O Klodi

The sonnet, a unique literary form that had been submitted to passionate and diligent use during the Elizabethan period, is remarkable as much for its expository as it is for its performative dimension. Paul Oppenheimer sees the invention of the sonnet as a “momentous event” and asserts that “the sonnet’s mysterious aesthetic perfection probably amounts in importance to the revelation” (290): for it is difficult to bring an account of the affective obsession that major poets had with it without figurative recourse to the language of faith and value.

The expository dimension of the sonnet develops primarily by its structure. This poetic form consists of fourteen lines and has a well defined rhyme scheme and structure that presents, presumably, an inciting challenge, for everything one has to say should conform to the sonnet’s template. Its first eight lines, or the octave, should expose the issue at hand; stating a problem, posing a question, intimating an emotional tenseness, while the remaining six lines or the sestet should present a change, a turn-the volta- and usually resolving the tension or giving an answer in the last couplet. The sonnet- more precisely the Elizabethan sonnet- thus persists as the sign of the matter it initiates. Often concerned with unrequited love -amorous or religious- the first part of the sonnet, the octave; featured as an inspired minimal prologue reminiscent of the chorus, introduces a charged mood of sentiment or thought or both through a visionary posture. In his sonnet XXXIV Edmund Spencer writes

Lyke as a ship, that through the Ocean wyde,

by conduct of some star doth make her way,

wheras a storme hath dimd her trusty guyde,

out of her course doth wander far astray,

So I whose star, that wont with her bright ray,

me to direct, with cloudes is ouer-cast,

doe wander now, in darknesse and dismay,

through hidden perils round about me plast. (865)

The epic simile constructed through the first three verses of the above fragment- placed in a genetically lyrical poem as the sonnet, it already informs about its generic capacities-sketches the gravity of an ongoing personal drama; the speaker is not only stricken by a terrible distress, whose guidance is “with cloudes ouer-cast” and moves “in darknesse and dismay”, he, most importantly, stresses the inability to think, to “see”, he is lost like a ship that “wonders far astray” seeming to fear for his life, or at least his intellectual life as “hidden perils round about plast”. Again, the extended simile contrasts with the swift rhythm set by other devices such as the occasional inverse and the obligatory rhyme scheme; a contrast that subtly incorporates the distress in the text itself. That is, it transcends the description, is embedded into the nature of the narrative-which is the other way for the sonnet to actualize its different expository possibilities. This peculiar sensibility generates for the reader a sense of unusual expectation for the prospect of a release, of a closure, or disclosure for that matter. Yet, that very ability to articulate that condition, of being “in darknesse and dismay”, paradoxically testifies to the contrary of its meaning. The speaker is not only capable to fully understand, (despite the message of his rhetoric) his perfectly rhymed discourse and by the means of that very same rhetoric, we become aware of the conceivable perception that the speaker is not lost; he possess admirable lucidity, which in its turn seems to serve a concrete purpose, moving him not “astray” but towards the object of his dictum, his addressee. In this sense-but not only- the sonnet concretizes its performative function, which finds a better expression in terms of verifiability in the second part of the sestet.

Yet hope I well, that when this storme is past,

My Helice the lodestar of my lyfe

will shine again, and looke on my

with louely light to cleare my cloudy grief.

Till then I wander carefull comfortlesse,

in secret sorrow and sad pensiuenesse. (865)

The first line of the sestet introduces a significant change, the speaker-partially and temporally nullifying the gloom and loss with which he vested his situation in the first part-claims to have a good “hope” that the “loadstar will shine again” and free him from his “cloudy grief’ but at the same time confesses his “hope” to be somehow delusional, saying, as he does, that it brings no comfort to him and leaves him “sad”, casting thus doubts about the truthfulness of his very assertion. This apparent contradiction informs about a mind-game, the play – the theatrical sense of the word included – of seduction, which utterances are always ambiguous and agreeable, ironic and alluring, attributes which constitute another instance of the performative function while the expository value of the sonnet in the sestet is measured and reinforced by a perceived sincerity of avowal – the supposed surrender to one’s own fate or acknowledging a sort of some assumed wise “misery”, whereas this is to be understood as furthering his plea. Hence, both these functions compliment one another in a symbiotic fashion being at the same time a sign of presence and constructed absence-the love object exalted above one’s reach-correlated within and through the form of the sonnet they enable the speaker to relate a truth that seems accessible only by their means, which value accrues by the transcendence of the status of the mere “poem.” The sonnet thus becomes by its own artifice not only complete but also the sign of what is not there. The same can be observed for most of the Elizabethan sonnets. Philip Sidney with his 6th sonnet seems to have a similar understanding of the form when he writes

Some louers speake, when they their Muses entertaine, Of

hopes begot by feare, ofwot not what desires,

Of force of heau’nly beames infusing hellish paine,

Of liuing deaths, dere wounds, faire storms, and freesing fires:

Some one his song in Joue and Joues strange tales attires,

Bordred with buls and swans, powdred with golden raine:

Another, humbler wit, to shepherds pipe retires,

Yet hiding royall bloud full oft in rurall vaine.

To some a sweetest plaint a sweetest stile affords:

While teares poure out his inke, and sighes breathe out his words, His

paper pale despaire, and pain his pen doth moue.

I can speake what I feele, and feele as much as they,

But thinke that all the map of my state I display

When trembling voyce brings forth, that I do Stella loue. (918)

The octave here enumerates and describes some of the motives, the reasons and the styles one employs to write about love, but the speaker here differentiates between himself and the others implementing at first a sad and yet sharp irony that spirals in an increasing scale. He says “Some loures speak, when they their Muses entertain” thus undermining the seriousness of their discourse or its significance as they do not speak but of “wot not what desires”. The series of oxymorons “Of liuing deaths, dere wounds, faire storms, and freesing fires” although a conventional figure of Petrarchan tradition to which Sidney adheres, here are used with a negative charge, the irony in this instance borders the sardonic and culminates in sheer sarcasm when he mentions the poets that find inspiration in ” … Jove’s strange tales/ Broidered with bulls and swans … ” and finishes with the “humbler wit” of the pastoral. He obviously speaks of the sonnet and of himself-and possibly for the best of the Italian and English tradition-in the sestet when he writes “To some a sweetest plaint a sweetest style does afford”, in other words there is no other form to write of one’s love pains as appropriate as the sonnet and that the best- in love and talent- practice this particular form. This valorization pursues the same end as in the Spencer’s sonnet, it is a call on the addressee, marked by frustration because of a perceived failure on its part to acknowledge that this prescribed form can transcribe the real “matter” of desire: the investment of spiritual value that makes it matter exceptionally, that shapes the compulsions and obsessions of the poet. And it is, of course, the very absence of the real disclosure that announces what is missing, as here again, the speaker dismisses with a stroke what he has expounded declaring that “all the map of my state I display/ when trembling voice brings forth that I do Stella love”. The sonnet itself meanwhile serves as a paradoxical but nonetheless substantial proof of the contrary, that those only words “I love Stella” do not “map his state”. Apparently the sonnet does.

A form of negation through contrast, juxtaposition, or antithesis seems to be always present in the Elizabethan sonnet either directly expressed or subtly implied. Perhaps a very eloquent expression of this can be observed in Shakespeare’s 35th sonnet.

No more be grieved at that which thou hast done:

Roses have thoms, and silver fountains mud:

Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,

And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.

All men make faults, and even I in this,

Authorizing thy trespass with compare,

Myselfcorrupting, salving thy amiss,

Excusing thy sins more than thy sins are;

For to thy sensual fault I bring in sense,

Thy adverse party is thy advocate,

And ‘gainst myself a lawful plea commence:

Such civil war is in my love and hate,

That I an accessary needs must be,

To that sweet thief which sourly robs from me.

The octave here seem to stress the idea that perfection is impossible in nature, thus, one can always look at the possibility of forgiving oneself or accept to live with his or her shortcomings as there are no “roses [that] have [not] thorns”. But the same philosophy does not seem to apply to the speaker, who recognizing his contradictory feelings dramatically worded as a “civil war”of “love and hate” confesses to help a cause that works against him being an “accessory” to the “thief that robs him” of that very same perfection he views as unnatural. Yet again he chooses a form that demands perfection, as the sonnet is, to express all this. Thus, the contrast, once more, relies here on two levels; first on the difference created between the octave and the sestet, underneath the apparent similarities, the parallels between the comparisons do not have the same sign. The examples of the octave are meant to induce forgiveness and understanding, while the line of the sestet “Thy adverse party is thy advocate” seems distressing and saddening for the speaker because it is something that brings “war’ within his mind and not peace. Secondly the contrast is constructed on the form of the poem itself and its content. In this sense the sonnet through its structure and restrictions that determine its mode of expression becomes at the same time the “matter” it contends to expose and the reflection of its absence.

The sonnet in a way announces what is missing, assuming a sensibility that it originally attempted to discern, something about the formal matrix which the sonnet constitutes as refuge form the vicissitudes of temporality and space, imprisoning and at the same time fashioning the thought within and according its limited textual precinct. In Opennheimer words “the sonnet, like the profoundest of small mirrors, still plumbs the depths of our best poets richest gifts, and it is probably what the literary historian think of first when he thinks of secure and enduring forms in poetry”.