Sonnets – Page 2 – Interesting Literature

10 Classic Examples of the Sonnet Form

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The sonnet form is one of the oldest and most popular poetic forms in European literature, having been invented in the thirteenth century and used since by poets as varied as Petrarch, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Tony Harrison, Carol Ann Duffy, and Simon Armitage.

Below, we offer ten of the finest examples of the sonnet form as it’s been practised in literature, especially English literature – although we begin with an Italian example.

A Short Analysis of William Wordsworth’s ‘Scorn Not the Sonnet’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The sonnet was popular among the Romantic poets. John Keats wrote many, including the celebrated ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’; Shelley gave us ‘Ozymandias’; and a pioneering female poet, Charlotte Turner Smith, was both a proto-Romantic poet and the person often credited with causing a revival of the sonnet among English poets.

A Short Analysis of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella 41: ‘Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Written in the early 1580s, Astrophil and Stella is the first substantial sonnet sequence in English literature, and sees Sidney exploring his own life-that-might-have-been with Penelope Rich (whom he turned down), through the invented semi-autobiographical figures of ‘Astrophil’ (‘star-lover’) and ‘Stella’ (‘star’). Sonnet 41, which begins ‘Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance’, may have been inspired by a real-life tournament at Whitehall in May 1581, and sees Astrophil attributing his success as a jouster and horseman to Stella, who ‘Sent forth the beams which made so fair my race.’

‘To Sleep’: A Poem by John Keats

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘To Sleep’, a sonnet by one of the leading second-generation Romantic poets, John Keats (1795-1821), addresses sleep as a ‘soft embalmer of the still midnight’. Sleep allows us to escape our own minds, when one’s conscience begins to prick us, keeping us awake. Sleep wraps us up in lovely delicious rest, and allows us to forget the world.

To Sleep

O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleas’d eyes, embower’d from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close
In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,
Or wait the ‘Amen,’ ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities.

‘I dream of you, to wake’: A Poem by Christina Rossetti

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘I dream of you, to wake’ is a sonnet by the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti (1830-94). Although not one of her most famous poems, it’s a marvellous sonnet: addressed to the speaker’s lover, and contrasting the wonderful, perfect dream world that sleep brings with the less perfect reality that we wake to (hence ‘I dream of you, to wake’). If only she could dream all the time, then things would be all right!

‘I dream of you, to wake’ by Christina Rossetti

I dream of you, to wake: would that I might
Dream of you and not wake but slumber on;
Nor find with dreams the dear companion gone,
As, Summer ended, Summer birds take flight.
In happy dreams I hold you full in night.
I blush again who waking look so wan;
Brighter than sunniest day that ever shone,
In happy dreams your smile makes day of night.