Shakespeare Sonnet's in Modern English
The sonnet was originally a love poem developed by the Renaissance Italian poet, Francesco Petrarch. It is always the case with immortal writers that they invent forms in response to their strong need to express ideas and emotions for which they cannot find an existing form. Petrarch had an overwhelming need for a new way of expressing the various aspects of his love for his Laura. He adapted a mediaeval song form to his purpose and the sonnet was born. He squeezed everything he wanted to express on a particular single aspect of the love he felt into a fourteen line structure that was very concentrated and in which the rhythm and rhyme and metaphorical pattern produced a significant amount of the meaning.
The sonnet became popular with poets and the Elizabethans took it up with great enthusiasm after it was introduced into English poetry by Wyatt and Surrey. The Elizabethan poets used it to woo their mistresses and to display their poetic skills. Notable among those poets were Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney and, of course, William Shakespeare. Shakespeare was very conscious of his skill in writing sonnets and referred to it constantly in the sonnets themselves, although in a joking manner. He also referred ironically to his skills as poor, as part of his development of complex arguments. He seemed to understand, however, that his sonnets would last for as long as human beings were able to read.
The sonnet is still very much alive. John Donne, catching the spirit of the Jacobean age, with its taste for strong, logical, rational argument, found the sonnet perfect for his intellectual style, for his need to express his love for his wife, Anne, for his expression of religious passion, and for his reflections on death. As a result the sonnet came to be the obvious form for short statements on the great emotional themes, like love, death, war and religion. Poets use it to express their deepest feelings on those matters. The Victorian Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, wrote several sonnets expressing the numerous facets of his Christian faith. The Victorians liked the sonnet as much as the Elizabethans did and other great practitioners were Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Rossettis, and George Meredith. The sonnet is still in use today for powerful short poetic statements about particular aspects of those great themes. It hasn't changed all that much and the ‘Shakespearean' sonnet is still recognisable in modern poetry. American poets noted for their sonnets include Longfellow, E. A. Robinson, Elinor Wylie, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
While Shakespeare was pursuing a successful career in acting, writing plays, promoting other playwrights and managing theatres he was also writing sonnets. He wrote most of them as a young man. When he was forty-five, seven years before his death, a slim volume entitled Shake-Speares Sonnets appeared in London's two main bookshops. Although we now look back on the plays with a feeling that he said everything in them that a man might ever want to say about the world, they were not personal but written exclusively for public entertainment. The volume of sonnets was personal.
The first hundred and twenty-six sonnets in Shakespeare's volume appear to be addressed to a beautiful young man. Although there is an erotic underlying theme running through them that doesn't seem to be their main subject. They express a wide range of topics from poetry, painting and music, to nobility, the breeding of children, sexual betrayal, and the ravages of Time.
The next batch, 127 to 152, moves away from the young man to a shady, mysterious, dark woman who is fascinating but treacherous. The poet's passions become more personal and intense compared with the friendship displayed in the first batch – his adulterous obsession with her; his feelings of inadequacy; and the disgust and revulsion he feels when she proves false. Reading them through in sequence offers an awesome emotional experience.
The last two sonnets seem inconsequential. They are imitations of Greek epigrams devoted to Cupid, a young votress of the goddess Diana, and a hot therapeutic spring. At first glance they seem separate from the dark lady sonnets but they form a poetic summing up of the poet's relationship with her and the reflections on love that are dealt with in detail in the other sonnets.
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