Bright as the glimpses of eternity,
To saints accorded in their mortal hour.
The strophic character of many sonnets is still more visible both in Wordsworth and some earlier poets (as e.g. Sidney or Shakespeare) when several consecutive sonnets on the same subject are so closely connected as to begin with the words But or Nor, as e.g. in Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sonnets (XI, XV, XVIII, XXIII); or when sonnets (cf. the same collection, No. XXXII) end like the Spenserian stanza in an Alexandrine. This peculiarity, which, of course, does not conform to the strict and harmonious structure of the sonnet, and is found as early as in a sonnet by Burns (p. 119), sometimes occurs in later poets also.[203] Wordsworth has had an undoubtedly great influence on the further development of sonnet-writing, which is still extensively practised both in England and America.
§ 315. None of the numerous sonnet-writers of the nineteenth century, however, brought about a new epoch in this kind of poetry. They, as a rule, confined themselves to either one or other of the four chief forms noted above, viz.:
1. The specifically English form of Surrey and Shakespeare, used e.g. by Keats, S. T. Coleridge, Mrs. Hemans, C. Tennyson Turner, Mrs. Browning, M. Arnold (pp. 37, 38) (cf. Metrik, ii, § 566).
2. The Wordsworth sonnet, approaching to the Italian sonnet in its form or rather variety of forms; it occurs in S. T. Coleridge, Hartley Coleridge, Sara Coleridge, Byron, Mrs. Hemans, Lamb, Tennyson, D. G. Rossetti, M. Arnold (pp. 1–8) (cf. ib. §§ 561–2).
3. The Miltonic form, correct in its rhymes but not in the relationship of its different parts to one another, used by Keats, Byron, Aubrey de Vere, Lord Houghton, Mrs. Browning, Rossetti, Swinburne, and others (cf. ib. § 563).
4. The strict Italian form, as we find it in Keats, Byron, Leigh Hunt, Aubrey de Vere, Tennyson, Browning, Mrs. Browning, Austin Dobson, Rossetti, Swinburne, M. Arnold (pp. 179–85), and most poets of the modern school (cf. ib. §§ 564–5).