“The first of all the rout was sound,
The next were dust and flame,
And then the horses shook the ground:
And in the thick of them
A still band came.”
Nearly a third of Mr. Rosetti's volume consists of sonnets. Now, a sonnet should be grave but not heavy. It must have a severity tempered by sweetness like the breviary character of the Venerable Bede. It must linger meditatively; it must not loiter, or fumble with its meaning. It must be sinuous, never headlong; feeling its rhymes delicately, not falling upon them; for these are less rhymes than the most prominent of many assonances, upon all of which the rhythm hangs. Indeed, the texture of the sonnet resembles more that of blank-verse than that of any other metre we possess. Without denying the perfection of some two or three of Milton's sonnets, and perhaps in a lesser degree of about as many of Wordsworth's, we may be permitted to say that among our sonnet-writers Milton, as a general rule, is too fierce and headlong, as Wordsworth says of him, in words of praise which to our ears suggest blame. In his hands, “the thing became a trumpet”; whilst [pg 271] Wordsworth has too poor a vocabulary for a composition in which every word ought to tell. Shakespeare's sonnets are only sonnets in name. They do not fall into two, or rather one and a half, like an acorn and its cup, but are simply short poems of three independent stanzas of alternate rhymes, the whole concluding with a rhyming couplet. The Elizabethan writers who used the genuine sonnet—Sidney, Spenser, Drummond, especially the last—attained, we cannot help thinking, to a more exquisite use of the sonnet than either Milton or Wordsworth, although the beauty of their sonnets is somewhat marred by the twanging effect of the concluding rhyming couplet to which they persistently cling. Many of Mr. Rosetti's sonnets strike us not only as beautiful poems, but as very finished specimens of the sonnet. He seems to have attained to the Italian delicacy of the best of the Elizabethan sonneteers, without loss of originality and force. He is, however, perhaps rather too fond of fretting the melody of his lines by a harsh emphasis, which, effective enough in a liquid medium like Italian, is rather trying to the naturally broken music of the English tongue. An example of this may be noted in the sixth line of the following very beautiful sonnet. He has called it “Inclusiveness”—a title with which we venture to quarrel, for the phenomenon described is not a quality of anything, but a fact or law; we would substitute, in spite of its technical flavor, “Introsusception.”
“The changing guests, each in a different mood
Sit at the roadside table and arise:
And every life among them in like wise
Is a soul's board set daily with new food.