Soul-animating strains,—alas too few.
The Shakespearean sonnet consists of three quatrains followed by a couplet,—the usual English form up to the seventeenth century. Milton adopted the Italian, or Petrarchian model, which has continued to be the standard sonnet form in our modern poetry. In the Miltonic, or Italian, sonnet a group of eight lines, linked by two rhymes each occurring four times, is followed by a group of six lines linked by three rhymes each occurring twice. The octave and the sextet are severed from each other by the non-continuance of the rhymes of the former into the latter. At the end of the octave, or near it, is usually a pause, marking the culmination of the thought, and the sextet makes an inference or rounds out the sense to an artistic whole.
Read Wordsworth’s sonnets, Happy the feeling from the bosom thrown, and Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room.
I.
The date of this sonnet is unknown. From the fact that it comes first in the series as arranged by the poet, it is inferred that it is the earliest sonnet he chose to publish.
[4. the jolly Hours.] See [note on Comus 986].
[5-6.] To hear the nightingale before the cuckoo was for lovers a good sign. This superstition is a motive in the Cuckoo and the Nightingale, a poem formerly attributed to Chaucer, and as such “modernized” by Wordsworth, but now known to be the work of Sir Thomas Clanvowe. Stanza X of this poem is thus given by Wordsworth:—
But tossing lately on a sleepless bed,
I of a token thought which Lovers heed;
How among them it was a common tale,