Of variable rhyme scheme and meter, sonnets are
sometimes structured into stanzas of an octet and a sestet or of three quartets
and a concluding couplet. They are normally fourteen lines long, though always
with a concluding volta,
the rhetorical turn that gives the sonnet its reputation for surprise, rigor,
and elegance.
In lyric intensity, in density of imagery and turn of
phrase, a sonnet is instantly recognizable. The professor of comparative
medieval literature Paul Oppenheimer, writing in Comparative Literature, explains that
sonnets are highly dialectical, whereby an issue (often concerning romantic
love) is posed, but the “form of the poem will solve the problem,” a form
somewhere between a poem and a syllogism.
There
are structural variations: the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet; the English or
Shakespearean sonnet; Edmund Spenser and Alexander Pushkin both invented their
own types, and there are any number of deviations, a flexibility that proves
their enduring appeal. Oppenheimer argues that the “invention of the sonnet was
a momentous event,” as “no major poet… in Italian, German, French, Spanish, and
English has failed to write sonnets.” And as Christopher Kleinhenz notes in the
edited collection Francis Petrarch, Six Centuries Later: A Symposium:
“750 years after its appearance, the sonnet still has the same basic form.”
Kleinhenz writes: “For centuries the sonnet has
remained the most popular and the most difficult poetic form in Western
literature,” with few canonical poets since the Renaissance completely avoiding
them. The endurance of the fourteen lines is startling, though a return to its
complex origins almost a millennium ago provides a fuller understanding of its
appeal. The sonnet, as it turns out, is many things; not least of which is a
lesson in the complexity of societies and souls.
With
good reason the fourteenth-century Tuscan poet Petrarch is the sonnet’s
exemplar. In fact, he’s often erroneously understood as its creator. Petrarch
penned Il Canzoniere,
a sequence of 366 poems—the vast majority of which are sonnets—dedicated to his
idealized love Laura de Noves. Petrarch’s vision appeared bold, new, and
uncompromising, whereby he would declare in Sonnet 105 of Il Canzoniere: “Understand me who can, for I
understand myself”—a full-throated affirmation of radical individuality.
Though he was an inhabitant of the Middle Ages,
Petrarch’s mind was of the Renaissance: the primogeniture of that era. “The
early humanists universally regarded Francesco Petrarch as their founder,”
writes Robert E. Proctor in Renaissance Quarterly. In his
enthusiasms for travel, classical writing, and individual expression, Petrarch
was a vital advocate for the pedagogical reform movement known as humanism.
The fusion of aesthetics and erudition known as
Petrarchism was foundational, for, as Oppenheimer argues, the “invention of the
sonnet may possess an even greater importance: it may mark the beginnings of
what we must mean by ‘modern’ poetry.” Petrarch didn’t invent the sonnet,
however, for that honor is owed to an obscure (though brilliant) poet named
Giacomo da Lentini, who was a notary for King Frederick II of Sicily, writing
nearly a century before the celebrated Tuscan. If the sonnet was a mechanism
for creating modernity, then da Lentini is the engineer whom we must credit.
And yet even the most adept of engineers must draw from materials not of their
own crafting.
I’ve
seen it rain on sunny days
And seen the darkness flash with light
And even lightning turn to haze.
So
writes da Lentini in a sonnet translated by Leo Zoutewelle. While da Lentini
doesn’t reach the heights that we associate with Petrarch and Shakespeare, the
hallmarks are all there. Structured as an octet combined with a sestet, and
already with the characteristic volta which
mimics a mind in argument with itself, da Lentini engages a series of
contradictions, of “sweet things [that] taste of bitterness” and “enemies their
love confess,” but by the volta, these paradoxes are set in perspective by the
even “stranger things I’ve seen of love.” The paradoxes are never reconciled—if
anything, each line is a tiny dialectic—such as when da Lentini writes of that
which “healed my wounds by wounding me” and of being “saved from love, [though]
love now burns more.”
These
contradictions aren’t resolved, even as da Lentini moves from investigating the
physical world (sunny days, light, frozen snow, etc.) to love. Central to the
sonnet is that mystery, for as incongruous as sweet things being bitter might
be, stranger still is love. Though a Christian gloss could be provided, there
is a surprisingly secular feel, with Oppenheimer arguing that the “sonnet must
itself be considered symptomatic of the slowly developing state of mind that we
designate by the term ‘Renaissance.’”
The Sicilian School of poets had several traditions to
draw from. Because “sonnet” roughly translates to “song,” even though it’s
believed that few lyrics were ever actually set to music, scholars have
searched for the form’s origin beyond poetry. The most obvious candidate is the
eight-line strambotto,
a peasant song to which may have been added a sestet.
There
are also non-Western candidates, with scholars having long suspected that da
Lentini drew from Arabic poetry. This was unsurprising, for Sicily was at the
confluence of the known world. By the thirteenth century, Sicily had had
periods of rule by the Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals,
Ostrogoths, Byzantines, Arabs, and Normans, with strong cultural influence from
all of them. Buffeted between the Latin West, the Byzantine East, and the
Islamic world, the Kingdom of Sicily was ruled over by Frederick, a Swabian
German, who established a Palermo court known for its efficiency, tolerance,
and innovation. With a large population of Jews and Muslims, Arab influence
remained vital, with the Emirate of Sicily having fallen to Norman invaders
only a bit more than a century before.
The
scholar Samar Attar claims in Arab
Studies Quarterly that the “formation of Italian literary
texts between 1200 and 1400 cannot adequately be understood without reference
to the various Arabic and Islamic sources that date back to the seventh century
onwards.” Likewise, literary scholar Kamal Abu-Deeb writes in Critical Survey that the sonnet has “schemes, or
structures, that are variations… on structures of the muwashshahat produced by Arab poets,” a genre
which unlike the sonnet is traditionally set to music, while Oppenheimer notes
that several scholars have argued that the form “derived from the Arab zajal, a
rhyming stanza popular with the Arabs living in Sicily in Giacomo’s time.”
Even more evocative than the morphological
similarities are the thematic ones; with its volta,
the sonnet mirrors the dialectic argumentation that marked Islamic and Jewish
philosophy, and in its celebration of secular love there are antecedents in
Sufism. “The idea that a beloved woman can be the manifestation of divinity or
the emanation of God was acceptable among the Arabs much earlier before the
thirteenth century” writes Attar. In short, Petrarch’s Laura has Islamic
precedents.
There
is the potential for other idiosyncratic influences on the sonnet. From 1209 to
1229 the town of Albi in Languedoc faced a bloody crusade waged by the Church
against a group of Christian heretics known as Cathars (though sometimes
referred to as Albigensians, after the seat of their movement). Much
romanticized in the ensuing centuries, the neo-gnostic Cathars promulgated a
gospel that saw the material world as evil, argued that the universe was
dualistically split between good and evil, extolled the equivalence of the
sexes, and celebrated Platonic spiritual union (including a belief in
reincarnation).
The
Cathars shared their Occitan tongue (closely related to both French and
Catalan) with the troubadours, a movement of poet-performers who set their
verse to music. There is academic disagreement about the relationship between
the Cathars and the Languedoc troubadours, but some scholars argue that the
latter were the artistic vanguard of the former, with Michael Bryson and Arpi
Movesian in Love and its Critics: From the Song of Songs to
Shakespeare and Milton’s Eden arguing that “the
massacres that followed affected the poetry of the thirteenth century. No
longer were poets free to flout the morality of the Church without
trepidation.” The result was that later troubadour poetry encoded Cathar
beliefs rather than explicitly expressing them.
From
French Provence, many refugees from the destruction of Catharism made their way
across the Mediterranean at the invitation of Frederick, and they may have
influenced the nascent sonneteers. Writing in Speculum,
the poetry scholar Elias L. Rivers declares that there is a “consensus with
regard to most poetry of the Sicilian School, namely that the concept of love
on which these sonnets are based is in general the same as that of the
Provencal troubadours: the poet ‘serves’ his lady as a vassal.”
A tradition of idealized platonic love, so identified
with Medieval poetry, finds its way into the early sonnets through Islamic and
troubadour influence. Elias confidently declares that the “newly invented
sonnet form so shaped, and merged with, the subject-matter of the troubadours
as to constitute a coherent poetic genre of great vitality.”
On the other hand, in Parrots and Nightingales: Troubadour Quotations and the
Development of European Poetry, the French literature scholar
Sarah Kay asserts that there was a “gradual take-up of troubadour inspired
poetry among… writers of the Sicilian school.” While orthodox Catholics would
have blanched at the association with heresy, the rich heritage of Occitan
poetry “was acknowledged by Dante and Petrarch, who extended their indirect
influence throughout the Europe of the Renaissance,” as the editors of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics write.
So integral is the influence of Occitan upon the foundations of the sonnet that
the comparative literature scholar William D. Paden in Annali d’Italianistica quips that
he considers “Petrarch as though he were the last troubadour.”
Oppenheimer
claims that the Platonism that became foundational for Renaissance philosophy
(also crucial to Catharism) is numerically structured into the sonnet. He sees
a crucial relationship between the number of lines in the sestet, the octet,
and the twelve lines of the poem before the concluding couplet. “The
proportions 6:8 and 6:8:12 did play exceedingly interesting roles in the
history of ideas… where they describe… ‘harmonic’ proportions,” Oppenheimer
writes, because the “notion of the 6:8:12 relation as ‘harmonic’… may be found
much earlier, in the Pythagorean-Platonic theory of numbers.”
The ratio between the sestet and octet may indicate a
mystical understanding that would dominate Renaissance humanism, but arguably
even more important is what the form accomplishes—a full-throated, lyrically
compact, dialectically structured meditation on subjective consciousness.
Oppenheimer claims that for this reason the sonnet is “in a real sense, a lyric
sung by the soul to the soul” with a “mysterious aesthetic perfection… like the
profoundest of small mirrors, [which] still plumbs the depths of our best
poets’ richest gifts.”
There
is an intrinsic mystery to the attractions of those fourteen lines. In the
seventeenth-century Donne described sonnets as being like a series of “pretty
rooms.” Two centuries later and Edith Wharton would call them a “pure form…
like some chalice of old time,” and Dante Gabriel Rossetti said that sonnets
were a “moment’s monument,” while in our own century Terrance Hayes claimed
that they’re “part prison, / Part panic closet, a little room in a house set
aflame.”
The
sonnet is arguably something else as well—an ancient vehicle for ideas from a
millennium ago, an innovation of forgotten poets in the sun-dappled,
lemon-tree-filled courts of King Frederick II, his notaries working at the
crossroads of east and west, Islam and Christianity, orthodoxy and heresy, for
whom the form would function as an incubator for individuality, the lyric a
catalyst for a new way of observing. Rather than saying that the sonnet was an
exemplar of the Renaissance, it’s more accurate to say that the Renaissance was
born because of the sonnet, this perfect lyric gem of thought and experience.
JSTOR Daily
Resources
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students. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our
articles for free on JSTOR.
The Origin of the Sonnet
By:
Paul Oppenheimer
Comparative
Literature, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Autumn, 1982), pp. 289-304
Duke
University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon
The Studia Humanitatis: Contemporary Scholarship and
Renaissance Ideals
By:
Robert E. Proctor
Renaissance
Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Winter, 1990), pp. 813-818
Cambridge
University Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of America
Love and its Critics: From the Song of Songs to
Shakespeare and Milton’s Eden
By:
Michael Bryson, Arpi Movsesian
Love
and its Critics: From the Song of Songs to Shakespeare and Milton’s Eden, 576
pages
Open
Book Publishers
Petrarch as a Poet of Provence
By:
William D. Paden
Annali
d'Italianistica, Vol. 22, Francis Petrarch & the European Lyric Tradition
(2004), pp. 19-44
Arizona
State University
