Renaissance

A reading of one of the first English sonnets

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516/17-1547) was the poet who invented the Shakespearean sonnet, sometimes known as the English sonnet. It was the Earl of Surrey who made the innovation of ending the sonnet with a rhyming couplet, and in ‘The Soote Season’ he uses this to brilliant effect. This is one of the first sonnets written in English, but it’s not as well known as it perhaps should be. We think ‘The Soote Season’ is also one of the finest English poems written about summer, though it also takes in the spring season too. It was first published in English poetry’s first ever verse anthology, Tottel’s Miscellany: Songs and Sonnets of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Others (Penguin Classics), in 1557, where it appeared with the title ‘Description of Spring, wherein each thing renews, save only the lover’. Below is the poem, to which we append a few words of analysis. The poem is given in its original spelling.

The soote season, that bud and blome furth bringes,
With grene hath clad the hill and eke the vale:
The nightingale with fethers new she singes:
The turtle to her make hath tolde her tale:

Read more