The Sonnet
Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frown'd,
Mindless of its just honours; with this key
Shakespeare unlock'd his heart; the melody
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound;
A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound;
With it Camöens sooth'd an exile's grief;
The Sonnet glitter'd a gay myrtle leaf
Amid the cypress with which Dante crown'd
His visionary brow: a glow-worm lamp,
It cheer'd mild Spenser, call'd from Faery-land
To struggle through dark ways; and when a damp
Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand
The Thing became a trumpet; whence he blew
Soul-animating strains -- alas, too few!
Commentary
Here’s Wordsworth’s famous defence of the sonnet, followed by a playful but thought-provoking parody by Dickinson:
‘Scorn not the sonnet’ (Wordsworth)
Scorn not the sonnet on the sonnet, critic;
It is a bank where poets love to lie
And praise each other's ingenuity
In finding such a form. The analytic
Reader may stigmatise as parasitic
The mirror-image of a mystery,
The echo of lost voices, find it dry,
And intellectually paralytic.
Yet 'tis a child of Fancy, light and live,
A fragile veil of Nature, scarcely worn
(Of Wordsworth's two, of Shakespeare's none, survive);
Empty not then the vials of scorn upon it.
Nor, since we're on the subject, should you scorn
The sonnet on the sonnet on the sonnet.
- Peter Dickinson
The latter notes that Wordsworth, who wrote more than 500 sonnets in his lifetime, produced two of these ‘meta-sonnets’ (the other being ‘Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room’) and Shakespeare, who wrote 154, none at all.
Dickinson’s selection of rhymes for ‘critic’ - and the self-referential closing couplet - may raise a smile. One has to wonder what Wordsworth, ever the serious Romantic, would have made of his “parasitic ingenuity”.
— Paul
Martin adds
The final two lines of Dickinson’s parody are absolutely brilliant. I wonder why Unauthorized Versions1 didn’t pick this one up.
Links
Biography of Wordsworth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wordsworth
And of Dickinson:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Dickinson
The poem/parody theme:
Poem #376
Poem #378
Poem #380
-
an absolutely delightful anthology of poems paired with their parodies, which both Thomas and I are huge fans of. We once ran a theme based on the book (see links), which today’s pair of poems would have fitted very nicely into. ↩