Oxford Book of Sonnets

Ed. John Fuller
Oxford University Press, 2000

Sonnets are love. Love, if correctly administered, should involve sonnets. That has always been my impression, at least. They are the domain of courtly lovers gazing into the sunset and thinking of an unattainable prize; of romantic messages written in tears with a fine quill on scented paper; that sort of thing. They are the poetic equivalent of roses and an invitation to a candlelit dinner. For the Elizabethans at least - notably Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare and Samuel Daniel - the sonnet was the ideal medium for poems of love about idealised beauty. These men defined the form in England, following Petrarch and the early 16th century poems of Englishmen Wyatt and Surrey. The woman written about would not always be someone the poet knew, and more often than not would be a work of fiction. Even Petrarch's Laura was not necessarily an actual person. In their sequences of poetry the aforementioned writers attempted to seal the image of the beloved forever in words ("My verse your virtues rare shall eternise / And in the heavens write your glorious name" as Spenser put it), cataloguing her qualities over the course of numerous metaphors and conceits.

The Oxford Book of Sonnets, while having much the same purpose as Spenser, Sidney, Drayton and the rest (to compile images of beauty; to profess love - this book is an ideal gift and has clearly been designed as such) does not give the reader the same kind of experience as a sonnet sequence does. The poems run chronologically by author to make "historical development perfectly plain to the attentive reader". This seems to be firstly a mistake and secondly a nonsense. The historical development is not pronounced. Robert Frost's sonnets could date from the early 1600s but do not, while the later 20th century examples bear no resemblance to early sonnets whatsoever in style or subject matter. Similarly, the attempt to rectify the "neglect" of comic and satiric sonnets is frustrating. Certainly, by offering us Thomas Hood's "Literary Reminiscences" and Charles Cotton's "Four Rural Sisters", the editor shows that it is not impossible to write something funny in fourteen lines. He confirms that it is merely gimmicky.

Further, it is a frustration to read only selected sonnets out of Sidney's "Astrophel and Stella", and absurd that only one of Daniel's wonderful "To Delia" is included. However, a choice had to be made and usually many of the best appear where there have been hundreds to choose from. The sheer eroticism of Spenser's Amoretti still astounds, even in the five poems here; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's honesty and plain language come across extremely well here. This is a pick and mix, though. So, we get the popular and predictable poems (Shakespeare's "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day", Shelley's "Ozymandias") but we also get Barnabe Barnes' "Jove for Europa's love took the shape of a bull", which imagines the poet transformed into wine so it may pass through his beloved's body and out again "by pleasure's part". The contrasting styles are intriguing but play against the concept of the sonnet as a form for the transmission of loving feeling which is something of a shame but quite enjoyable nonetheless.

There are simply too many different authors and poems here to give a sense of the general tone, but that is the delight of this book. John Fuller achieves his aim of proving the diverse possibilities of the sonnet form, even if not all the examples he gives are successful. It is good to see Larkin and Lowell compiled together, and Yeats' violent "Leda and the Swan" in the same book as Christopher Reid's whimsical "At the Wrong Door". The initial qualms about particular choices or the fact that modern authors get only one poem each soon fade and it is apparent that this book is a treasure trove of short, often beautiful and inevitably concise poems. In the words of George Chapman's sonnet, this kind of poetry consists of "Teaching by passion what perfection is". It does so with the style and grace only a sonneteer can conjure.

Read the classic Quiller-Couch edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse on Bibliomania.