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- .pl 11
- .hd
- \.col
- """"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
- .col
- |Lit crit
-
- \
- .ft
- /
-
- .col
- |(C) ALLaski 1988
-
- /
- .cpi 10 7 73
- .parind 8
- .parsep 0
- .fj
- .// .\ \P These two require a suitable configuration for
- .// .jgfj proportionally spaced characters.
-
- The two main forms of the sonnet present rather different problems and
- possibilities to the poet.\J The more technically difficult is the older,
- brought over from the Italian by two poet\-diplomats, \U}Sir Thomas Wyatt\V and the
- \U}Earl of Surrey\V, who had found it in the work of Petrach and translated
- quantities of his sonnets into English, getting into some difficulties in the
- process because English is a language which does not rhyme as easily as
- Italian. \E}In spite of the difficulties\F, the form became popular; most young
- poets took it up, and the boldest of them, always prepared to make innovations
- if he felt the need of them, revised the form to diminish the technical
- difficulties, and gave us the \E}Shakespearean\F sonnet, one which uses
- \I}seven\J rhymes, and so ends with a couplet which usually turns or clinches
- the argument of the preceeding three stanzas.
-
- .point 6
- .cpi 17 18 90
- .parind 0
- .parsep 1
- .sp 8
- .nofj
- .makel poem
- \IShall I compare thee to a summer's day?
- Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
- Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May
- And summer's lease hath far too short a date.
- Sometimes too hot the eye of Heaven shines
- And often is his fair complexion dimm'd
- And every fair from fair sometimes declines
- By chance and Nature's changing force untrimm'd.
- But thy eternal summer shall not fade
- Nor lose perfection of that fair thou owest
- Nor shall Death boast thou wander'st in his shade
- When in eternal lines to time thou growest.
- So long as men can read and eyes can see
- So long lives this and this gives life to thee.\J
- .// .port For future development Portrait/landscape
- .usel base
-
- It will be seen that this, though usually printed as a solid block of verse,
- consists of three stanzas rhyming \I}abab cdcd efef\J, followed by a couplet
- \Igg\J. The poet only needs to find one pair of rhymes at any point, so reducing
- to a minimum the more mechanical part of the exercise, the search for rhymes.
- However, the challenge of managing to work in a confined form and to find a
- tightly limited number of rhymes and still produce a fine poem continued to
- appeal to poets, and so we find first \I}Milton\J and later \IWordsworth\J
- persisting in using the more technically demanding \E}Petrachan\F form.
-
- .usel poem
- \E}Earth hath not anything to show more fair!
- Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
- A sight so touching in its majesty.
- This city now doth like a garment wear
- The beauty of the morning. Silent, bare,
- Domes, churches, spires and citadels do lie
- Open unto the fields and to the sky,
- All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
-
- \I}Never did sun more beautifully steep
- In his first glory valley, dale and hill.
- Ne'er saw I, never felt a calm so deep.
- The river glideth at his own sweet will.
- Dear God! The very houses seem asleep
- And all that mighty heart is lying still.\F\J
-
- .usel base
-
- Here Wordsworth is working with only four rhymes in his fourteen lines, a very
- much tougher proposition; the standard pattern of this kind of sonnet is to
- have \I}eight\J lines (the octave) rhyming \I}abbaabba\J, and then, usually introducing
- a new thought, the final \I}six\J lines (the sestet) consisting of two or three
- rhymes, arranged in a number of possible ways, but avoiding a final couplet
- because of confusion with the Shakespearean form.
-
- One cannot help noticing that in this fine sonnet, the exigencies of the rhyme
- make Wordsworth do some awkward things - using the weak "y" sound of "majesty"
- as a rhyme for "by" is simply a technical awkwardness, the line itself
- remaining a good one, but "The river glideth at his own sweet will", when
- coldly considered, seems to be a line without much meaning, forced on
- Wordsworth by the need to get one more rhyme for "hill" and "still".
-
-
- .stop Print Commentary
- .setst :^| : Remove the ^s if not ^<124> to |
- .setend : ^|:
- .nopind
- This demonstrates the user\-set layout 'poem' and the implicitly set layout
- 'base'; 'poem' differs from 'base' with respect to margins, paragraph
- indentation, paragraph spacing and line spacing, although this latter will not
- show up on the screen. Since the directives for 'poem' have taken effect
- before the ".SETL poem", there is no need to use a directive to put 'poem'
- into effect. I usually define the layouts to be used in the prologue, see
- exalien, but this is a simple example in which I wanted to show as clearly as
- possible what was going on.
-
- ".USEL base" returns to the original setting. The next poem is JGprinted in the
- poem layout, reinstated by the directive ".PUSHL poem", and 'base' is reinstated
- by ".POPL". This way avoids mention of 'base', returning to the preceeding
- layout. This can be useful in larger contexts, but here has no significant
- advantage over the use of .USEL]
-
- The poet's names are underlined, and the names of the sonnets Emphasised, purely
- for demonstration purposes. \S}Here is some subscript \R}and some superscript\T
- too. Note that the bars at each end of the line will also be printed
- sub/super-script, which does not come out on the screen.