Intollerably so struggling, and so shamed;
Most holy and far, if you’d come all too near,
If earth had seen Earth’s lordliest wild limbs tamed,
Shaken, and trapped, and shivering, for my touch—
Myself should I have slain? or that foul you?
But this the strange gods, who had given so much,
To have seen and known you, this they might not do.
One last shame’s spared me, one black word’s unspoken;
And I’m alone; and you have not awoken.
It is significant that for his sonnets Mr. Brooke frequently chooses the Shakesperian form,—a form which, strangely, English poets have generally for at least a century discarded in favor of the Petrarchan model. The common feeling appears to be that the Petrarchan (a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a, c-d-e-c-d-e or some variation on that scheme) is musical and emotional; and that the Shakesperian (a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g) is harsh, cold, mechanical, and incapable of subtle harmonies. The exact reverse of this is the case. It is perhaps too much to ask the reader to write a sequence of a hundred sonnets in each form, as a test; but I am confident that after such an experience, he would agree with me. The Petrarchan form is capable of only one successful effect; a rising on the crest of a wave, whose summit is the end of the eighth line; and a subsidence of the wave, in the course of the last six lines. The Shakesperian form, on the other hand, is capable of a literally infinite variety of effects: no pattern is set arbitrarily in advance, but, as in blank verse, any pattern may be created. The first twelve lines—which are nothing but three quatrains—can be moulded into a contour that fits any shape or size of thought whatsoever; and the couplet at the end—a device despised by the ignorant—may be used either to clinch the purport of the preceding twelve lines, or to blend with them, or startlingly to refute them, or to serve any other end that the genius of the writer is capable of imagining. The mere novice will like this form because of its simple rhyme-scheme and its superficial ease of working; the experienced amateur will prefer the Petrarchan form because, while the more complex rhyme-scheme presents for him no difficulties, the basic inadequacies of his thought-structure are fairly well concealed by the arbitrary sonnet-structure; but the master of imagination and expression is likely to follow Shakespeare and the novice in preferring the true English form, wherein he can with perfect freedom create a subtly modulated movement that will answer to every sway and leap of his thought. Mr. Brooke, whose sense of form is keen, is one of those who can safely and wisely try the more interesting and more dangerous medium.