Although so complex and difficult to construct, the sonnet has always seemed to me a natural and almost inevitable form. Whether the reason lies in its intrinsic nature, or in the tradition that surrounds it, is not easy to tell. A sonnet is almost exactly square, and yet it has a division sufficiently off the centre to make its squareness admirable instead of tiresome; and perhaps this simple trait, together with its closely woven structure of rhyme, is what gives it the quiet assurance it has—the tranquil rightness of a thing of nature or natural convenience. I feel towards an excellent sonnet as I imagine an eager horse may feel towards a good measure tightly filled up with golden grain.
This feeling is due partly to a kind of honesty of which the squareness of a sonnet is symbolic. It is a form in which poets can express themselves when they are not rhapsodically excited. And very often they are not so excited, and at such times if they write rapid lyrics they have to whip themselves up with an emotion that they get out of the writing rather than out of the facts. And this makes much lyric poetry seem a little histrionic, whereas in order to create a sonnet at all, a concentration and sustainment of feeling is required that is inevitably equal to its more temperate pretensions.
The quality of being inevitably and honestly square may become a dreadful thing, however. And it makes this form inappropriate for persons who have not at least a certain degree of lyrical taste. In the hands of such persons a sonnet is not a poem, but an enterprise. They get inside that square with a whole lot of materials, colors and sounds and old clothes of ideas, and they push them round, and if they can not make them fill in properly and come up to the edges, they climb out and get some more. And the result is so palpably spreadout an object, always with lumps of imagery here and there, that it can not even be received in the linear sequence that is natural to the eye and ear.
This fault can be avoided by having strongly in mind while composing a sonnet, the virtues not specifically its own—the clarity, the running and pouring in single stream, that are the qualities of song. And to these qualities the strict convention of its rhymes and the traditional relation of the sonnet's parts, ought to give way when there is a conflict between them, for if a poem has not rhapsody, it is the more important that it should have grace. At least that is my opinion, and I offer this preface, in expiatory rather than boastful vein, to those high priests of perfection who guard the sonnet as a kind of lonely reliquary of their god.
A PRAISEFUL COMPLAINT
| You love me not as I love, or when I Grow listless of the crimson of your lips, And turn not to your burning finger-tips, You would show fierce and feverish your eye, And hotly my numb wilfulness decry, Holding your virtues over me like whips, And stinging with the visible eclipse Of that sweet poise of life I crucify! How can you pass so proudly from my face, With all the tendrils of your passion furled, So adequate and animal in grace, As one whose mate is only all the world! I never taste the sweet exceeding thought That you might love me, though I loved you not! |