Make an assessment of the development of
the sonnet form in England focusing on the
Elizabethan sonnets in your syllabus.
Sonnet is considered
by many a perfect flower in the garden of lyrical poetry. However, Sonnet in
English literature is a foreign importation. The term sonnet has come from the
Italian “Sonnetto” means a song. It originated in Italy. It is flourished in
the master hands of Petrarch, Dante and Tasso. It is a short lyrical poem of
fourteen lines, with a special arrangement for rhyme. It is complete in itself
and expresses in condensed form one thing, one idea or one emotion. It is
divided into two parts, the first eight lines form the octave with the rhyme
scheme ‘abba’ , ‘abba’ , the last six lines from sestet , and they rhymed
variously as ‘cdecde , cd , cd , cd , or cdedec’. The theme or emotion in
most cases is love and its varied moods. And somewhere in the sonnet,
mostly between octave and sestet, there remain a volta or
jump of thought.
During the early 15th
century, it peeps through the English shore. The great sonneteers of the
Elizabethan era were Sir Thomas Wyatt, Earl of Surrey, Philip Sydney, Michael
Drayton, Samuel Daniel, Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare.
Sir Thomas Wyatt:-Sir Thomas Wyatt is the innovative Sonnet writer in
English literature. His thirty one sonnets are noteworthy. They appeared
in Tottel’s Miscellany published on 1557. Ten of these sonnets
were the translation from Petrarch. Apart from couplet ending, which
Wyatt introduced, it had a Petrarchan model. Even though
following Petrarch’s models closely, he remains the pioneer in the realm of
English literature in his own art of presentation and imagery.
