be the one who'd make the circuit short. I lectured them on neutrons and Ohm's Law, and other half-baked physics I'd been taught. I'm sure my father felt I was a bore!

Two dead, but current still flows through us three though the circle takes for ever to completeeternity, annihilation, me, the small bright charge of life where they both meet.

The /1/ who reflects in the final quatrain on the experience described in the previous three is aware of himself, just as Petrarch was, as a point between past and future, a point where transvaluation of the past and of the self takes place. The sonnet sequence is the matrix of these points, which the reader progressing through can understand either as something static-"Not marble, nor the gilded monuments I Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme," something that Harrison described wittily as "the poet preserved beneath deep permaverse" -or as something dynamic, the sound of sighs, the poet's evolving self. But the self is neither whole nor achieved, and the sign of that is the discontinuity of sequence, the dislocation as one moves from sonnet to sonnet. Elizabeth Barrett felt justified in presenting her sequence as a bouquet-the flowers varied but all together; but such confidence is unusual. Berryman, in the sonnet quoted earlier from the end of his sequence, took a hundred sonnets with him to read to his lady, but she did not come, "so I sat down and wrote": a hundred sonnets are futile, and a new one must be begun.

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Harrison' s powerful re-creation, through the single-sonnet glimpses of memory, of his childhood and adolescence contrasted with his present state, is a reassurance that in the twentieth century, the pattern initiated in the thirteenth and templated, as it were, by Petrarch in the fourteenth still functions. The confessional lyric sequence, in which the I 1/ is simultaneously subject and object of its own discourse, in which a narrating I 1/ usually appears as conscious of its own poesis, offering a revaluation of itself to the reader, in which the discontinuities of the self (past/present, inner/outer, feeling/thought) are represented formally by the individuality of each sonnet, and the continuity is shown by the motifs and symbols that hold the sequence together (if they do)-this kind of sequence, often categorized as "love poetry" because the /I/ is defined by its desire of an Other, is the most popular and, it has to be said, the most successful in European poetry.

Categorical sequences, as I have called them, in which thenarrating I 1/ is more of an observer (passionate or wise or both) of a succession of objects (scenes, times, persons) that pass before him or her are also common, and often very agreeable, but rarely have been rewarded with the kind of critical attention and success that the lyric sequences have had. The problematics of the self, at least since the Renaissance, have been at the center of literary endeavor in Europe and America more than any other single topic, and the sonnet-sequence genre has been particularly friendly to them.

Donne's Holy Sonnets and Shakespeare's Sonnets

Before we leave the lyric sequence and turn to the philosophical sequence, to be examined through the sonnets of Rilke, we shall look briefly at two of the most famous British sonnet sequences, John Donne's Holy Sonnets, written after 1609 and published in 1633 and 1635, and Shakespeare's Sonnets, probably written before 1600 and published in 1609. In these collections, which as I shall argue are not quite to be regarded as sequences, the problematics of the self create sonnets whose concern is perhaps not philosophical but certainly existential. In both collections, one short and sacred, one long and secular, the author has chosen to

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withdraw the voice of an organizing or presiding speaker as we have heard it, for instance, in the Rime of Petrarch or the corona sequence of George Macbeth; we have only the voice of the speaker of each sonnet, with whatever continuities of repeated motifs or positions the successive sonnets may display. Crucially, this has the formal consequence that we do not know, in either case, that we are dealing with a sequence at all. This uncertainty affects in turn our sense of what the speaking self is, verbally and psychologically, "making of itself."

The problem is partly textual and historical: for neither collection do we have any contemporary letters or documents dating composition or transmission, and both collections were printed apparently without the intervention of the authors or instructions from them-Donne's sonnets were published posthumously in 1633 and 1635, and Shakespeare, though alive in 1609, has left no trace of his connection, however slight, with the printing of his sonnets.

Both authors have withdrawn, or been withdrawn by the accidents of time, as organizers of their sonnets. These two collections are sequences by virtue of the efforts of editors and readers only, using the common authorship to infer a persona as the thread on which to string the sonnets sequentially. If the sonnets were mediocre and miscellaneous, then we should not need to take the matter further: but not only are there individual sonnets from both men that must rank among the world's greatest, but the intensity of the collection when read as a whole suggests sequentiality so strongly as to have kept editors and critics busy for centuries. Shakespeare's sonnets, in particular, are one of the great mysteries of literature because they seem to be so specific and circumstantial and yet offer no connections at all with history other than their publication in 1609.

John Donne: Holy Sonnets

Donne' s "La Corona," discussed in chapter 2, is established as a sequence by the linking of its lines. The Holy Sonnets are much harder to handle, and a brief account of the textual problems is needed here.

In a modern edition of Donne' s poems, the reader will usually find 19 Holy Sonnets, often with a prefatory sonnet, "To E. of D. with

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six holy Sonnets."14 The order in which they occur is the decision of the editor. The prefatory sonnet, usually thought to be addressed to the Earl of Dorset, Richard Sackville (1590-1624), refers to sending six sonnets out of seven written but does not make it clear which seven sonnets Donne then had~it is first printed in 1633 on its own, many pages after the sonnets, showing that the editor had no manuscript evidence either. (There are indeed seven sonnets in "La Corona," but their close linking and circularity make it unlikely that Donne would have sent only six of those.)

The sonnets are preserved in various manuscripts made in Donne' s lifetime, none being in his handwriting, and also in the two printed texts of 1633 and 1635.15 The manuscripts suggest that the 19 sonnets circulated in Donne's lifetime in two sets. These two sets, as potential sequences, can be tabulated more readily if we first list all19 as they appear in Grierson's edition:

I. Thou hast made me

2. As due by many titles

3. 0 might those sighes and tea res

4. Oh my blacke Soule!

5. I am a little world

6. This is my playes last scene

7. At the round earths imagin' d corners

8. If faithfull soules alike be glorified

9. If poysonous mineralls

10. Death be not proud

11. Spit in my face you Jewes

12. Why are we by all creatures waited on?

13. What if this present were the worlds last night?

14. Batter my heart, three person' d God

15. Wilt thou love God, as he thee!

16. Father, part of his double interest

17. Since she whom I lov' d hath pay' d her last debt

18. Show me deare Christ, thy spouse

19. Oh, to vex me, contraryes meet in one

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One group of manuscripts supplies a 12-sonnet set with the title Holy Sonnets, which the 1633 edition printed: sonnets 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16. A second group includes sonnets 1, 3, 5, and 8 and produces a different 12-sonnet set: 1, 2, 3, 16, 4, 6, 5, 7, 9, 8, 10, and 15, to which the title "Divine Meditations" was attached. Sonnets 17, 18, and 19 appear in only one manuscript, the Westmoreland manuscript, which has the complete set of 19: the second group's 12, then 11, 12, 13, and 14, and finally 17, 18, and 19. The editor of the second edition of 1635 had extra manuscripts available and by inserting his extra sonnets produced the 16-sonnet set that gave the order followed by Grierson, listed earlier. The reader should note that this "sequence," probably the most readily available in modern times, is wholly editorial, does not reproduce the order of either of the two manuscript groups, and is thus least likely of all to show Donne' s intentions.

The last three sonnets of the 19 occur in only one manuscript probably because they are later in date: sonnet 17 refers to the death of Donne's wife in 1617, 18 has been dated plausibly to 1620, and 19, appearing with them, may also be late. They do not seem connected in any other way and do not form a suite.

Faced with this self-assembly kit of sonnets, where any editor or critic is free to argue for his or her own sequencing, or for none,16 the reader may well wonder why Donne's Holy Sonnets should intrude into this study at all. The pressure to make a sequence of them, or of the majority of them, comes from two observable facts, one formal and one generic. First, Donne used the sonnet form for only two purposes: short verse letters to friends, as Milton did, and devotional meditative poetry. As is well known, his secular collection of "Songs and Sonnets" contains no sonnets. He seems to have associated the sonnet with devotional verse. Second, his own corona sequence, though liturgical and constructive rather than meditative and analytic, shows his familiarity with the sonnet sequence as an utterance in the genre of the spiritual exercise, in which each sonnet is used to focus the mind on a moment, a sensation, or a thing in a review or progress, as in Anne Locke's Meditation of a Penitent Sinner ( discussed in chapter 2).

Had Donne wished to produce a disciplined meditative sequence after the Ignatian or Calvinist models, with which he was well acquainted, he would have done so, subduing each son-

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net, as in "La Corona," to a rational plan; what we have here is a set of sonnets almost all of which are exclamatory-petitioning or questioning or appealing in a state of excitement. Though the content is religious, this is still the Petrarchan model of sonnet writing, in which each sonnet holds or expresses an intensely felt moment of unease or some strong emotion and attempts as far as can be done in 14lines both to dramatize and control it. Donne certainly would have known the most popular sonnet sequence of his own youth, Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella (1591), which-in the universe of Cupid rather than of Christ-presents the desiring self in exactly that way. Lacking a metapoetic presence (as Donne's sonnets do) to give an assurance of overall control, each sonnet's particular effort at control must finish with its couplet, and the reader (and speaker) then moves to a new crisis· and a new effort in the next sonnet.

From the textual evidence mentioned previously, we cannot be sure that Donne intended this, but he certainly allowed his sonnets to circulate in this looser way. Whatever the order in which they are read, according to the first or second group of manuscripts, the movement from one sonnet to the next, across a gap of white paper, represents a movement of the mind from one topic to the next, hunted by the terrors of the Four Last Things, heaven, hell, death, and judgment. The formal meditation (which these sonnets do not make) was designed to help the mind of the sinner to cohere in the face of the unsequencing terror of final judgment; but as Donne writes these they are disjointed, belonging together, but separated into unhappy pieces. His sixth sonnet actually presents the speaker's existence in this way:

This is my playes last scene, here heavens appoint My pilgrimages last mile; and my race Idly, yet quickly runne, hath this last pace, My spans last inch, my minutes latest point, And gluttonous death, will instantly unjoint My body, and my soule, and I shall sleep a space, But my' ever-waking part shall see that face, Whose feare already shakes my every joynt. (6.1-6)

The syntax and lexis of this sonnet, especially in the first quatrain, echo the disjointing effects of fear; and the movement from

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THE SONNET SEQUENCE

one sonnet to another can be read as a larger kind of dislocation of the mind, jumping from one topic to another.

A few of the sonnets are more deliberate, showing a kind of collectedness in the face of fear or uncertainty; and it is significant that in both groupings of sonnets sonnet 2 is at the startfirst in the 1633 volume and second in the other group of 12. This sonnet is a kind of inventory of existence and seems to be about to define the speaker as a living soul, joined to his God; but as it ends it disjoints, and the final tercet opens up a problem so vast that the whole subsequent series of sonnets might be thought generated from it:

As due by many titles I resigne My selfe to thee, 0 God, first I was made By thee, and for thee, and when I was decay' d Thy blood bought that, the which before was thine, I am thy sonne, made with thy selfe to shine, Thy servant, whose paines thou hast still repaid, Thy sheepe, thine Image, and till I betray' d My selfe, a temple of thy Spirit divine; Why doth the devill then usurpe on mee? Why doth he steale nay ravish that's thy right? [that's: what is] Except thou rise and for thine owne worke fight, Oh I shall soone despaire, when I doe see That thou lov'st mankind well, yet wilt' not chuse me. And Satan hates mee, yet is loth to lose mee. (1)

Donne had his age's appetite for puns and quibbles in full measure, and the legal metaphor of "titles" certainly suggests that to resign oneself to God is to re-sign oneself: as a created soul, as a son, as a purchase, as an image, and as many others. The enunciation of the many titles in the sonnet is a new signature/signifier/significance, or would be if the antithesis in the final couplet did not disrupt the "signing'' process. The connection Harrison makes between the wholeness of existence and the integrity of writing/speech-something Petrarch also observed in his sonnet sequence-was familiar to Donne and his age in the notion of the two covenants that God and Christ had signed and signaled for humanity, the covenants of law and of grace. This is the subject of one of the other more deliberate sonnets, the sixteenth, which stands last in the 1633 set of 12:

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Father, part of his double interest Unto thy kingdome, thy Sonne gives to mee, His joynture in the knottie Trinitie, Hee keeps, and gives to me his deaths conquest. This Lambe, whose death, with life the world hath blest, Hath made two Wills, which with the Legacie Of his and thy kingdome, doe thy Sonnes invest, Yet such are these laws, that men argue yet Whether a man those statutes can fulfill; None doth, but thy all healing grace and Spirit, Revive againe what law and letter kill, Thy !awes abridgement, and thy last command Is all but love; Oh let this last Will stand! (12)

This very technical sonnet involves the customary distinction between the covenant of law, written in the Old Testament, and the covenant of grace, proclaimed in the New Testament: that man is condemned under the law but of God's free will ransomed by grace by the actions of Christ as recorded in the New Testament, one of which was to command his disciples, as the final commandment, to love one another (John 13:34). This sonnet, at the end of the group, has a definite effect of closure and of sequencing: it returns to the idea of man existing through legal title and, instead of the multiple signatures of sonnet 1, offers to the disjointed soul a "joynture," that is, a legally guaranteed shared interest in an estate, figured repeatedly in the New Testament as, for example, in the mansions that Christ said he was preparing for his disciples. Man can claim this not by statute but by testament (God's "will," as shown in the New Testament).

If we knew certainly that sonnets 1 and 12 had been placed by Donne himself where they are in the 1633 volume,17 then these 12 sonnets would be unassailable critically as a sequence: the last sonnet would be the speaker's claim to his inheritance. What makes one inclined to leave this set as the statement of an existential problem is the fact that this last sonnet ends not with a claim but a plea: the matter is still uncertain as the speaker ends.

A lyric sequence that directly confronts existential problems"What am I and by virtue of what does this I I! exist?" -encounters a curious paradox: by another of these puns that link writing with existence, to be an author is to have authority over one's text, and by that to exhibit (usually by publication) a definite

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THE SONNET SEQUENCE

ordering presence, the very thing, of course, that these sonnets are questioning and at moments denying. It is tempting to think that Donne left the Holy Sonnets in their present indeterminate form because he recognized this point and denied himself the accomplishment of a formal sequence because its completed form would be, as it is in "La Corona," a sign of achieved identity, like the signature on a will, and thus would contradict the claim that "none cloth" fulfill the requirements of the law. Religious scruple prompts the carpet weavers of the East to weave an error into the end of their carpets, lest a perfect human work seem insolence to God: a like scruple may have inhibited Donne from formally perfecting his holiness in these sonnets.

William Shakespeare: The Sonnets

Shakespeare's Sonnets were published in 1609 by a publisher named Thomas Thorpe in a small quarto volume entitled "SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS. Never before Imprinted" and known to scholars as Q.l8 They were identified as Shakespeare's on the title page, and no one in Shakespeare's own day (he himself lived until1616) or later has reputably challenged this (though individual sonnets may be suspect). There are 154 sonnets and a long poem called ''A Lover's Complaint." But, although there are a number of metapoetic references in the sonnets, some of which suggest the existence of a collection of poems (e.g., sonnets 78, 102, 103, and 105), nowhere is it clear that the poems we are reading are the collection referred to. Further, there is no evidence to show or suggest that Shakespeare oversaw or was even connected with the printing and publishing of his sonnets-a thing quite possible in Jacobean times, when copyright laws did not exist-and there is textual evidence to suggest positively that he did not supervise the printing (e.g., patent misprints [126]) that the author would have picked up had he been there.

The problem gets more acute: we know that Shakespeare was writing and circulating sonnets in manuscript before 1600, a decade or so before the Sonnets were published by Thorpe, and two of them, 138 and 144, had appeared in print in an anthology of 1599; but almost incredibly, nowhere in the entire collection is there a single unambiguously clear historical or biographical reference that would enable any sonnet, let alone the whole collec-

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THE LYRIC SEQUENCE

tion, to be dated or even assigned to the historical Shakespeare (compare Petrarch, whose worksheets we have, or Tony Harrison, whose name is in his sequence several times). There are a good many puns on "will," but none on "shake-spear." If Shakespeare did, like Donne, allow manuscript copies to circulate, we do not have any of them, as we have for Donne' s Holy Sonnets. Manuscript copies of particular sonnets exist, but none can be shown to have any authority.

In sum, then, there is no confirmation in the text or in history (for all the efforts of critics and biographers) that the 154 sonnets we have were ever intended by the author to be a collection, or, supposing that they were, that they were intended to be in the order in which we now have them, or even that they are all by Shakespeare. On the side of cohesion and sequentiality, it can be said that we seem to have two linked sequences rather than one: sonnets 1 through 126 appear to be addressed to, or concerned with, a handsome young man, and sonnets 127 through 154 similarly concern a dark-haired lady. But since many of the sonnets, particularly in the first section, have no markers of gender for the addressee, their appearance in the given section may be Thorpe' s work rather than their author's. There are many paired sonnets, 19 and some sonnets in threes, and the collection opens with a suite of 17 sonnets all urging the young man to beget a child (15 does not by itself, but it is almost certainly paired with 16), so coherent in tone and imagery that it is hard to believe they were not assembled by their author.

Further, there is a suppressed narrative in which it appears that the young man of the first section and the woman of the second formed a sexual liaison that the speaker regarded as a betrayal. There are four "triangle" sonnets, 42, 133, 134, and 144, which allude to this triad, and if 42 was meant by Shakespeare to be where it is, then that would establish a link between the 1 through 126 set and the 127 through 154 set.

If only .... If only the sequence ended with a metapoetic sonnet, looking back on the themes of the preceding 154, we could talk with some confidence about Shakespeare's art in the construction of sequences. As it is, the sequence ends with two rather silly and mannered sonnets (153-54) that belong together but regrettably do not belong to anything that precedes them, and 152 is not in any way an "overview" sonnet.

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THE SONNET SEQUENCE

That Shakespeare, as speaker of the sonnets, was haunted by the instability of the self in time and in social reality-like Petrarch and Harrison-is clear from many of the sonnets; but it is not clear, and in the present state of our knowledge is not likely to be clear, that the collectivity of the sonnets is any attempt to order the experience of that instability. Themes recur, paradoxes and problems are presented acutely and movingly, but sequentiality we do not have. Or, rather, we do not know we have. It is not difficult to find sequences within the Sonnets: 1 through 17 form a suite long enough to count as a sequence, and though their order is not certainly Shakespeare's, it is inconceivable that they were not intended to be read together. Similarly sonnets 78 through 86 form a suite concerned with the so-called Rival Poet, but neither 78 nor 86 looks like the beginning or end of a freestanding sequence, and there are other sonnets concerned with rival poetry outside that group-for example, sonnet 102.

There is no reason why Shakespeare might not have allowed publication of all the sonnets he was prepared to see circulated in 1609, simply as a miscellany, within which there would naturally occur suites that had been written on particular topics or occasions during his life. One fact about the Sonnets makes for this hypothesis, and one makes against it. For it is the failure of the Sonnets to end in any way suggestive of sequence: as noted, the two final sonnets, 153 and 154, are a pair that have no connection with the rest of the set and certainly have no effect of closure or finality. Against it is "sonnet" 126, a 12-line poem in couplets, unique in the series, which sums up a great deal of what has been said in the preceding 125 and addresses the "lovely boy" quite clearly. The printer set it with a pair of empty brackets below the last two lines, showing that he thought a final couplet was missing and that he could not check the matter with the author.

But the poem is complete, plainly different from everything else in the series, and situated exactly where the sonnets change from talking about a man (or "boy") to talking about a woman. This might happen by chance, but it is hard to resist the conclusion that Shakespeare put it there as a closure of the first part of the series, thus signaling sonnets 1 through 125 plus 126 as a sequence. What follows might then be simply what was left over, a miscellany of other sonnets. However, when we register that the tone of the second part, bitter and angry and cynical, con-

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THE LYRIC SEQUENCE

trasts strongly with that of the first, we are bound to think of the Petrarchan template of sonnets in vita followed by sonnets in morte, or sonnets of love followed by sonnets of penitence, and wonder whether Shakespeare intended "sonnet" 126 to mark the transition from the male lover who gives life to the female lover who brings death.

Let us now assume Shakespeare's authorship, if not his order~ ing, of the Sonnets, and say that the common experience of his readership has been that what he writes is intensely and corn~ pellingly problematic.20 He is not directly engaged, as Donne was, in confronting his spiritual destiny and his existence as an immortal soul in a perishable body, and in the course of address~ ing his lovers he writes many elegiac sonnets and sonnets of praise of a conventional, though exquisitely finished, kind. But what raises the question of sequentiality is that these sonnets, in both parts, appear to be keyed to a suppressed narrative, a chain of events both circumstantial and psychological that are known to the speaker and his addressee and that are being alluded to but not directly expressed.

Dante in his Vita Nuova wrote in this way but then obligingly surrounded the allusive sonnets with a prose narrative supplying the circumstances; Sidney in Astrophel and Stella likewise assumes a narrative background, but we happen to know it from history, and he refers to it often enough within his sonnets to make it serve to connect them. The same is true of John Berryman' s Sonnets to Chris. But Shakespeare, quite remarkably, has contrived to give all the appearances of circumstantiality without once providing a clue that would enable a single event or person to be identified. It is the problem of referencing that Lewis Carroll parodies in the trial scene of Alice in Wonderland:

They told me you had been to her, And mentioned me to him: She gave me a good character, But said I could not swim.

Without losing sight of the possibility that the playwright who imagined the sufferings of Hamlet and Othello could well have imagined the narrative of the sonnets, we can reasonably assume, with most modern critics, that the majority of the son-

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THE SONNET SEQUENCE

nets as we have them were written by Shakespeare, probably in the 1590s, out of his own feelings toward a young man and a lady with whom he was involved emotionally. The young man was rich, powerful, and unmarried and in a position to give Shakespeare patronage: at some stage Shakespeare felt himself being supplanted in the young man's affections or esteem by the figure known to critics as the Rival Poet. The woman, commonly called the Dark Lady, since her hair was black, was married to someone else but had an affair with the young man, as well as with Shakespeare. The young man's youth and beauty made Shakespeare feel old (he was in his mid-thirties in the late 1590s). Finally, Shakespeare's affection for him was not physically homosexual, as sonnet 20 makes clear.

There is one devotional sonnet (146) that seems not to belong to this scenario at all, and a number of generalized, reflective sonnets (e.g., 30, 64, 116, and 129) that, although congruent with it, need not have been part of it; many of the sonnets have no marker of gender and might be addressed to a lover of either sex, or simply to a close friend. On the side of continuity, many of the sonnets are in pairs, and there is even one triplet, sonnets 91 through 93, which can be read as a single poem; all this strengthens our sense of an ongoing narrative on which we are reading an allusive commentary-or, since so many of the sonnets actually are addressed to the lover, overhearing a commentary.

In the first part, sonnets 1 through 126, the speaker is for the most part in the stance we have called abjection, as is Donne in his Holy Sonnets: wholly dependent on the young man for favor, advancement, and power in a manner typical of Renaissance social politics. This does not prevent him from offering advice, but it is always advice with humility:

Lord of my love, to whome in vassalage Thy merrit hath my dutie strongly knit; To thee I send this written ambassage To witnesse duty, not to shew my wit. Duty so great, which wit so poore as mine May make seeme bare, in wanting words to shew it; But that I hope some good conceipt of thine In thy soules thought (all naked) will bestow it: Till whatsoever star that guides my moving, Points on me gratiously with faire aspect,

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THE LYRIC SEQUENCE

And puts apparrell on my tottered loving, To shew me worthy of thy sweet respect, [Q: their sweet]

Then may I dare to boast how I doe love thee, Til then, not show my head where thou maist prove me.

[maist prove: might test] (26)

As words are the dress of thought, which cannot be known until spoken or written, so the effect of words is to win favor, which will (quite literally) enable the petitioner to appear well dressed and so establish himself in society: till then, he must be a social reject, or outcast, like a beggar. This analogy links speech/writing to existence: to exist is to be properly signified, and to fail to speak well, or to not have one's speech heard, is to vanish-"not show my head where thou maist prove me." Sonnets (or any other kind of petitionary writing) are thus ambassadors (1.3), on whose favorable reception the existence of the outsider depends.

This idea, which will apply also to prayers addressed to God, is a translation into the realm of social politics of the Petrarchan conceit that the lady constitutes the lover by her favor: without it he is dead, or abandoned, or turned to stone. Anxiety, therefore, over the possibility of failure, leads to self-doubt and existential angst, one of the ingredients of which, for a practicing poet, is doubt over the capacity of language itself to signify properly. This has two opposite results. First, it produces a number of sonnets in which the power of language to immortalize is defiantly asserted: "His beauty shall in these black lines be seen, I And they shall live, and he in them still green" (63.13-14)-the "shall" in that last line is comparable to Donne' s "Oh let that last Will stand!" But second, it produces a number of sonnets in which all signifiers are seen as weak and uncertain, like existence itself. A sonnet sequence, special among literary genres, does not have to reconcile opposed positions: it can simply leave them side by side.

But wherefore do not you a mightier waie Make warre uppon this b\oudie tirant time? And fortifie your selfe in your decay With meanes more blessed than my barren rime? Now stand you on the top of happie houres, And many maiden gardens yet unset, With vertuous wish would beare your living flowers,

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THE SONNET SEQUENCE

Much liker than your painted counterfeit: So should the lines of life that life repaire Which this (Times pensel or my pupill pen) Neither in inward worth nor outward faire Can make you live your selfe in eies of men,

To give away your selfe, keeps your selfe still, And you must live drawne by your owne sweet skill. (16)

Sonnet 16, a particularly difficult and riddling sonnet even when read as the continuation and completion of 15, shows the intimate connection between existence and language in Shakespeare: when this existential nervousness appears, it has an ambiguating effect on language, making the speaker play with signifiers as a sign of his own uncertainty. The octave continues the plea made throughout suite 1 through 17 that the young man should marry and beget a son to perpetuate his qualities. The comparison of actual procreation with poetic creation (16.4) now makes the written sign weaker ("barren," "painted counterfeit") than the human sign ("living flowers"). The sestet develops the implications of this idea, as it should, but something then happens that is characteristic of Shakespeare, indeed one of the dominant mannerisms of the Sonnets: on all the levels of style, phonological, lexical, syntactic, and referential, a kind of ferocious rhetorical play develops, where items are hurled about in the lines, with the result, as Stephen Booth points out in his edition, that the reader at one and the same time understands quite well what has been said but does not in the least understand how it has been said.21

The octave separates poetry from procreation, to the latter's advantage: the sestet appears to develop this idea but does so by collapsing the two again. "The lines of life" is probably a reference to a "line of children" arranged as they often were in Renaissance portraits like flowers in a flower bed, developing the conceit of 1.7; but "lines" can only be said to "repair" life if there is a very strong sense of drawing lines--immediately confirmed by 1.10, which foregrounds the idea of writing again. Now it is plausible to imagine children as redrawn versions of their father; but the moment one does this, one realizes that children are redrawn by removing lines, not adding them-the faces of children precisely do not have the lines of the adult. And Shakespeare himself

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elsewhere uses "lines" in this sense to make the dark lines of poetry superior to the lines of age.

At this point, the reader will also lose the thread of the syntax: it is almost impossible to establish the grammar of "which this ... can make you live yourself." The meaning ought to be damaged by this apparent error, but the reader will not be in any doubt that lines 9 through 12 mean roughly what lines 13 and 14 say. However, the final complication is the place where lexis and ontology meet: "To give away your selfe, keeps your selfe still." Rhetorically, this line is a riddle to be solved like most riddles by understanding that words do not mean what they seem to mean. Here "give" is made to mean the same as "keep," its normal antonym, by the maneuver of understanding that "your selfe" can have two different meanings: first, "your seed," which biologically carries your "self," and then second, "your present noble qualities." The effect of that is to make "you must live" in 1.14 carry a double significance, which is the significance of doubled life, as the parent gives life to the child, life that is at once the child's own and the parent's relived ("repaired," which now acquires a double meaning in 1.9).

Any riddle involves the awareness that words have double meanings; but when the riddle itself is concerned with the meaning of life, as it is here, then lexis and ontology meet, and the instability of life is instantiated in the instability of words. (Shakespeare is also prepared to say that the permanence of life can only be found in the permanence of words.)

My intention here is not to explain sonnet 16, on which there is already a great deal of critical comment, but to draw attention to a recurrent feature of the Sonnets: in the patron/client relationship that is also a relationship of love and favor, Shakespeare (more exactly, his speaker) frequently doubts either his own capacity to deserve love and give it, or his lover's reliability, and sometimes both at once. All this happens under the awareness of the impermanence of all things. When this insecurity of his selfhood becomes acute, so too becomes the instability of the language in which the insecurity is expressed-a contrived instability, certainly, inasmuch as any sonnet is a rhetorical creation. When existence is problematical, language is riddling, and the reader must apprehend that problematic through the effort of understanding unstable meanings:

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THE SONNET SEQUENCE

Sinne of selfe-love possesseth al mine eie, And all my soule, and al my every part; And for this sinne there is no remedie, It is so grounded inward in my heart. Me thinkes no face so gratious is as mine, No shape so true, no truth of such account, And for my selfe mine owne worth do define, As I all other in all worths surmount. But when my glasse shewes me myselfe indeed Beated and chopt with tand antiquitie [tand: tanned) Mine owne selfe love quite contrary I read Selfe, so selfe loving were iniquity.

Tis thee (my selfe) that for my selfe I praise, Painting my age with beauty of thy daies. [Q has daies ]22

From the very first line, where "al mine eie" is also readable as "all mine I/' this sonnet is replete with selves of every kind (assisted by the fact that Shakespeare's printers did not distinguish, as we do, between "myself" and "my self"): the self reflected in the eye, the self reflected as the Ill the self in the heart, the self imaged in the mind, the self who watches the other selves, the self seen in the mirror, the /I/ who is constructing these selves, the beloved, who in the last couplet is parenthetically called "my selfe/' and finally the painted self, whose relation to the self that is "thee" and to the self that is 'T' is difficult to establish.

This existential riddle is inextricable from-indeed it has to arise from-the lexical riddle created by the multiplying of the word "self" and its cognates. The iteration and the paradoxes (how can a mirror show the truest self?) intensify through the sonnet, until in the thirteenth line the reader might well suspect that this speaker knows neither who he is nor by what, or whom, he is "indeed" and in word possessed. Shakespeare wrote many clear and melodious sonnets, usually elegiac in tone, which have nothing, or very little, of this existential complexity, but the note of riddling and studied obliquity is sounded constantly throughout the Sonnets; no contemporary sonneteer has it, other than momentarily, and because it also occurs in the plays, particularly in the major tragedies and later plays, we can assume that it was congenial to Shakespeare's mind to think in this way.

This mode of apprehension, intimately linking poesis to existence, can hardly be called philosophical but, exhibited as it is

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throughout a collection of 154 sonnets, it amounts to something more than a quirk. Each sonnet is used as a puzzle, a space in which to solve a problem very quickly, and it is that sense of resistance to an obstacle that links Shakespeare with Donne. The kinds of resistance offered are different: Donne characteristically proposes a straightforward argument that becomes tense and desperate through the figure of hyperbaton, distortion of normal syntax:

If poysonous minerals, and if that tree, Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us, If lecherous goats, if serpents envious Cannot be damned, alas, why should I be? Why should intent or reason, born in me, Makes sins, else equal, in me more heinous? (Holy Sonnets, 9.1-6)

Here each word is plain in its meaning, and the sense that the speaker is fighting for his existence comes from the compression of the syntax and the phonological difficulties created by awkward consonantal clusters. Shakespeare works differently:

Tis better to be vile then vile esteemed, When not to be, receives reproach of being, And the just pleasure lost, which is so deemed, Not by our feeling, but by others seeing. For why should others false adulterate eyes Give salutation to my sportive blood? (121.1-6)

Here neither the syntax nor the phonology offers any difficulty: what renders this nearly impenetrable is the obliquity of the lexis. Any word by itself has a readily available sense-"reproach," "of," "being''-but their conjunctions-" reproach of being" -place each word obliquely to its neighbor, so that the sense seems obscured.

If in reading Donne one has the sense of a mind speaking to its God, so urgently that mortal ears cannot keep up, in reading Shakespeare the sense is of a mind communing with itself, intensely self-absorbed, and constantly alluding to what it and only it and its lover already know. (A good dramatic soliloquy is written to seem like this, though it must in practice be comprehensible to the audience.) Donne's existential problems are theo-

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logical in origin: he is "in" a scheme of grace and salvation or damnation, and must by asking questions find where and what he is.

Shakespeare's existential problems are apparently social in origin: to be is to be recognized by others, and the recognition depends on speech, the speech that will establish that one loves or is loved. There is something echoic about this, like a bat sending out sound signals to position itself, and indeed iteration, making a sound rebound so that it defines itself against itself is as we have seen, a mannerism of Shakespeare. "No, I am that I am," he declares later in sonnet 121, and this ironic use of the ultimate in existential pronouncements-Dnly God can so define himself, and only Iago tries to imitate him-points to the bafflement and anguish inherent for mortals in such narcissistic self-definition, where each word looks at its reflection, falls into itself, and is drowned.

In both collections-! am reluctant to call them sequencesthere is thus a suppressed narrative (for Donne, a well-known drama of judgment and salvation or damnation, for Shakespeare a private story of social and erotic relationships) and a quest for meaning; for both poets the speech must be effective, for Donne as prayer and argument or plea, for Shakespeare as self-assertion and homage to acquire recognition. Punningly one might say that for Shakespeare cognition and recognition are inseparable. If we cannot show that either poet intended this, we can at least show by critical reading that the narratives and the quests are there, and that if we do not have sequence in the formal sense, we have at least continuity and repetition from two poets whose speakers see life as a drama in which one must continue to petition in order to exist at all.

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Chapter 6

THE PHILOSOPHICAL SEQUENCE: CHRISTINA RoSSETTI, "THE THREAD OF LIFE," AND RAINER MARIA RILKE,

SONNETS TO 0RPHEUS

I n one way Shakespeare's sonnets, sequential or not, were powerfully influential on later sequence writers: when the sonnet

sequence returned to favor in the nineteenth century in Europe and America, the meditative or, as one may say, the philosophical element in the Sonnets became thematically and stylistically a kind of cultural icon, as the meditative speeches from the plays already were. When F. T. Palgrave produced his Golden Treasury (a title itself with iconic overtones) in 1861, he included 20 Shakespearean sonnets, and for 15 of them supplied titles, most of which, without in the least doing violence to the poem, gloss it as the meditation of a wise speaker-'~bsence" (57), "Time and Love" (65), "The World's Way" (66), "The Life without Passion" (94), and so forth.

Nineteenth-century literary theory emphasized the uplifting and idealizing quality of literature, as in Matthew Arnold's

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Culture and Anarchy (1853), and its cultural practice gave almost hieratic status to literary figures (usually but not always male), which was often accompanied by an archaizing of their roles and of their imagery (as in the photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron). This encouraged great literary figures to speak, as it were, from a height, and Wordsworth in particular wrote sonnet sequences in the last third of his life in which he delivered his thoughts on subjects both eternal and contemporary in astoundingly oracular vein. A kind of combined ShakespeareaniMiltonic I Wordsworthian style became the common property of the age, and lesser men and women turned out sonnets and sonnet sequences in the form of meditations on all sorts of nominally uplifting subjects.

It is easy to make fun of an age's lesser poetry: my purpose is to point out that to this desire, culturally prominent from the 1830s to the 1930s, the sonnet sequence offered a suitable form-a loosely connected grouping of briefly uttered thoughts, each one aspiring to reach the marmoreal clarity of Shakespeare, but not demanding any continuous or sustained reflectiveness. In this sense of "philosophizing," the lyric sonnet sequence shades into the philosophical, and nineteenth-century anthologies, such as David Main's Treasury of English Sonnets (1880), show a decided preference for sonnets with a general reflective bent-of which there are plenty, given the inherent tendency of the sonnet to comment in its sestet on what is observed in its octave. In this sense any sonnet in which the I 1/ reflects on his or her experience with some generalized conclusion could be said to be "philosophical," such as Milton's sonnet "On his Blindness," the last line of which has become a proverb: "They also serve who only stand and wait."

When one tries to pass beyond the single sonnet into some kind of connected argument, difficulties arise that have bedeviled all philosophical poetry, not just that which might be written in sonnets. Aristotle long ago pointed out in The Poetics that if a philosopher wrote in verse, the result would not be poetry but philosophy in verse, because poetry is a kind of imitation (mimesis) not a kind of analysis.l Poetry is not a medium in which philosophy may work, but a mode of apprehension categorically different from the philosophical mode. For a poem to be called "philosophical," the distinctively poetic mode of envisioning the

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world has to be used alongside some kind of abstract explanation of these visions, and the explanation has to be the primary aim of the poem. So Wordsworth' s Ode: Intimations of Immortality (1802-1807) would normally be considered a philosophical poem, as would T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets; Milton's Paradise Lost, on the other hand, though it contains a good deal of Christian philosophical thinking, would not be seen as philosophical, because its primary aims are epic and narrative. The necessity of developing some kind of argument as one advances toward the truths of which the poetic images are the mimesis means that considerable length is required, perhaps as long as an epic (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, 1st B.C.E.). While a sonnet sequence could give this, it is hard to see it offering development without sacrificing the sonnetness of each sonnet; if it retained that, the sequence would fragment into a series of thoughts.

One interesting attempt, which will serve to show in sequence form the problems and procedures we are discussing, is Christina Rossetti's "The Thread of Life," a three-sonnet sequence written before 1882:

The irresponsive silence of the land, The irresponsive sounding of the sea, Speak both one message of one sense to me:l\loof, aloof, we stand aloof; so stand Thou too aloof, bound with the flawless band Of inner solitude; we bind not thee; But who from thy self-chain shall set thee free? What heart shall touch thy heart? what hand thy hand?'-

And I am sometimes proud and sometimes meek, And sometimes I remember days of old, When fellowship seemed not so far to seek, And all the world and I seemed much less cold, And at the rainbow's foot lay surely gold, And hope felt strong and life itself not weak

Thus am I mine own prison. Everything Around me free and sunny and at ease: Or if in shadow, in a shade of trees Which the sun kisses, where the gay birds sing, And where all winds make various murmuring; Where bees are found, with honey for the bees; Where sounds are music, and where silences

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Are music of an unlike fashioning. Then gaze I at the merrymaking crew

And smile a moment and a moment sigh, Thinking, Why can I not rejoice with you? But soon I put the foolish fancy by: I am not what I have nor what I do; But what I was I am, I am even I.

Therefore myself is that one only thing I hold to use or waste, to keep or give; My sole possession every day I live, And still mine own despite Time's winnowing. Ever mine own, while moons and seasons bring From crudeness ripeness mellow and sanative; Ever mine own, till Death shall ply his sieve; And still mine own, when saints break grave and sing.

And this myself as king unto my King I give, to Him Who gave Himself for me; Who gives Himself to me, and bids me sing A sweet new song of his redeemed set free; He bids me sing, 0 Death, where is thy sting? And sing, 0 grave, where is thy victory?2

Philosophically, it is perhaps a pity that the existential inquiry begun in the first sonnet is diverted at the end of the third into conventional religious sentiment, however sincerely felt. Nonetheless, this is a determined and poignant attempt by an unmarried woman to find her selfhood as age advances (the echo of Keats' s Ode to Autumn in the third sonnet may not have been conscious), and the chain of the sonnets is used to assert an argument: "Thus am I I Therefore myself ... " which is carried forward by using the turn from octave to sestet in each sonnet to advance from one image cluster to the next. Each cluster expands on a feeling that is part of the sense of self (or selves) that the existential argument addresses: aloofness (1.1-8); hope (1.9-14); estrangement from harmony (11.1-8); perplexity (11.9-14); selfpossession (III.1-8); and religious exaltation (111.9-14). These six moods are constitutive of "the thread of life."

This attempt is hardly weighty or general enough to be acceptable as philosophy, but it is a genuine and well-crafted attempt to use the sonnet sequence to ask an existential question. It is still a lyric sequence, in that it fore grounds the feelings of an I 1/ who is

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simultaneously subject and object of her own discourse, but it also presents itself to the reader as a single unit; it would be possible to read this as one poem in three stanzas before noticing that each stanza is also a complete sonnet. As a three-sonnet suite or a three-stanza poem, it is a way of gaining the extra length that a complicated philosophical or metaphysical inquiry seems to need, without losing the sequentiality of sonnets. Longfellow's four-sonnet sequence, "The Two Rivers," though it has much less to say and takes longer to say it, is of the same kind.

It is probably fair to say that the sonnet sequence, as a genre, has never really coped with the problem of waxing philosophical. The Italian Renaissance, and after it the Renaissances of other European countries, inherited from neoclassical rhetoric a strong sense that length and dignity went together, and a poem by definition short, such as the sonnet, was regarded as a low or middle form of verse, suitable for low or middling subjects. The writer of the sonnet could not elevate his or her speech to epic or tragic or philosophical subjects, since these required, according to the rules of classical eloquence, rhetorical elaborations (such as epic similes) that are simply too extended for 14 lines. The sonnet is for Donne, in "The Canonisation," "a pretty room," not a vast library; "a well-wrought urn," not one of those "half-acre tombs." Spenser similarly, taking a break about 1592 from the writing of The Faerie Queene to praise his wife in his Amoretti, sees his sonnets in relation to his epic as his wife is in relation to his Queen:

Till then give leave to me in pleasant mew [then: i.e., till he restarts his epic; mew: retreat]

To sport my muse, and sing my love's sweet praise: The contemplation of whose heavenly hew My spirit to an higher pitch will rayse.

But let her prayses yet be low and meane, [meane: of middle rank] Fit for the handmayd of the Faery Queene. (Amoretti, lxxx 9-14)

To increase the sonnet sequence's capacity for greatness, Dante in his Vita Nuova interspersed his sonnets with longer poems, using the most noble long poem (below the level of epic), the canzone, to extend his thinking: there are 31 poems in his sequence, in this order: 10 sonnets, 1 canzone, 4 sonnets, 1 canzone, 4 sonnets, 1 canzone, 10 sonnets.3 Petrarch, as most critics agree, adopted the idea of a mixed sequence from Dante, and inserted 29 canzoni

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into his sequence of 366 poems. There are also nine sestinas, and though a sestina must have only 36 or 39lines (72 or 75 for a double sestina), whereas a canzone may be of much greater length, there is thus roughly the same 1:10 proportion of long poems to short in Petrarch' s sequence as in Dante's.

Despite Petrarch' s immense influence, the idea did not catch on, and few later sequence writers mixed in other poems, let alone long, dignified ones. In English literature, Sir Philip Sidney, William Drummond, and one or two others inserted "songs" and "madrigals" into their sequences, but these were not in any way intended to be philosophical or expand the level of thought of the sequences. When the sonnet sequence revived in the nineteenth century, the notion of decorum that kept the sonnet "low and meane" had vanished; and though the ode (the successor to the canzone) flourished as a vehicle for ceremonious or lofty ideas, no one seems to have offered to mix odes with sonnets as Dante had mixed canzoni with them.

Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus

However, the sonnets of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), to whom we now turn, in a strange way keep company with a group of philosophical long poems, and thus one of the most extreme and free of sonnet sequences returns to the pattern of Petrarch six centuries earlier. The long poems are known as the Duino Elegies, after the castle in Italy where Rilke began to compose them, and there are 10 of them, written between 1912 and 1922. They vary in length from 44lines to 112, but as long poems are comparable to Petrarch' s canzoni. The Sonnets to Orpheus, mentioned in chapter 1, number 55, in two parts, 26 and 29, and were written (almost unbelievably) in 18 days, from 2 February to 20 February 1922. At exactly the same time, Rilke finished the Duino Elegies: he had already written elegies 1 through 5, and parts of 6, 9, and 10; he now completed these, added 7 and 8, and wrote a new elegy 5.4 Among those poets of whose creativity we have a record, there is no comparable achievement in so short a time.

A thumbnail sketch of this extraordinary man would make him seem to be an incarnation of Bunthorne, the poet so savagely

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satirized in Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience. Hugely famous in his later life, wholly self-absorbed and incapable of lasting commitment to anything except his own inner daimon, he moved restlessly around Europe and its borders, constantly rescued from catastrophes by rich, intelligent, and attractive women who gave him apartments and castles, lavishly furnished, in which to write. Duino was one of these, and the Sonnets to Orpheus were composed, and the Duina Elegies finished, in Chateau Muzot, in Switzerland, his last refuge. He was neither unkind nor unsociable, merely deeply and permanently restless and unfixed, except when confronting in words the enormous imaginative energies of his inner nature. W. H. Auden most acutely called him "the Santa Claus of loneliness" and pays tribute to him in his own Sonnets from China (1937) as one

Who for ten years of drought and silence waited Until in Muzot all his powers spoke, And everything was given once for all. (xix, 11.9-11)

This is not the place to attempt an explanation or critique of Rilke' s sonnets; as elsewhere in this book, I am concerned with them as a particular kind of sequence. But some outline of Rilke' s ideas is essential to understanding how he uses the sonnet form and the sequence genre to present them. Auden's phrase "all his powers spoke" is apt, for Rilke frequently represented the composition of his poems-and especially these-as almost involuntary, as if he had been taken over by a higher power or spoken to out of a whirlwind (the first sentence of the First Elegy arrived in exactly that way, he said).5 Allowing for the fact that this is a myth of poesis embedded in Romantic aesthetics and critical theory, there seems no reason to doubt that Rilke composed very rapidly in a high state of excitement, imposed on, as he once said, in "breathless obedience." Yet, while the Duino Elegies-actually extensively reworked-do indeed show a kind of looseness of form and content that suggests this spontaneous overflowing, the sonnets are oddly strict in form, as if one part at least of Rilke' s mind had determined to keep a tight grip on the enormous pressure of their excitement.

In content, they are apparently miscellaneous and uneven and, had they been discovered among Rilke' s papers after his

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death, might not have been considered a sequence at all. Yet the circumstances of their composition being known, there would certainly have been a case for regarding them as a group; since Rilke supplied the title, there is no doubt that he thought of them as a set, composed in two parts, and as he said, "filled with the same essence" and "of the same litter" as the Elegies.6 The sonnets interrupted his planned work on the Elegies and thus appear as a kind of series of excited exclamations in the midst of the more somber and argumentative long poems. For the reader unfamiliar with the Elegies, it may be helpful to suggest a comparison with William Blake, who, though utterly different from Rilke in almost all personal circumstances, was like him a mystic, and one whose mysticism, expounded at length in the Prophetic Books (prose poems [1789-1804] not unlike the Elegies), appears in a highly condensed form in his Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789, 1794). The shorter poems of both appear as a song-discourse opposed to (as well as congruent with) the more didactic and evangelical long prose poems.

There is no metapoetical sonnet to give an overview of the collection: instead the title, Sonnets to Orpheus, supplies the mythical thread. Rilke had been attracted to the figure of Orpheus before, but when in the summer of 1921 he moved into Chateau Muzot, the woman who was currently arranging his life for him, Dorothee Klossowska, discovered a postcard of a Renaissance drawing of Orpheus with his lyre among the animals, and put it on the wall facing his desk. Around this image the Sonnets cohered. Only five of the sonnets are addressed directly to the "gottlicher" (demigod) himself-I.ii (possibly along with l.i), I.xviii, I.xx, I.xxvi, and Il.xiii-and two to Wera Knoop, the account of whose death touched off the sequence (I.xxv and II.xxviii); the remainder are to a variety of people and things, including a number to a generalized "us," and one even to a dog (I.xvi). But the significance, or better, significances, of Orpheus as Rilke perceived them are everywhere in the vocabulary and themes of the sonnets, just as the significances of Apollo run through Petrarch' s Rime.

Orpheus as demigod is the protopoet, the "Bard who present, past, and future sees" as Blake says, and thus the god or master (I.xviii, xx) of the speaker of the sonnets, himself a poet. Because Orpheus was able, according to legend, to move stones and corn-

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pel trees and animals to come to him by his song, he is a force of movement, the movement of being itself, what one might call the Lord of the Dance. Since Wera Knoop, before her illness took hold, was a beautiful dancer, there are references throughout the sonnets to dancing and rapid movement as an affirmation of oneness with the created universe, both temporal and eternal.

But since Orpheus is also a lyre player, he creates harmony, and though he is the lord of movement he is also the lord of rest, or at least of the peace of harmony (Ordnung). Poignantly, in his legends, Orpheus was destroyed by screaming unreason, by the Maenads: Rilke sees his essence surviving in all creation as it tries to transcend its temporality through natural love. The sonnet that ends the first part, written like so many of the Sonnets in dactylic, dance rhythm, hymns this aspect of Orpheus:

Du aber, Gottlicher, du, bis zuletzt noch Ertoner, da ihn der Schwarm der verschmahten Manaden befiel, hast ihr Geschrei i.ibertont mit Ordnung, du Schoner, a us den Zerstorenden stieg dein erbauendes Spiel.

Keine war da, class sie Haupt dir und Leier zerstor', wie sie auch rangen und rasten; und alle die scharfen Steine, die sie nach deinem Herzen warfen, wurden zu Sanftem an dir und begabt mit Gehor.

Schliesslich zerschlugen sie dich, von der Rache gehetzt, wahrend dein Klang noch in Low en und Felsen verweilte und in den Baumen und Vogeln. Dort singst du noch jetzt.

0 du verlorener Gott! Du unendliche Spur! Nur weil dich reisf'nd zuletzt die Feindschaft verteilte, sind wir die Horenden jetzt und ein Mund der Natur. (I.xxvi)

(But you, divine one, you, till the end still singing out, as the horde of rejected Maenads seized you, overlaid their shrieks with your harmony, fair one, from the destruction rose your creative song.

There was none that could break your head or your lyre, however they pressed and twisted; and all the sharp stones that they threw against your heart were turned to gentleness there, and became your listeners.

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At last they destroyed you, inflamed with revenge; lingering in lions and in rocks your sound stays, and in trees and birds. There you now sing still.

0 you vanished God! You endless track! Only because hatred finally tore and dispersed you, are we now listeners today, and a mouth of Nature.)

Orpheus as a symbol of the triumph of art over death is traditional, as in Milton's Lycidas,7 but Rilke takes the symbol further: violence and destruction (as in Wera Knoop's death) actually enable us to hear the song of Orpheus, dispersed now throughout all creation, because Orpheus himself, in his quest for Eurydice, knew death, and is thus transcendent, immanent, and mediating (the parallel with Christ will occur to today's reader, but it is not one that Rilke used). We must, Rilke thinks, welcome metamorphosis, the transformations of our nature, looking both back to what we have been in our ancestors and forward to what we may be in our descendants. Otherwise we are trapped-as animals, less time bound than we, are not-by the mechanisms of clocks and machines. To quote from Leishman's translation of Rilke's own comment on his poems,

We, local and ephemeral as we are, are not for one moment contented in the world of time nor confined within it; we keep on crossing over and over to our predecessors, to our ancestry, and to those who apparently come after us. In that greatest 'open' world all are, one cannot say 'contemporary', for it is the very abolition of time that makes them all be. Transitoriness is everywhere plunging into a profound being, and therefore all the forms of the here-and-now are not merely to be used in a time-limited way, but, so far as we can, instated within those superior significances in which we share. But not in the Christian sense (from which I more and more passionately withdraw), but, in a purely terrestrial, deeply terrestrial, blissfully terrestrial consciousness, to instate what is here seen and touched within the wider, within the widest orbit-that is what is required. Not within a Beyond, whose shadow darkens the earth, but within a whole, the whole .... Therefore, not only must all that is here not be vilified or degraded, but, just because of that very provisionality they share with us, all these appearances and things should be, in the most fervent sense, comprehended by us and transformed. Transformed? Yes, for our task is to stamp this provisional, perishing earth into our-

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selves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its being may rise again, invisibly, in us. We are the bees of the Invisible.8

In this quest for truth, Orpheus is the "unendliche Spur," the endless track, his Orphic essence dispersed through all creation, to be (to change the Rilkean metaphor) gathered by us like bees and stored up to be returned to the" great golden hive of the Invisible."

The last attribute of Orpheus is what makes this mystic quest possible for Rilke and for us, as it was for Blake and for Wordsworth in their different ways. Orpheus as a poet could say things into being: to name is to create. To name a rose is to transform the rose into being (I.vi); to describe an anemone, or celandine, is to enter into its movements (I.v). All poetry has this power, the power of mimesis, which is not copying, but creation and action. This telling, Rilke saw in the Sonnets as praise"Ri.i.hmen, das ists!" -and it is this concept that gives the Sonnets their affirmative nature and constant dancing movement.

This philosophy (or part of one) has its instantiation in the form of the sonnet sequence. I called its contents "miscellaneous" earlier, but 1\ilke's bee metaphor suggests a different kind of approach. The reader, following the "scent" of Orpheus in all things, follows the speaker across the field of creation, where to visit any object-a rose, a dead child, the stars, oranges, a fountain-and name it aright is as Yeats splendidly said, to be absorbed "into the artifice of eternity." Shakespeare thought his own poetry capable of doing this, as did Petrarch (though he rested within a Christian framework that Rilke rejected); Blake and Wordsworth too looked through objects to a symbolic wholeness, and saying so made it so. "Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man" -Shelley's dictum is a Rilkean starting point; but to move through the poetry is then to enact the movement that the philosophy behind the poetry desires. As Laura draws poetry out of Petrarch's speaker by fleeing ahead of him, as Daphne' s escape from Apollo is the birth of poetry, so, Rilke says to the reader,

die verwandelte Daphne will, seit sie lorbeern fiihlt, dass du dich wandelst in Wind. (II.xli.13 -14)

(the transformed Daphne since she feels herself laurelled, wants you to change yourself into a wind.)

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Rilke' s sonnets, then, are individually specimens, or visits, way stations or shrines where the speaker stops to praise; but collectively and progressively they are a movement, part of the larger faith, explored and explained in the Elegies, which surrounds all this activity but is not constantly articulated. The discontinuities between sonnets are the gaps between the individualities of things; the continuities are of course the traces of Orpheus, and his dancer Wera, and what enacts this is, quite uniquely in the history of the sonnet sequence, rhythm.

It is essential to Rilke' s philosophy that the reader move joyfully through his poetic creation as if dancing: the strict form of the sonnets, always in 14 lines, always with a Shakespearean octave and a Petrarchan sestet, keeps rhyme and sound recurrent, and the constantly altering rhythms keep the reader moving forward, but with changes of speed. Elsewhere, with rare exceptions, sonnets in sequence are written in iambic pentameter (or hendecasyllables in Italian and French): Rilke established a dominant dactylic rhythm, the rhythm of dance, which gives way now and then to iambic or trochaic as the subject matter changes. He also alters the length of lines, both inside sonnets and from sonnet to sonnet: they range from 6 to 14 syllables. In the wonderful twenty-second sonnet of the first part, the change in movement from sonnet to sonnet becomes the symbol of what the sonnet is talking about-this is a metarhythmic sonnet. The previous sonnet gives us the dance of spring:

Friihling ist wiedergekommen. Die Erde ist wie ein Kind, das Gedichte weiss, viele, o viele ....

(Springtime has come again back, and the Earth is like to a child, that has poems by the score .... ) (I.xxi.l-3)

Then the reader is checked in flight; there is a deeper harmony:

Wir sind die Treibenden. Aber den Schritt der Zeit nehmt ihn als Kleinigkeit im immer Bleibenden.

Alles das Eilende wird schon voriiber sein;

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denn das Verweilende erst weiht uns ein.

Knaben, o werft den Mut nicht in die Schnelligkeit, nicht in den Flugversuch. Alles ist ausgeruht: Dunkel und Helligkeit, Blumen und Buch.

(We are the Strivers; yet Time in its waning goes into littleness in the Remaining.

All of the hastening Will surely be past; We then are led in By what stays as Last.

Not at the fleeing wing, Child, nor at lightness, level your power; Rest is on everything: Darkness and Brightness, Codex and Flower.) (I.xxii)

The last words of Rilke' s last sonnet are "Ich bin" -"1 exist"; however, these are not spoken by the speaker but are the affirmation recommended to us all, through the "silent friend of many far from us" to whom the sonnet is nominally addressed.

Und wenn dich das Irdische vergass, zu der stillen Erde sag: Ich rinne, Zu dem raschen Wasser sprich: Ich bin. (II.xxix.12-14)

(And when earthliness forgets you, to the quiet earth say, I run; to the running water say, I exist.)

It would be captious to say that so explosively emotional and passionate a sequence is not lyrical, but it is certainly not of the same kind as the sequences we have looked at previously. The

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speaker is not preoccupied with his own identity or selfhood, and the form of the sequence-discrete sonnets versus continuous sequence-is not used to dramatize the aporias of the /I! or make an accounting of it. Instead, we have a unique achievement (anticipated, perhaps, by the sonnet writing of Gerard Manley Hopkins) in which the accumulation of rhythms throughout the sequence is used as a metonym for the philosophical Dance of Being, of which the narrated figures of Orpheus and Wera Knoop are types. Each individual sonnet attests to, or praises, some aspect of the being of created things, including "us," to whom a number of sonnets are addressed.

As noted, there is no properly metapoetic sonnet in the Orpheus cycle, no poem in which the speaker identifies himself as narrator of it. But the extraordinary first sonnet of the second part is Rilke' s-or his speaker's, as the apprentice of Orpheusview of his art. Using the traditional metaphor of poetry as breath, spiritus, he sees his own breath as forming part of the air that circles the entire world and hence himself as instantiated in creation by his poesis, as Orpheus was:

Atmen, du unsichtbares Gedicht! Immerfort urn das eigne Sein rein ausgetauschter Weltraum. Gegengewicht, in dem ich mich rhythmisch ereigne.

Einzige Welle, deren allmahliches Meer ich bin; sparsamstes du von allen moglichen MeerenRaumgewinn.

Wie viele von diesen Stellen der Raume waren schon innen in mir. Manche Win de sind wie mein Sohn.

Erkennst du mich, Luft, du, voll noch meiniger Orte? Du einmal glatte Rinde, Rundung und Blatt meiner Worte. (II.i)

(Breathing, thou invisible poem! Always a pure world-space exchanged for this single existence. Counterweight of my enactment of myself in rhythm.

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Single wave, of which I am the accumulating sea; you, of all possible seas the most frugal, space to be used.

How many of these places in space were already within myself. Many a wind is like a son to me.

Do you know me, air, still filled with my habitations? You, sometime the smooth outer skin, the rounding and leaf of my words.)

Though this leap of the imagination belongs to Rilke' s ideas, it is also a traditional way of thinking of the sonnet sequence: following Petrarch, many poets represented their utterances as sighs or cries to be taken up by Nature, and the double meaning by which the word for page is also, in most European languages, the word for the leaf of a tree, allows the wind and the trees and the whole natural world to become a metaphor of the word~indeed, the natural world is often figured as God's poem. As has been suggested, the sonnet sequence is akin to genres such as the photograph album and the diary, in which the sense that one is ordering a world in miniature is particularly strong.

Dante, whose Divine Comedy is probably the greatest poetic world shaping in European literature, stopped short of using his own sonnet sequence, Vita Nuova, to construct a cosmos: he said in the prose gloss to his final visionary sonnet that

After this sonnet, there came to me a miraculous vision, in which I beheld things that convinced me to write no more about that blessed spirit [Beatrice] until I could do so in a worthier manner; to which end, I am now doing what I can, as she well knows. (Vita Nuova, xlii)

To that end, he needed, he thought, to move from the lower style of the sonnet world to the high style of the Divine Comedy. Petrarch' s vision remained always fixed on himself, however resonantly; Wordsworth' s world vision, and Milton's, went into epic blank verse; and Blake, who might have been able to use the sonnet form to make a cosmos, wrote no sonnet sequence. Only Rilke, under intense and irresistible pressure, grasped the entire

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cosmos in a sustained lyric outburst that also takes sonnet-sequence form, with that sense of evolving power that runs through Romanticism:

Worte gehen noch zart an Unsaglichen aus .... Und die Musik, immer neu, aus den bebendsten Steinen, baut im unbrauchtbaren Raum ihr vergottlichtes Haus.

(Words ever go forth into that unsayable place .... And Music, always anew, with unreliable stones

builds up her celestial house out of the wastes of space.) (II.x.lZ-14)

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CONCLUSION

I n this brief study, I have tried to give the reader an overview of the way the sonnet sequence works, from its beginning in the

thirteenth century in Italy to the present day. Because, as I argue, the sonnet sequence has remained constant in both its form and its generic properties, I have worked through the book by asking the reader to set sonnet sequences from different times and places alongside one another. If this created some temporal confusion, I have made amends by helping the reader with a chronological overview in the introduction.

So little has been written about the theory of sonnet sequences-a few pages here and there from critics usually pursuing some other (quite legitimate) main interest-that I have offered my own scheme of analysis from the start, as something that will enable the reader to think about, analyze, and discuss the sequentiality of sequences: in practice, what holds a group of sonnets together. What follows is a brief attempt to clarify this scheme, now that the reader is familiar with some of the material on which it operates.

All poets who publish (in print or manuscript) a collection of sonnets face what I call the "problem of aggregation": they have to know what holds together this selection of sonnets in this order. The problem in its simple form is shown aptly by a minor eighteenth-century English poet, Anna Seward (1747 -1809), who in 1799 published "A Centenary of Original Sonnets." They are

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certainly united by authorship, but should we call this a sequence? Seward herself attempts to settle the matter by describing her work as

my centenary of sonnets which form a sort of compendium of my sentiments, opinions and impressions during the course of more than 20 years1

-a comment that leaves modestly unresolved her recognition of the miscellaneous nature of her text ("a sort of") with her desire to see it as a whole ("a compendium"). This is an authorial collection, not a sequence; a reader who wanted to argue for its sequentiality would have to discover kinds of continuity in it of which Seward herself was presumably unaware-not impossible, and critically quite justifiable, but in this instance, I think, unlikely.

Whether authors do it themselves, or we retrospectively claim to discover what they may not have realized, there seem to be four main kinds of connectedness, which I have called formal, narrative, lyric, and philosophical. These terms are not mutually exclusive-a sequence could, I suppose, have elements of all four at once, though I have never met one-but they do seem to describe ways of aggregating that poets have actually used, and one or other seems to dominate the organization of a sequence.

1. Formal. Sonnets linked by repetition of some element of their form-rhyme, syntax, single lines, or by response to some element of form, as when one sonnet starts with the second half of the sentence that ended the preceding one. The most elaborate formal linkage is that of the corona sequence with sonnetto magistrale, as described in chapter 2. A development of this is the categorical sequence, in which the sequence of the sonnets is the sequence of a category or set of objects outside it-the months of the year or the seven deadly sins, for example. The topographical sequence can shade into narrative or lyric.

2. Narrative. The sonnets are arranged to unfold a story to the extent that the people and objects in it are presented as they would be in a novel, with descriptors of place and time and

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CONCLUSION

character. Narrative is an uncommon kind of linkage, since its demands tend to obliterate the internal wholeness of single sonnets.

3. Lyric. The sonnets individually register the moods of a reflective persona, whose continuing presence in the sequence is usually marked by one or more of the following: direction of sonnets to the same person or addressee; maintenance of a symbolic language; thematic recurrence; and, most importantly and commonly, the emergence in the sequence of reflections on the act of uttering or speaking it (metapoesis). To put it in modern terms, if we recognize the existence of a personality that recognizes itself, we are dealing with a lyric sequence.

4. Philosophical. Philosophizing, in a loose sense, is done all the time by sonnet writers, since the structure of the sonnet encourages reflective development of one's moods; but a single sonnet, or even two or three, is hardly long enough to exhibit philosophical thought. But occasionally the reflectiveness of the speaker rises to a level of abstractness or generality that transcends individual personality, and the voice becomes diffused, as in the sonnets of Rilke; truth about the world, not personality, becomes the primary object of attention for both speaker and reader. When that happens, the term philosophical seems appropriate.

I have also drawn attention to the uniqueness of the sonnet sequence: it is the only literary genre (apart from an author's publication of his or her own letters) to balance the wholeness of each of its parts with the wholeness of the entire collection. In a novel, the wholeness of the entire work overpowers the wholeness of each chapter, even when written for serial publication; conversely, in a collection of short stories, the wholeness of each short story claims attention ahead of the wholeness of the collection. The sonnet sequence compromises exactly between these two positions. Historically, Dante and Petrarch, in different ways, discovered and demonstrated that this balance can be used to image the precarious balance of integration of personality, and the sonnet sequence has been a tool for the exploration of self-

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hood ever since. Thus writers of lyric sequences, trying to bind together the disparate elements of their own persona, often call what they offer by a narrative name: an account, a story, a journey, a book. Sir Philip Sidney, in Astrophel and Stella, said it in 10 crisp syllables for all time:

I am not I: pity the tale of me.

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Notes and References

Introduction

1. For further and more detailed information about Petrarch and the text of his poems, the reader is referred to endnotes 1, 3, and 4 for chapter 5.

2. For Rilke, likewise, see endnotes 4 and 5 for chapter 6.

3. For a fuller account of these authors, see Michael R. G. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), eh. 2; hereafter cited as Spiller, Development of the Sonnet.

4. The only account of the development of the corona form I have found is that by G. M. Crescimbeni, L:Istoria della Volgar Poesia, vol. 1 (2d imprint, Venice, 1731), 211-14, "Delle Corone, e d' ogni altra spezie di piu sonetti legati insiemi" ("On coronas, and all other kinds of numbers of sonnets joined together"). After discussing the revival of interest in tenzoni in the sixteenth century among men of wit in Italy, he goes on to say:

Some poets, who wished to make the way of doing [sequences] stricter, obliged themselves to weave all the sonnets together with the same rhymes .... [T]hey also made them in other ways, among which there was one that they called a corona, which they made up of however many sonnets they wanted, in which usually the only concern was to start one sonnet with the last line of the preceding one, finishing the last sonnet with the first

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THE SONNET SEQUENCE

line of the first one. There is an example of this sort of corona in the Poems of Tasso ... of twelve sonnets, beginning 'Era pieno l'ltalia e pieno il Mondo', which ends with a slight change, 'E gia pieno l'Italia, e pieno il Mondo.'

But the poets of Siena, and particularly the Academy of the Intronati, found the proper way of constructing coronas-since the ones mentioned above should really be called sequences [' catene'] rather than coronas. These ones are composed of fifteen sonnets, the last one of which is called the 'magistrale' and from the lines of that one are taken the first and last lines of all the other fourteen, in such fashion that the first sonnet begins with the first line of the magistrale and finishes with its second; the second begins with its second line and finishes with its third; and so it follows through to the fourteenth, which begins with the fourteenth line of the magistrale, and finishes by picking up its first one again; so that at the point where the magistrale comes in, the composition concludes with it having come full circle like a crown ['corona']. (212-14)

5. George Gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573; reprint, London: Scolar Press, 1970), 336.

6. William T. Going, Scanty Plot of Ground: Studies in the Victorian Sonnet (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), 14.

7. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, vol. 3, ed. E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 557; hereafter cited as Selincourt, Poetical Works of William Wordsworth.

Chapter 1

1. H. Austin Dobson (1840-1921) had a dilettantish attitude to the presentation of poetry that is apt to strike the modern reader as superficial or irritating. He was nevertheless a good craftsman and an elegant and witty writer at his best. The poem quoted, entitled "Urceus Exit," can be found in the Oxford Book of English Verse edited by Sir Arthur QuillerCouch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939) at no. 828.

2. The sonnet was added, at the end of nine others, to the 1673 edition of Milton's poems, Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions (London: Thomas Dring, 1673), but unlike the others was not numbered, suggesting that it was perceived as irregular.

3. William Sharp, editor of Sonnets of This Century (London: Waiter Scott, [1886]), 307. Meredith himself, however, knew of

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NOTES AND REFERENCES

the sonnetto caudato, and declared that his 16-line stanzas were "not designed for that form." (The Letters of George Meredith, vol. 2, ed. C. L. Cline [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970], 798.)

4. Joachim du Bellay (1522-1560), Defense et Illustration de la Langue Franr;aise (Paris: Arnoull' Angelier, 1549), livre 2, eh. 4.

5. The poems of Giacomo da Lentino, with translations, notes, and a brief account, are available in a modern critical edition by Step hen Popolizio, A Critical Edition of the Poems of Giacomo da Lentino, Ph.D. thesis, 1975 (Ann Arbor University Microfilms, Michigan, 1980). See also E. H. Wilkins, "The Invention of the Sonnet," Modern Philology 13 (1915): 463-94.

6. "Undid silbe ciascun vuole pun to" -Pieraccio Tedaldi, ea. 1330. A "punto" is a full stop, comma, or semicolon, and also by synecdoche the point at the end of which the stop comes. For the complete sonnet, see G. Getto and E. Sanguinetti, If Sonetto (Milano: Mursia, 1957), 80.

7. Popolizio, Poems of Giacomo da Lentino, 159.

8. Samuel Daniel, A Defence of Ryme [1602?]; reprinted in Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols., ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press,l904), 2, 358.

9. The comparison (humorously done) occurs in a sonnet quoted in Spiller, Development of the Sonnet, 9-10 and n. 11. The "Sonnet on the Sonnet" is almost a subgenre, attracting at least one book, David T. H. Scott, Sonnet Theory and Practice in Nineteenth-Century France: Sonnets on the Sonnet (Hull: University of Hull Publications, 1977), and an anthology, M.J. Russell, Sonnets on the Sonnet (London: Longmans, 1898). The Italian anthology mentioned in endnote 6 for chapter 1 quotes several of the kind in its introduction and reprints them in the body of the anthology.

10. Dante, Vita Nuova, ea. 1292, section 3. The sectionalization of the text followed here is that of the Societa Dantesca Italiana in Opere di Dante (Firenze: F. Lemonnier, 1960). The translation is mine.

11. The "first among my friends" was Guido Cavalcanti, whose reply begins "Vedeste al mio parere onne valore" ("You have beheld, to my way of thinking, the highest worth"); the other

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THE SONNET SEQUENCE

replies surviving are by Cino da Pistoia ("Naturalmente chere ogni amadore" ["Every lover naturally seeks"]), and Dante da Maiano ("Di cio che stato sei dimandatore" ["Of what you have requested"]). Each of the replies uses the rhymes given by Dante in his opening sonnet: -ore, -ente (AB), -endo, -ea (CD). The complete tenzone is reprinted in Vita Nuova, ed. Fredi Chiapelli (Milano: Mursia, 1965), 79-80.

12. The most exhaustive examination of tenzoni in thirteenthcentury sonnets is by Salvatore Santangelo, Le tenzoni poetiche nella letteratura Italiana delle origini (Geneva: Olschki, 1928), a study that has not been translated into English.

13. Gascoigne, Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, 336.

14. Santangelo, Le tenzoni poetiche.

15. Crescimbeni, Llstoria della Volgar Poesia, vol. 2, 211-14.

16. Gascoigne, Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, title page. The three sonnets given are on pp. 211-12, first called a "terza sequenza" and then simply "this sequence."

17. Gascoigne, Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, 360-63, referred to as "seven sonnets in sequence."

18. George Macbeth, Collected Poems, 1958-1970 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1971), 34-41.

19. There is a brief notice of Anne Locke in Spiller Development of the Sonnet , 92-93. See also Spiller's 'A. Literary First: The Sonnet Sequence of Anne Locke (1560)," Renaissance Studies, March 1997, forthcoming. Anne Locke's sequence is edited by Kel Morin-Parsons, Anne Locke's Sonnet Sequence (Ontario: North Waterloo Press, 1997).

20. Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate (London and Boston: Faber, 1986). The stanzas of the novel are iambic tetrameters, rhyming ABAB CCDD EFFE GG, and have a consistent sequence of feminine and masculine rhymes, FMFM FF MM FMMF MM. This stanza was invented by Alexander Pushkin for his verse novel Eugene Onegin (1823), and while it has been suggested by Vladimir Nabokov in Eugene Onegin, vol. 1 ([London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964], 12) that Pushkin may have intended a kind of sonnet, it is really a narrative stanza. Sonnets in tetrameters, often comic or satirical, are of course not uncommon.

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21. Il Fiore e Il Detto d'Amore, ed. G. Contini, Opere di Dante, vol. 8 (Milano: Societa Dantesca Italiana, 1984).

22. Crescimbeni, r:Jstoria della Volgar Poesia, vol. 2, 344.

23. George Wither, Campo-Musae (London: Austin and Coe, 1643), 78; reprinted in Miscellaneous Works of George Wither: First Collection (The Spenser Society, 1872); Vox Pacifica (London: Austin, 1645); reprinted in Miscellaneous Works of George Wither: Second Collection (The Spenser Society, 1872). An extract from Vox Pacifica appears in The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse, 1509-1659, ed. David Norbrook (London: Penguin Press, 1992), 745-47.

24. An 18-sonnet sequence by the British writer Charles Emily appeared in 1781; there seems to be no American sonnet sequence dated in the eighteenth century. In the literary remains of the British writer Thomas Edwards (1699-1757), published in 1758, there is a collection of 45 sonnets, all Miltonic and most addressed to friends, which in the last sonnet are offered as "the Collection" by the author; but it is not clear that they are connected by anything except numeration. It could be argued that this is the first eighteenth-century sonnet sequence.

25. For a list of British sonnet sequences of this period, see William T. Going, Scanty Plot of Ground: Studies in the Victorian Sonnet (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), 157 -67; for American sequences, see Lewis G. Sterner, The Sonnet in American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930), 145-48.

26. Du Bellay' s sequence was intended as the first book in a series, but his early death prevented the publication of a sequel. In its 1558 form it contained 32 sonnets with a prefatory sonnet '~u Roy." This was followed by "Un Songe ou Vision sur le Mesme Subject," a second sequence of 15 sonnets describing a number of fantastic, emblematic objects connected to the fallen grandeur of Rome. See du Bellay, Oeuvres Poetiques, vol. 2, ed. Henri Chamard (Paris: E. Comely, 1908-1910), 3-39. For the English reader, there is an excellent translation by Edmund Spenser, "Ruines of Rome: by Bellay," in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. W A. Oram and others (New Haven and

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London: Yale University Press, 1989), 381-405. Spenser also translated du Bellay' s "Songe" twice: once in 1569, in }an van der Noot' s A Theatre for Worldlings, in which he produced a sequence of 15 blank verse sonnets, a rare form, though only 11 of the 15 are taken from du Bellay; and then as "The Visions of Bellay," in which all15 are translated into English sonnet form (Yale Shorter Poems, 441-50, 470-84).

27. Guittone d' Arezzo, Le Rime, ed. F. Egidi (Bari: Laterza, 1940), 235-48. The vices are pride, avarice, luxury, envy, gluttony, sloth, anger, vainglory, cowardice, and injustice; the virtues are knowledge, humility, generosity, chastity, friendship, temperance, goodwill, meekness, charity, honor, fortitude, and justice. Some of these are plainly social practices rather than moods, but the medieval concepts of passion, temperament, and humor deal with emotional characteristics in a more stereotyping and ethically oriented way than in modern times.

Chapter 2

1. Guittone d' Arezzo, Rime, ed. Egidi, 179-82.

2. The texts of Folgore' s sonnets are taken from Poesia del Duecento e del Trecento, ed. Carlo Musetta and Paolo Rivalta (Torino: G. Einaudi, 1956), 397. The complete sequence is printed on pp. 393-99. The translations, which I have adapted extensively, are taken from D. G. Rossetti, Poems and Translations 1850-1870 (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), 252. The complete sequence, with the dedicatory sonnet, is translated by Rossetti on pp. 247-54.

3. The text, printed at the end of Locke's translation of Calvin, Sermons of John Calvine upon the Songe that Ezechias made. (London: John Day, 1560), is taken from the unique British copy, British Library 696.a.40, sig. [Axi(r)-v]. The translation of the two psalm verses, 51.11-12, appears to be Anne Locke's own.

4. The quotations from Donne' s "La Corona" are taken from the 1633 edition, Poems by ]. D. With Elegies on the Authors Death (London: John Mariott, 1633, 28-32).

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5. Donne, Poems by J. D., 31 (sonnets 5 and 6).

6. Donne, Poems by f. D., 29 (sonnet 3).

7. Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems (New York: Harper and Row, [1956]), 728.

8. References throughout are to the number and line(s) of the sonnets of "A Christmas Ring" in George Macbeth, Collected Poems 1958-1970 (London: Macmillan, 1971), 34-41.

9. Using the second line of the sonetto magistrale as an example, the rhyme word "beak" (A) has to rhyme with cheek, leak, and shriek (3). But each of these lines, back in its original sonnet, is an A or a B rhyme, and so has to rhyme with three others: beak/meek, piq-, reek; cheek/week, seek, unique; leak/freak, Greek, weak; shriek/streak, chic, oblique (12). All four first lines are also last lines (CDE rhymes) in the sonnet immediately previous, and in the Petrarchan form each rhymes with one other line in its sestet: beak/creak; cheek/eeek!; leak/peak; shriek/sleek (4). So beak generates 19 rhymes, supposing that there are no repetitions. A magistrale line in the sestet will similarly have nine words rhyming with its rhyme word.

10. Gascoigne, Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, 360-63. Only once in the seven-sonnet sequence does Gascoigne alter the meaning of a line as it passes from one sonnet to the next. Lady Mary Wrath, "Pamphilia to Amphilanthus," The Poems of Lady Mary Wrath, ed. Josephine Roberts (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1983). She was the niece of Sir Philip Sidney and imitated his style in Astrophel and Stella creditably; she does not, however, appear to know how a corona sequence works.

Chapter 3

1. The text used for all references to and quotations from Word swarth's sonnet sequences is Selincourt, Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. This quotation, from the ample notes, is on 557; the River Duddon sequence is on 242-61 and the Ecclesiastical Sonnets on 341-407.

2. "The nineteenth century critics were too much concerned with the prosody of the individual sonnet to be aware of the

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widespread experimentation of the poets in linking sonnets into poems of unique unity." (William T. Going, Scanty Plot of Ground: Studies in the Victorian Sonnet [The Hague: Mouton, 1976], 36).

3. Wordsworth himself pointed to Milton's 'And feel that I am happier than I know" (Paradise Lost, viii.282) and to a line of Moschus that he had himself translated as "But we, the great, the mighty, and the wise" (Selincourt, Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 524). Since he knew Burns's poetry well, he may also have recalled "But och! I backward cast my ee" from To a Mouse; and the modern reader will hear the Platonic echo of Shelley's "The One remains, the many change and pass." The elegiac allusiveness of this sonnet is remarkable.

4. G. H. Tucker, The Poet's Odyssey: ]oachim du Bellay and the Antiquitez de Rome (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 3.

5. Du Bellay' s text, here and elsewhere, is from Oeuvres Poetiques, vol. 2, ed. Henri Chamard (Paris: Comely, 1908-1910), 3-29. The Antiquitez were very readably translated by Edmund Spenser about 1580, and the text used here is The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram and others (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 381-405; hereafter cited as Spenser: Shorter Poems.

6. Spiller, Development of the Sonnet , 80- 82.

7. See "Roman Texts and Contexts" in Tucker, Poet's Odyssey, 105-74.

8. "Exegi monumentum aere perennius" -Horace, Carminum Liber Ill, final poem. Shakespeare repeatedly defies time in this way in his Sonnets (e.g., sonnets 18, 19, 55, 63, and 65).

9. On this, see discussion in Spiller, Development of the Sonnet, eh. 9 and also Joel Fineman, Shakespeare's Perjured Eye (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

10. My translation: Spenser's version misses the point, in 1.6, that he has made his verses sing (dire) the monuments.

11. Spenser: Shorter Poems, 404.

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Chapter 4

1. An excellent account, but not available in English, is Mario Marti, Storia dello Stil Nuovo (Lecce: Milella, 1973). The editorial material in Mark Musa, Dante's Vita Nuova (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973) is helpful. See also Spiller, Development of the Sonnet, eh. 3.

2. Though the material is not directly relevant to this study, there are two useful anthologies with explanatory material: Bernard O'Donoghue (ed.), The Courtly Love Tradition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982); R. T. Hill and T. G. Bergin (eds.), Anthology of the Provenqal Troubadours (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973). For the Latin popular tradition, see Peter Dronke, Mediaeval Latin and the Rise of the European Love Lyric, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). There are two Italian studies of the connections referred to: Anna Clausen, Le origini della poesia lirica in Provenza e in Italia (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1976), and F. Catenazzi, J;influsso dei Provenzali sui temi e immagini della poesia Siculo- Toscana (Brescia: Marcelliana, 1977).

3. I am presenting Dante's Vita Nuova as innovative; but to a contemporary it would have looked like another example of the prose/verse narrative of medieval times, the prosimetrum. One later sequence indebted to Dante is Lorenzo de'Medici' s Comento (ea. 1482), a set of 41 sonnets with a prose commentary; but the sonnets-which are mainly Petrarchan love sonnets-are very much subdued to an extremely long quasiphilosophical commentary, so that, indeed, it is questionable whether we should call this a sonnet sequence at all, or a philosophical work with verse insertions. See Sara Sturm, Lorenzo de'Medici (New York: Twayne, 1974), 63-76.

4. The Vita Nuova was largely neglected even in Italy in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, but in the nineteenth century was widely translated, both in whole and in parts and referred to and imitated by many poets, as well as used by graphic artists. This was part of a European and American rediscovery of Dante, principally of the Divine Comedy.

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5. Her sonnets, including the sequences referred to here, form the last section (pp. 561-738) of her Collected Poems, ed. Norma Millay (New York and London: Harper Brothers, 1956). A good short biography and critical account, with a full bibliography, is Norman Brittin, Edna St. Vincent Millay (New York: Twayne, 1967).

6. W H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), 192.

7. The four sonnets entitled "She, to Him" were written in 1866 and published in Wessex Poems and Other Verses (London: Osgood, Mcllvaine & Co., 1898).

8. Brittin, St. Vincent Millay, 111.

9. The Poems of George Meredith, vol. 1, ed. Phyllis Bartlett (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978) 115-45. Originally published in Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside (London: Chapman and Hall, 1862).

10. Complete Poems of Robert Frost (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966), 143-44.

Chapter 5

1. John Berryman, Collected Poems, 1937-1971, ed. Charles Thornbury (London and Boston: Faber, 1989), 108; hereafter cited as Berryman, Poems. For a readable biography of Petrarch, see Morris Bishop, Petrarch and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963). For a densely informative short study of Petrarch's major works, with a biography and an account of the making of his sonnet sequence, see Kenelm Foster, Petrarch: Poet and Humanist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984).

2. Spiller, Development of the Sonnet, 71-82.

3. The text used for quotations from Petrarch is the Italian-English edition by Robert Durling, Petrarch's Lyric Poems (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1976), easily the best for the serious reader whose Italian is not wholly fluent. Translations of Petrarch are my own.

4. The classic account of Petrarch' s working is E. H. Wilkins, The Making of the 'Canzoniere' and other Petrarchan Studies (Rome:

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Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1951). A good summary account is in Aldo S. Bernardo, Petrarch, Laura and the Triumphs (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974), 26-63.

5. Berryman, Poems, 70.

6. Selected Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Margaret Forster (London: Chatto and Windus, 1988), 237.

7. Spenser: Shorter Poems, 600.

8. Berryman, Poems, 129. The sestet is strongly reminiscent of Petrarch's sestina, Rime 30; also, one of the rhyme words in this sestina is "chiome"[hair], which according to the sestina's rules occurs six times. Quirkily, the sequence ends with Berryman referring the reader to Judges 16:22, which states "Howbeit, the hair of his [Samson' s] head began to grow again after he was shaven." The name Lise in the sonnet quoted was an alias for Chris: in the first publication of the Sonnets to Chris, Berryman's Sonnets (New York: Farrar Strauss, 1967), he used Lise (one syllable); in the Collected Poems 1939-1971 (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), she is called by her real name, Chris, except in this last sonnet, where Lise is retained. Her identity has been shrouded carefully by Berryman' s biographers: she was 27, married with a young son when they had their affair in 1947 in Princeton; but Chris does not even appear in the index of Paul Mariani' s Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman (New York: William Morrow, 1990). Since Petrarch, whom Berryman admired and imitated, shrouded the identity of Lama, this is perhaps appropriate.

9. Du Bellay, Oeuvres Poetiques, I.27.

10. George Macbeth, Collected Poems 1958-1982 (London: Hutchinson, 1989), 350.

11. Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, Oeuvres Completes, ed. C. Pichois, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1975-1976), 1.232.

12. See Dorothy Mermin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), eh. 5. It is possible that Elizabeth Barrett also knew of the famous collection of letters to an unworthy lover called Letters from the Portuguese, supposed to have been written in

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the seventeenth century by a Portuguese nun, Maria Alcoforado, though actually an eighteenth-century French compilation. They were popular and widely translated, and an English translation was made by William Bowles in 1817, which Elizabeth Barrett could have known. Curiously, Rilke was impressed by them and attempted to translate them into German ea. 1908. Another suggestion may have come from Poems from the Portuguese of Luis de Camoens, a popular translation by Percy, Viscount Strangford, printed five times between 1803 and 1824.

13. Tony Harrison, from The School of Eloquence, Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1984), 112. The word from in the title points to the fact that "The School of Eloquence" is not really the name of a sequence, but of a project on which Harrison is still engaged. Eighteen sonnets under that title were published in 1978; these expanded to 50 in 1981, and then to 67 in 1984. Michael Drayton similarly worked on and published his sonnet sequence, Idea, between 1599 and 1619, and Petrarch (before the invention of printing) issued various versions of his Rime to friends and patrons. On Harrison, see Neil Astley, "Tony Harrison: Selective Bibliography," in Tony Harrison, ed. Neil Astley (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1991), 504-5.

14. The standard edition of Donne's poems, to which most later editions are indebted, is The Poems of John Donne, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912). The standard edition of the Divine Poems, with full scholarly apparatus, is John Donne, The Divine Poems, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). Gardner prints the Holy Sonnets in three groups: the 1633 set, followed by the additional sonnets from the 1635 volume, followed by the additional sonnets from the Westmoreland manuscript.

15. See Gardner (ed.), Divine Poems, lvi-xcviii. I have quoted from the 1633 edition, Donne, Poems by]. D.

16. See the reappraisal of Gardner's edition by John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), eh. 6.

17. The printer set them out as a sequence, with each sonnet numbered and the group of 12 set off by double rules at beginning and end. His use of double rules in the volume is

154


not, unfortunately, consistent. See Gardner (ed.), Divine Poems, lxxxii-lxxxvii.

18. A facsimile of Q is printed in Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven and London: Yde University Press, 1977). This is a magisterial edition with a rich commentary. I have quoted from Q, since any edition introduces editorial decisions about meaning. I have substituted v for u and j for i and have corrected Q, with a marginal note, only where the original would seriously mislead the reader.

19. See discussion of these in Spiller, Development of the Sonnet, 170-75

20. For an account of the debate, see Hugh Calvert, Shakespeare's Sonnets and Problems of Autobiography (Devon, England: Merlin Books, 1987), and also Paul Ramsey, The Fickle Glass (New York: AMS Press, 1979), which has an excellent bibliography. The most intense examination of the problem of subjectivity in the Sonnets is Joel Fineman, Shakespeare's Perjured Eye (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

21. Booth, Shakespeare's Sonnets, xii.

22. Q prints a comma, not a full stop, at the end of this sonnet. This punctuation, which is also at the end of some other sonnets, is probably a misprint, but as often happens in Q, it is immediately suggestive: it is just possible, given Shakespeare's fondness for pairing sonnets, that 62 is intended to be read with 63 as a single poem, though there is an awkward change of person from "thee" to "him."

Chapter 6

1. "People do associate the word poet with the metre itself, and speak of 'elegiac poets' or 'epic poets' as if a poet were not made by imitation, but by the verse, entitling them all indiscriminately to the name. Even when a treatise on medicine or natural philosophy is brought out in verse, the name of poet is by custom given to the author; yet Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common except the metre, so that it would be right to call the former a poet, but the latter a natural philosopher rather than a poet." (Aristotle, Poetics, 1.7 -8)

155

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

2. The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti, ed. WM. Rossetti (London: Macmillan, 1911), 262-63.

3. The arrangement is plainly intended to be symmetrical but is not as neat as it seems. In the first group of poems, one of the 10 is actually a ballata, a long, songlike poem; two of the sonnets are extended sonnets, in which short lines of seven syllables are inserted: AaBBbA AaBBbA CDdC CDdC (and CDdC DCcD). This is a variant known as a sonettus duplex or sonetto doppio and is comparatively rare. In the last group of 10, one of the poems is a canzone of two 13-line stanzas.

4. The reader is referred to the bibliography of recommended titles for details of the original German texts. I have used the second edition of the Sonnets to Orpheus, tr. J. B. Leishman (London: Hogarth Press, 1936); hereafter cited as Rilke, Sonnets. The preface gives a translation of the letter to his Polish translator, Witold von Hulewicz, which I have cited. Leishman' s translations of the Sonnets copy the rhythm and rhyme scheme closely but sometimes sacrifice accuracy; I have used my own translations. The reader who wants to go on to the Duino Elegies has a choice of a number of modern translations: a useful bilingual text is the translation by Stephen Cohn, Rilke, Duino Elegies (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1989).

5. "The poet walked up and down [on the castle bastions] .... [T]hen suddenly, as he was pondering, he stopped dead: it seemed to him that he heard a voice call through the roaring of the wind: Who, if I cried, would hear me from the ranks of the angels?" ["Wer, wenn ich schriee, horte mich denn aus der Engel I Ordnungen?" is the first line of the first elegy]. The reminiscence, by Rilke' s friend Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, is quoted often; see, for example, Siegfried Mandel, Rainer Maria Rilke (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), 91-92.

6. Rilke, Sonnets, 18.

7. Milton, of course, is occupied, both in Lycidas and in the parallel passage in Paradise Lost, vii.32-36, with the danger to the artist himself of sudden death or political persecution. It is significant, however, that in a poem concerned with the transfiguration of the artist, the detail of Orpheus' death that Milton emphasizes is the survival of the head, whose

156


gory visage down the stream was sent, Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore. (Lycidas, 61-62).

Rilke, like Milton, bases his sonnet firmly on the account of Orpheus' death in Ovid's Metamorphoses, xi.1-60. However, he chooses to contradict Ovid's point that Orpheus could not make his voice heard against the Maenads-

tendentemque manus et in illo tempore primum inrita dicentem nee quicquam voce moventem sacrilegae perimunt. (Metamorphoses, xi.39-41)

(the blasphemers destroyed him as he held out his hands, speaking for the first time without effect, nor causing anything to respond to his voice.)

The imaginative leap that turns the stones thrown at Orpheus into listeners seems to be a conflation of the attack of the Maenads in Ovid with his remark that

perque os, pro Iuppiter! illud auditum saxis intellectumque ferarum sensibus, in ventos anima exhalata recessit. (41-43)

(and through those lips, by Jupiter! that had been listened to by the rocks and understood by the senses of wild beasts, his spirit expired, and vanished upon the winds.)

Ovid also supplies the detail that the head and the lyre survived, thrown both into the Hebrus, where they floated, sounding audibly, down to the sea and to the shores of Lesbos. There is a good deal of imagery associated with the drowning and recovery of heads in Lycidas.

8. Rilke, Sonnets, 18-19.

Conclusion

1. Quoted by Margaret Aston, The Singing Swan (New York: Greenwood Press, 1931; reprint, 1968), 226.

157

Bibliographical Essay

I n his pioneering study of the sonnet sequence during its second great flourishing in English, William T. Going, in Scanty

Plot of Ground (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), points to the difficulty faced by anyone trying to guide readers on the subject: "almost every account of the sonnet during the Renaissance in England is in reality an account of the sonnet sequence" (11). Almost all critics use the term sonnet as a collective noun or adjective to refer to both the generality of individual sonnets and the aggregation of them into sequence: when, for example, Lauro Martines in his Society and History in English Renaissance Verse (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985) writes that "the sonnet craze comes and goes too swiftly to be rhymed with gradual change in the institution of upper-class marriage" (101), he blurs the distinction between the coming and going of the sonnet sequence craze, which was very quick in Britain, between 1591 and 1597, with the coming and going of the sonnet, which was rather longer, between ea. 1580 and ea. 1625. Moreover, critics who are actually concerned with sonnets that appeared in sequences tend to discuss them largely as individual sonnets, as does J. W. Lever in his key study, The Elizabethan Love Sonnet (London: Macmillan, 1956). I plead guilty to this blurring myself in The Development of the Sonnet (London: Routledge, 1992)-though there is at least a properly indexed entry under "sonnet sequence" -and it is perhaps a sense that "0, I have ta' en too little care of this!" that has led me to under-

158

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

take this present study. Be that as it may, information about and critical discussion of the sonnet sequence is scattered thinly among the much larger amount of work on "the sonnet" in the sense alluded to previously, and the reader has to be prepared to work generally with discussions of the sonnet. Checklists of sonnet sequences are not numerous. (Note that sonnet is spelled sonnet in French but sonetto in Italian, soneto in Spanish, and sonett in German.) For the early Italian period (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries), there is a brief list in Leandro Biadene, Morfologia del Sonetto nei Secoli XIII-XIV (1888; reprint, Firenze: Le Lettere, 1977), iii, "Serie o Corone di Sonetti." For the later period, the account of the corona sequence already mentioned earlier, by the eighteenth-century critic G. M. Crescimbeni (see endnote 22, chapter 1), mentions a number of sequences with dates and publication details. The large bibliographic study by Hugues Vaganay, Le Sonnet en Italie et en France au XVIeme Siecle (Louvain, 1899; reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1966), includes all sonnet sequences of that century but unfortunately does not distinguish them as such, so that unless the printed title includes a word such as corona or serie one cannot know. There is a complete list of British sonnet sequences in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet, appendix 1, and a reasonably complete list of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British sequences in William T. Going, Scanty Plot of Ground, appendix. A checklist of American sonnet sequences up to 1929 is provided by Lewis G. Sterner, The Sonnet in American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930), table entitled '1\merican Sonnet Sequences." Spiller records 43 sequences, including some not in 14lines, for the Renaissance period; Going records more than 230, and Sterner 64, for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in lists that do not claim to include every minor poet. It is clear that the high point of the sonnet sequence, numerically at least, is the late Victorian period in British and American literature.

Before I mention particular studies, there is one master bibliography of studies of the British and American sonnet: Herbert S. Donow, The Sonnet in England and America: A Bibliography of Criticism (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982) (which despite its title includes all the sonneteers of Scotland). This splendid compilation is indispensable for the student of the son-

159

THE SONNET SEQUENCE

net in English and American literature, and though it does not list editions of the sonnets themselves, it groups critical studies under each author, alphabetically arranged within the Renaissance and again within the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a separate section for Shakespeare. Its Contents is thus a useful though not exhaustive checklist of sonnet writers.

For our purposes, it is worth noting that of the 96 items listed under the heading of "General Criticism" only one has the word sequence or cycle in its title: Donow 120, Lawrence Zillman, "Sonnet Cycle," in Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. A. Preminger (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965).

There are numerous studies of the sonnet, some of them forming portions of larger treatments of vernacular verse, from the earliest work by Antonio da Tempo, written between 1329 and 1332, through to John Fuller's The Sonnet (London: Methuen Critical Idiom, 1972). Da Tempo's treatise, known from its Latin title as De Ritimicis Vulgaribus (On Vernacular Verse), was first printed in Venice in 1509 by Simone de Luere, and was later reprinted in an edition by G. Crion with the Italian title Delle Rime Volgari (Bologna: Commissioni pe'testi di lingua, 1869). The original text subsequently was edited in a modern edition by R. Andrews, Summa Artis Rithimici Vulgaris Dictaminis (Bologna: Commissioni per i testi di lingua, 1977). Da Tempo's concern, in sections that deal with the sonnet form, is with the different kinds of sonnet form practiced in the early fourteenth century, and he has nothing to say about what the Italians later called catene, or series/cycles of sonnets. His approach set the treatment mode of the sonnet for later writers such as Giovanni Trissino, La Poetica (Vicenza: per Tolomeo Janiculo, 1529), and Mario Equicola, Istitutioni al comporre in ogni sorte di rima della lingua volgare (Milano: n.p., 1541), ("General guide to the composition of vernacular verse"), and it is not until Crescimbeni (see endnote 4 for the introduction) that we find a section devoted specifically to sequences, short though it is. In the early modern period, after the revival of interest in the sonnet at the end of the eighteenth century, there are a number of accounts of the development of the sonnet, often prefaced to anthologies, of which Charles Tomlinson' s The Sonnet: its Origin, Structure and Place in Poetry (London: John Murray, 1874) is one of the longest and fairly representative. By this time nationalism had bedeviled dis-

160

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

cussion of the sonnet with two controversies: was the sonnet in its origins French/Provent;al or was it a native Italian creation?an issue of more than academic interest during the Italian struggle for independence in the nineteenth century; and was the Petrarchan model of the sonnet to be preferred, for British poets, over the Shakespearean model? Neither of these concerns was conducive to treatment of sonnet sequences, and it is not until John Fuller's The Sonnet in 1975 that a general study of the sonnet considers the sequence separately, if briefly. Neither Waiter Monch' s Das Sonett, Gestalt und Geschichte (Heidelberg: F. H. Kerle, 1955)-the best single book on the development of the European sonnet-nor Max Jasinski' s Histoire du Sonnet en France (Douai: Brugere, 1903) pays specific attention to the sequentiality of sonnets.

There are three useful studies, limited in their historical range, that consider the problems of aggregation. The most sophisticated of these is Mario Santagata, Dal Sonetto al Canzoniere (Padova: Liviana, 1979), which investigates the appearance and development of the canzoniere (the ordinary Italian word for a collection of poems, covering anything from an anthology to a sequence) at the end of the thirteenth century. His thesis is that the sonnet was invented at the point where listening to poems, often set to music, began to give way to reading them, and that this prompted people to compile, and poets to offer, poems and notably sonnets in collections. This in turn fosters the writing of collections that are truly sequential, and Santagata links this to the development of the concept of self:

the canzoniere is the most complex result, in the sphere of lyric poetry, of the prevalence of the written word over the spoken or sung word .... We may conclude that in modern Western poetry the striking manifestation (epifania) of the subject-self presupposes the book as material object. (122, my tr.)

He draws attention, as I have, to the way in which collections of sonnets combine the identity of each short poem with the repetitive and cumulative effects of a long poem and suggests that

the canzoniere is the result of a step-by-step process of forms in time--the logical succession might well be: tenzone, corona, collection-essentially endogenetic. (47, my tr.)

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THE SONNET SEQUENCE

Santagata' s book is not available in translation but offers a serious attempt at a sociohistorical explanation of sequentiality, keyed to the conditions of the Italian thirteenth century, but suggestive beyond that for the sequence as a genre.

Two older studies, which have the merit of being particularly concerned with sequences, are Cecil L. John's Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences (New York: Columbia University, 1938) and Janet G. Scott's The Elizabethan Sonnets (Paris: Honore Champion, 1929). Both concentrate on sonnets in sequences: John investigates motifs running through sequences, and Scott discusses borrowings from French sonnet writing. Much of what they say is pitched at the level of the individual sonnet, but attention is paid to the continuities of sequences, even if not in any theoretical way. Two generic studies, which in different ways deal with the sonnet's relation to epigram and to narrative, are Alistair Fowler's Kinds of Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982)-an indispensable work for anyone interested in genre theory-and Rosalie Colie' s The Resources of Kind (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), eh. 4, "Kindness and Literary Imagination." Both authors are immensely learned and move easily among a wide range of sonnet material in several languages: neither takes space to develop a generic theory of the sequences, but their suggestions are pregnant: Colie remarks, for example, that

the "more" of the sonnet-sequence lies not only in its shadowy psychological plot, but also in the deepening of analytical themes already present in the thematics of the single sonnet-the sonneteer's selfexamination, expressive of internal condition, his commentary on his own progress in both poetry and love. (105)

A critic might travel a considerable distance through sonnet sequences guided by that notion of" a shadowy psychological plot."

Colie and Fowler are both Renaissance scholars; for the later phase of the sonnet sequence, the essential text is William T. Going's Scanty Plot of Ground (1976), already referred to. His excellent introductory chapter, "The Victorian Sonnet Sequence," sets the post-1830 sequence in relation to the Elizabethan and eighteenth-century sequence, tracing the continuity of themes and techniques. As he justifiably says,

the history of the sonnet as well as that of the sonnet sequence during the nineteenth century has yet to be written. For the nineteenth

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BIBLIOGRAPI IICAL ESSAY

century belongs to the recent past; the number of sonnets, sonneteers and publishing and printing establishments is far greater in the nineteenth century; the sonnet and the sonnet sequence have become after Milton's insistence on the single sonnet two distinct genres; and the scope of subject matter and the conventions of technique for the sonnet as well as for the sonnet sequence during the Romantic and Victorian periods have become broader and more varied and hence more complicated to analyse and describe. (11)

Going is particularly interested, as he takes the reader through the work of the major Victorian sonnet writers, in the narrative capacity of the sonnet sequence; in the process, he also notes that the word sequence is a late-Victorian invention: though it was used first in relation to a set of sonnets by George Gascoigne in 1573, it does not appear again until D. G. Rossetti subtitled his The House of Life (1881) "a Sonnet-Sequence"-before that, collective terms including century, series, or cycle are used. The term was then used retrospectively of earlier sonnet collections by critics (Going, 35); and insofar as it inserts into critical thinking a notion of progress or accumulation absent from the earlier collective words, it might be considered a significant theoretical contribution in itself.

There are a number of works useful to the reader who wants to take further the study of the expression of self, which I have argued is a constant problem or preoccupation of the sonnet sequence. The problem of subjectivity arises well before the invention of the sonnet, and two helpful works are Prospero Saiz, Persona and Poesis: The Poet in the Poem (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), and Paul Zumthor's magisterial work, Essai de Poetique Medievale (Paris: Seuil, 1976), which has a long treatment of subjectivity (p. 64 onward). More immediately relevant to the Renaissance period are Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance SelfFashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), and Anne Ferry, The 'Inward' Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). For the sonnet sequence in its social matrix, see Lauro Martines's Society and History in English Renaissance Verse, which itself has an extensive bibliography, and Arthur Marotti' s article, " 'Love is not Love': Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order," English Literary History (1993), 396-428, which again has a detailed and useful bibliography in its footnotes.

163

Bibliography of Sequences

(Where a sequence has an authorial or well-established title, this is given. Titles printed independently are in italics.)

Auden, W H. "Sonnets from China." In Collected Poems. Edited by E. Mendelson. London: Faber and Faber, 1976, 149-57.

Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. Sonnets from the Portuguese. In Selected Poems. Edited by Margaret Forster. London: Chatto and Windus, 1988,216-37.

Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du Mal. In Oeuvres Completes, 2 vols. Edited by C. Pichois. Paris: Gallimard, 1975-1976, I.l-134.

Berryman, John. "Sonnets to Chris." In Collected Poems, 1937-1971. Edited by C. Thornbury. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1989, 69-129.

d' Arezzo, Guittone. Rime. Edited by F. Egidi. Bari: Laterza, 1940, 179-82. da San Gemignano, Folgore. Sonnetti. Edited by G. Caravaggi. Turin:

Einaudi, 1965. "Sonnets on the Months." In Poems and Translations 1850-1870. Translated by D. G. Rossetti. London: Oxford University Press, 1926,247-54.

Dante [Alighieri, Dante]. Vita Nuova. Edited by D. de Robertis. Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1980. Attributed to Dante. Il Fiore. In Il Fiore e il Detto d'Amore. Edited by G. Contini. Opere di Dante, VIII. Milano: Societa Dantesca Italiana, 1984.

Donne, John. Poems by f. D. With Elegies on the Authors Death. London: John Mariott, 1633. The standard modern edition is The Divine Poems. Edited by Helen Gardner. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952; revised, 1964,1-5.

164

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SEQUENCES

du Bellay, Joachim. Les Antiquitez de Rome. In Oeuvres Poetiques. Edited by H. Chamard. Paris: Comely, 1908-1910, 11.3-29. For the translation by Spenser, see under "Spenser, Edmund."

Gascoigne, George. A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers. 1573. Reprint, London: Scolar Press, 1970.

Harrison, Tony. from The School of Eloquence. In Selected Poems. New York and London: Penguin, 1984,109-78.

Locke, Anne. A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner. In Sermons of John Calvine upon the Songe that Ezechias Made. London: John Day, 1560. Sonnets of Am1e Locke. Edited by Kel Morin. Ontario: North Waterloo Press, 1996.

Macbeth, George. "A Christmas Ring." In Collected Poems 1958-1970. London: Macmillan, 1971, 34-41. "Thoughts on a Box of Razors." In Collected Poems 1958-1982. London: Hutchinson, 1989, 347-55 (these are quite different collections).

Meredith, George. Modern Love. In The Poems of George Meredith. Edited by Phyllis Bartlett. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978, 1.115-45.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent. "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree" and "Epitaph for the Race of Man." In Collected Poems. New York: Harper and Row [1956], 606-22,701-18.

Petrarch, Francis [Francisco Petrarca]. Rimo:: Sparse. Translated with the Italian text and additional poems as Petrarch's Lyric Poems. Edited by R. Durling. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1976. In many editions, the Rime Sparse are called the Canzoniere.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. Sonnets to Orpheus. Translated with the German text by J. B. Leishman. London: Hogarth Press, 1946. Leishman's German text was taken from Die Sonette an Orpheus. Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1923. This text is now superseded by the text in the Siimtliche Werke, vol. 1. Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1927). Revised and edited by E. Zinn, 1955-1966.

Rossetti, Christina. "Monna Innominata," "Later Life," and "The Thread of Life." In The Poetical Works of Christina Rossetti. Edited by W. M. Rossetti. London: Macmillan, 1911, 58-64, 73-82,262-63.

Shakespeare, William. The Sonnets. Edited by W. G. lngram and T. Redpath. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964. Revised, 1978.

Spenser, Edmund. "Ruines of Rome" and Amoretti. In The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser. Edited by W. A. Or am and others. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989, 381-405,583-658.

Wordsworth, William. The River Duddon and "Ecclesiastical Sonnets." In The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Edited by E. de Selincourt and H. Darbishire. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946, III.242-61, 341-407.

Wrath, Lady Mary. "Pamphilia to Amphilanthus." In The Poems of Lady Mary Wrath. Edited by Josephine Roberts. Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1983,85-145.

165

Index

Alighieri, Dante. See Dante Apollo, 58,88-89, 130, 133; and

Daphne, 88-89,97, 133 Aristotle, 124; The Poetics, 124 Arnold, Matthew, 123; Culture and

Anarchy, 124 Auden, Wystan H., 6, 7, 69, 70, 76,

129; Sonnets from China, 6, 69, 70, 129

Augustine, St., 64; Confessions, 64 Austen, Jane, 71

Bannerman, Ann, 5 Barnes, Barnabe, 5; A Divine Centurie,

5 Barrett, Elizabeth. See Browning,

Elizabeth Barrett Baudelaire, Charles, 6, 64, 90, 91; Les

Fleurs du Mal, 64, 91 Bembo, Pietro, 79 Berryman, John, 2, 7, 55, 64, 76, 78,

79, 82, 86, 104, 115; Sonnets to Chris, 64, 78, 82, 86, 115

167

Biadene, Leandro, 159; Morfologia del Sonetto nei Secoli XIII-XIV, 159

Blake, William, 130, 133, 137; Prophetic Books, 130; Songs of Innocence and Experience, 130

Blunt, Wilfred, 16; The Idler's Calendar, 16

Boethius, 64; Consolation of Philosophy, 64

Boissevain, Eugene, 69 Booth, Step hen, 118 Bridges, Robert, 31, 45; The Growth of

Lo1'e, 31,45 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 2, 17,

30, 68, 70, 84, 85,91-98,103, 104; Sonnets from the Portuguese, 8, 17, 68, 70, 84,92-98

Browning, Robert, 6, 30, 84,92-94, 97

Burns, Robert, 51

Cameron, Julia Margaret, 124 Cammelli, Antonio, 10

Cam6es, Luis de, 93 canzone,12,64,127,128 canzoniere, 3, 4, 161 Carrafa, Ferrante, 26; Dell'Austria, 26 Carroll, Lewis, 115; A/ice in

Wonderland, 115 catena, 3, 22 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 30 Colie, Rosalie, 96, 162; The Resources

of Kind, 162 corona sequence, 16, 22, 24, 36,

37-43, 48, 53, 159 Crescimbeni, Giovanni, 159, 160

da Lentino, Giacomo, 12-14,24 Daniel, Samuel, 14, 44; Delia, 14,44 d' Annunzio, Gabriele, 14 Dante, 2, 3, 5, 15, 22, 26, 28, 31,

61-67, 72, 79, 80, 94, 98, 115, 127, 128, 137, 141; and Beatrice, 64, 67, 137; Divine Comedy, 137; Il Fiore (attrib.), 26, 77; Vita Nuova, 2, 3, 15, 33,61-67,79, 80, 83, 94, 115

d' Arezzo, Guittone, 2, 25, 31, 32, 46, 62, 63; Tenzone con la Donna Villana, 32

da San Gemignano, Folgore, 3, 25, 33-35,41, 46; "Sonnets on the Months," 3, 25,33-34

da Tempo, Antonio, 160; De Rithimicis Vulgaribus, 160

Dickinson, Emily, 6 Dobson, Austin, 10 Donne, John, 2, 16, 18, 24, 32-40, 41,

43, 67, 84, 94, 105-13,115, 116, 117; Canonisation, The, 127; Corona, La, 16, 18, 32, 37-40, 55, 109, 112; Holy Sonnets, 32, 105-12, 113, 116; Songs and Sonets, 108

Donow, Herbert, 159; The Sonnet in England and America, 159

Dorset, Earl of, 107 Drayton, Michael, 44; Idea, 44 Drummond, William, 128 du Bartas, Saluste. See Sylvester,

Joshua

INDEX

168

du Bellay, Joachim, 11, 29, 46,51-59, 87; Les Antiquitez de Rome, 29, 46, 51-59; I: Olive, 4, 51, 87

Edwards, Thomas, 5 Eliot, T 5., 125; Four Quartets, 125 enonce/enonciation, 65 Equicola, Mario, 160; Istitutioni a/

comporre ... del/a lingua volgare, 160

Ferry, Anne;163; The "Inward" Language, 163

fin'amors, 62 Fowler, Alistair, 162; Kinds of

Literature, 162 Frost, Robert, 73-74; Home Burial, 74;

Hyla Brook, 74 Fuller, John, 7, 28, 160, 161;

Illusionists, The, 28; Sonnet, The, 7, 160, 161

Gascoigne, George, 4, 22-24, 43, 163; Adventures of Maister F.I., The, 23; Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, A, 23

Gilbert and Sullivan, 129; Patience, 129

Going, William T, 158, 159, 162-63; Scanty Plot of Ground, 158, 159, 162

Gray, Thomas, 50, 100; Elegy, 50 Greenblatt, Step hen, 163; Renaissance

Self-Fashioning, 163 Greville, Fulke, 4; Caelica, 4 Grierson, Herbert, 107

Hardy, Thomas, 70, 92; "She to Him," 92

Harrison, Tony, 7, 19, 31, 55, 64, 82, 98-105, 110, 113, 114; The School of Eloquence, 7, 19, 31, 64,98-105

Henri II, King of France, 51, 52, 57 Holden, Edith, 35; Country Diary of

an Edwardian Lady, 35 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 136 Horace, 47, 55,57

INDEX

Intronati, Accademia degli, 3

James VI, King of Scotland, 25 Jasinski, Max, 161; Histoire du Sonnet

en France, 161 John, L. Cecil, 162; Elizabethan Sonnet

Sequences, 162

Keats, John, 6, 126; "Ode to Autumn," 126

Klossowska, Dorothee, 130 Knoop, Wera, 1,130-36

Laura. See Petrarch Lawrence, D. H., 72; Odour of

Chrysanthemums, 72 Leishman, J. B., 132 Lever, J. W., 158; The Elizabethan Love

Sonnet, 158 Locke, Anne, 22,25-26,32,35-38,

41, 55, 92, 108; Meditation of a Penitent Sinner, 4, 25-26, 32, 35-38, 108

Longfellow, Henry W., 6, 29, 30, 127; "The Two Rivers," 29, 127

Lucretius, 125; De Rerum Natura, 125

Macbeth, George, 7, 24, 25, 32, 35, 40-44,53,67,84, 89, 90, 106; "Christmas Ring, A," 24, 32, 40-44, 53; Patient, The, 16, 17, 40; "Thoughts on a Box of Razors," 25, 40, 89, 90

Main, David, 124; Treasury of English Sonnets, 124

Marotti, Arthur, 163 Martinez, Lauro, 158, 163; Society and

History in English Renaissance Verse, 158, 163

Meredith, George, 7, 11, 19, 30, 68, 73, 76, 81, 98; Modem Love, 11, 19,68,73,76,81

metapoesis, 40, 51, 53, 81, 84, 90, 99, 101; and control of sequence, 40, 80, 89, 109, 112, 113; and narrative, 44, 67, 136; and speaking, 50,58,65,80,136,141

169

Milholland, Inez, 69 Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 16, 26, 39,

61, 68-76, 92, 95; "Epitaph for the Race of Man," 68; Fatal Interview, 68, 70, 92; "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree," 16, 26, 61, 68, 71-76

Milton, John, 5, 10, 16, 29, 49, 51, 59, 61, 69, 94, 108, 124, 137; "Ad Patrem," 98- 99; Lycidas, 132; Miltonic sonnet, 5; "On his Blindness," 124; Paradise Lost, 125; and Petrarchan form, 6,28

Monch, Waiter, 161; Das Sonett, 161

Moschus,51

Orpheus, myth of. See Rilke, Rain er Maria

Ovid, 91, Heroides, 93

Palgrave, Francis, 123; The Golden Treasury, 123

Petrarch, Francis, 1, 2, 3, 7, 22, 31, 64, 77-91 93, 98, 102, 103, 113, 127, 133, 137, 141; and identity, 99, 104, 110, 114; imitation by later poets, 5, 21, 29, 30, 51, 67, 92, 105, 128, 137; Laura, 1, 60, 78, 79, 86-88, 90, 133; Rime Sparse, 1, 3, 4, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 30, 50, 51, 60,77-91,101, 102, 106, 130; at Vaucluse, 29, 88. See also sonnet, Petrarchan

Rilke, Rainer Maria, 1, 2, 31, 43, 89, 98, 128-38, 141; Duino Elegies, 128-29; Orpheus, myth of, 89, 130-34, 136; Sonnets to Orpheus, 1, 2, 43, 128-38

Rilke, Ruth, 1 Robinson, Mary, 92; Sappho to Phaon,

92 Roman de la Rose, 26 Rossetti, Christina, 25, 53, 64, 92, 98,

125-27; "Later Life," 25;

INDEX

"Monna Innominata," 25, 92, 98; "Thread of Life, The," 125-27

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 31, 34, 63, 64, 163; "The House of Life," 31, 163

Roubaud, Jacques, 7

Sackville, Richard. See Dorset, Earl of Saiz, Prospero, 163; Persona and

Poesis, 163 Santagata, Mario, 161; Dal Sonetto al

Canzoniere, 161 Sceve, Maurice, 19; Delie, 19 Scott, Janet, 162; The Elizabeth

Sonnets, 162 sequence, use of term, 4, 18, 19, 23, 163 sestina, 128 Seth, Vikram, 18, 26, 28; The Golden

Gate, 18, 26, 28 Seward, Anna, 139, 140; A Centenary

of Original Sonnets, 139 Shakespeare, William, 2, 28, 29, 31,

60, 79, 96, 102, 106, 112-22, 124, 160; Dark Lady, 95, 113, 116; "Lover's Complaint, A," 112; Rival Poet, 114, 116; Sonnets, 18, 44,57,60,68,81,90,95, 105,106, 112-23. See also sonnet, Shakespearean

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 6, 51 Sidney, Sir Philip, 25, 44, 60, 94, 100,

109, 115, 128, 142; Arcadia, 8; Astrophel and Stella, 4, 8, 60, 92, 109, 115, 142

sonetto caudato, 10, 11; magistrale, 22, 24,40,41,42,140

sonnet: aggregation of, 16, 20, 24, 40, 44, 48, 55, 60, 139, 140, 158, 161; and canzone, 12; as deconstructive, 31, 44; development of, 11-14; and narrative, 8, 9, 65, 67, 68; octave and sestet of, 9; origins of, 2, 12; parts of, 6, 9-12; Petrarchan, 5, 6, 9, 10, 42, 93, 134, 161; Shakespearean, 6, 9, 24, 25, 104, 134, 161; structure of, 9-12; suite of, 19; tailed, 10, 11

170

sonnetness, 8, 27, 66 sonnet sequence: beginnings of , 2,

14, 22, 25; categorical, 3, 24, 25, 29, 33, 35, 47, 52, 105, 140; confessional, 85, 92, 101, 105; corona (see corona sequence); definition of, 16-18; formal, 16, 19, 20,21-26,32-45, 140; generic properties of, 139; lyric, 17, 19, 20, 28-31,46, 61, 77-122, 124, 126, 140-41; narrative, 8-9, 19, 21~ 26-28,43,60, 61-76, 140; philosophical, 69-70,123-38, 140-41; as photograph album, 20-21; sequentiality, overview of, 140-41; and tenzone (see tenzone); theory of, 5, 7, 49, 54, 139; topographical, 29-30, 46-60;

Spenser, Edmund, 4, 28 29, 31, 57, 59, 60, 68, 85, 127; Amoretti, 60, 68, 85, 127; Faerie Queene, 127

Spiller, Michael R. G., 158-59; The Development of the Sonnet, 158-59

Sterner, Lewis G., 159; The Sonnet in American Literature, 159

stilnovisti, 62-63, 66-67, 72, 81, 92 suite of sonnets, 19, 63, 98, 108, 113 Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of, 4, 25 Sylvester, Joshua, Divine Weeks and

Works (transl.), 43

Tasso, Torquato, 24 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 6, 69, 73, 98;

Tn Memoriam, 69; "Lady of Shalott, The," 98; "Mariana," 73, 75

tenzone, 2, 3, 14, 15, 16, 18, 22, 32, 61, 63

Thomson, Alexander, 5 Thorpe, Thomas, 18, 112, 113 Tomlinson, Charles, 160; The Sonnet,

160 Tottel, Richard, 4; Songes and Sonettes, 4 Trissino, Giovanni, 160; La Poetica,

160 Tupper, Martin, 25

Vaganay, Hugues, 159; Le Sonnet en Italie et en France, 159

Virgil, 59, 74; Acneid, 59; Eclogues, 74

Watson, Thomas, 19; Hekatompathia, 19

Whitman, Walt, 6 Wither, George, 26, 27; Campo-Musae,

26; Vox Paczfica, 26 Wordsworth, William, 5, 6, 17, 30, 31,

45, 46-51, 53, 54, 55, 57, 59, 79, 124, 133, 137; Ecclesiastical Sonnets, 6, 45, 47, 59, 60;

INDEX

171

"Memorials of a Tour in Italy," 47; "Ode: Intimations oflmmortality," 125; River Vuddon, The, 17, 29, 31,46-51, 54, 55, 59; "Widow on Windermere-Side, The," 18

Wrath, Lady Mary, 43, 92; Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, 92

Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 4

Yeats, W B., 70, 133

Zumthor, Paul, 163; Essai de Poetique Medievale, 163

Spiller-Sonnet Sequence

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