Amos Alcott - Sonnets and Canzonets

It may be complained that these sonnets lack variety. This is indeed a fault into which sonneteers often fall, – our best collection of American sonnets hitherto – those of Jones Very – being open to this censure. It will be found, perhaps, that the sameness of rhyme and thought is often but an appearance, – the delicate shade of meaning being expressed, in a vocabulary of no large extent, by a rare process of combining and collocating words. Certain phrases recur, too, because the thought necessarily recurs, – as when the oratory of Phillips and of Parker, as of others, is characterized by the general term, eloquence . In the poverty of our language, there is no other term to use, while the qualifying words and their connection sufficiently distinguish between one person and another. The critical are referred to Homer, who never fails to repeat the same word, or the same verse, when it comes in his way to do so.

But to return to the sonnet itself. Landor, to whom as to Thoreau, Milton was the greatest English poet, thought that the blind Puritan had made good his offence against the Psalms of David, by the sonnet on the slaughtered saints of Piedmont. “Milton,” he says, “was never half so wicked a regicide as when he lifted up his hand and smote King David. He has atoned for it, however, by composing a magnificent psalm of his own, in the form of a sonnet. There are others in Milton comparable to it, but none elsewhere.” And then the wilful critic goes on to say, putting his words into the mouth of Porson: “In the poems of Shakespeare, which are printed as sonnets, there is sometimes a singular strength and intensity of thought, with little of that imagination which was afterward to raise him highest in the universe of poetry. Even the interest we take in the private life of this miraculous man, cannot keep the volume in our hands long together. We acknowledge great power, but we experience great weariness. Were I a poet, I would much rather have written the ‘Allegro,’ or the ‘Penseroso’ than all those.” Monstrous as this comment seems to us, there is a certain truth in it, the sonnet in large quantities always producing weariness; for which reason, as I suppose, Dante interspersed his love sonnets in the “Vita Nuova” and the “Convito,” with canzonets and ballads. His commentaries – often of a singular eloquence – also serve as a relief to the formal verse, as his melodious Tuscan lines do to the formality of his poetical metaphysics. A person, says Landor, “lately tried to persuade me that he is never so highly poetical, as when he is deeply metaphysical. He then quoted fourteen German poets of the first order, and expressed his compassion for Æschylus and Homer.” Dante’s metaphysics were of a higher cast, and so interfused with love and fair ladies, that they only weary us with a certain perplexity as to where are the limits of courtship and of logic. Mr. Alcott also is quaintly metaphysical in Dante’s fashion; like the sad old Florentine, but with a more cheerful spirit, he addresses himself

and would fain inquire of those who go on a pilgrimage of Love (O voi che per la via d’Amor passate) and of the fair ladies who have learned love at first hand (Donne che avete intelletto d’amore.) His doctrine is that of the wise man whom Dante quotes and approves in the “Vita Nuova,” —

Other Americans have written sonnets in this ancient faith, – as he, who thus (in that happy season so aptly described by Mr. Alcott, as addressed his own cor gentil : —

addressed his own cor gentil: —

In the same Italian vein, another and better poet, but with less warmth, touches the same theme, —

In the changes of time and the fitful mood of the poet, sadness succeeds to this assured joy, and he sings, —

Here is another voice, chanting in another strain, —

Out of this valley of sadness the spirit rises on bolder wing, as the melancholy mood passes away, —

Here, as Landor said, “is a sonnet, and the sonnet admits not that approach to the prosaic which is allowable in the ballad.” For this reason Mr. Alcott, who began his poetical autobiography, when he was eighty years old, in a ballad measure, has now passed into the majesty of the sonnet, as he has come to those passages of life which will not admit prosaic treatment. Moderately used, and not worked to death, as Wordsworth employed it, the sonnet is a great uplifter of poesy. It calls to the reader, as the early Christian litanies did to the worshipper, Sursum corda , Raise your thoughts! The canzonet lets us down again into the pathetic, the humorous, or the fanciful, – though in this volume the canzonet generally betokens sadness. It may easily become an ode, as in the verses on Garfield: indeed the ode may be considered as an extended canzonet, or the canzonet as a brief ode. It is the sonnet that chiefly concerns us now, and that form of the sonnet which deals with love; since the germ of this book was a romance of love, seeking to express itself in the uplifting strain and tender cadence of successive sonnets; which lead us though green pastures and beside the still waters, and then to the shore of the resounding sea, – itself worthy of a sonnet which I have somewhere heard: —