Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned,
Mindless of its just honors; with this key
Shakspere unlocked his heart; the melody
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound;
A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound;
With it Camoens soothed an exile's grief;
The Sonnet glittered a gay myrtle leaf
Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned
His visionary brow: a glow-worm lamp,
It cheered mild Spenser, called from Faery-land
To struggle through dark ways; and, when a damp
Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand
The Thing became a trumpet, whence he blew
Soul-animating strains—alas, too few!
(Wordsworth: Scorn not the Sonnet. 1827.)
The World is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours
And are up-gather'd now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for every thing, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,—
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
(Wordsworth: The World is too much with us. 1806.)
Wordsworth's complaint as to the number of Milton's sonnets ("alas, too few!") certainly cannot be applied to his own. They number about five hundred, ranking him as the most prolific English sonneteer. These include some of the finest sonnets in the language, and very many of admittedly indifferent quality. Mr. Swinburne regards his sonnets as on the whole "the best out of sight" in our poetry. In general he followed the Italian model, but with very great liberty. He not only practised great variety of rime-arrangement in the sestet, but frequently altered the scheme of the octave to such forms as abbaacca; see, for example, the specimen beginning "Scorn not the Sonnet." Wordsworth also showed no regard for the careful division of thought between octave and sestet. Indeed in a letter to Dyce, in 1833, he said that he regarded the sonnet not as a piece of architecture, but as "an orbicular body,—a sphere or a dew-drop." (Works, ed. Knight, vol. xi. p. 232.) Its excellence seemed to him to consist mainly in a "pervading sense of intense unity." Nevertheless, he admitted that "a sonnet will often be found excellent, where the beginning, the middle, and the end are distinctly marked, and also where it is distinctly separated into two parts, to which, as I before observed, the strict Italian model, as they write it, is favorable."
Mysterious Night! when our first parent knew
Thee from report divine, and heard thy name,
Did he not tremble for this lovely frame,
This glorious canopy of light and blue?
Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew,
Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame,
Hesperus with the host of heaven came,
And lo! creation widened in man's view.
Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed
Within thy beams, O Sun! or who could find,
Whilst fly, and leaf, and insect stood revealed,
That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind?
Why do we, then, shun death with anxious strife?
If light can thus deceive, wherefore not life?
(Joseph Blanco White: To Night. ab. 1825. In The Book of the Sonnet, i. 258.)
This famous sonnet was called by Coleridge "the best in the English language." He seems, however, to have been led to this opinion rather by the thought than the form.