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      Sonnets and Canzonets

      TO A. BRONSON ALCOTT,

      The period to which the scholar of two and eighty years belongs, is seldom that of his youngest readers: it is more likely to be the epoch of his own golden youth, when his masters were before his eyes, and his companions were the books and the friends of his heart. Thus the aged Landor could not bring his thoughts down from the grand forms of Greek and Roman literature to which they were early accustomed; he had swerved now and then from that loyalty in middle life, impressed and acted upon as he was by the great political events of the Napoleonic era, – but he returned to the epigram and the idyl in the “white winter of his age,” and the voices of the present and of the future appealed to him in vain. In the old Goethe there was something more prophetic and august; he came nearer to his contemporaries, and prepared the way for a recognition of his greatness by the generation which saw the grave close over him. In this, that strange but loyal disciple of his, the Scotch Carlyle, rendered matchless service to his master; yet he, too, in his unhappy old age, could only at intervals, and by gleams of inspiration, – as at the Edinburgh University Festival, – come into communication with the young spirits about him. To you, dear Friend and Master, belongs the rare good fortune (good genius rather) that has brought you in these late days, into closer fellowship than of yore with the active and forthlooking spirit of the time. In youth and middle life you were in advance of your period, which has only now overtaken you when it must, by the ordinance of Nature, so soon bid you farewell, as you go forward to new prospects, in fairer worlds than ours.

      It is this union of youth and age, of the past and the present – yes, and the future also – that I have admired in these artless poems, over which we have spent together so many agreeable hours. Fallen upon an age in literature when the poetic form is everywhere found, but the discerning and inventive spirit of Poesy seems almost lost, I have marked with delight in these octogenarian verses, flowing so naturally from your pen, the very contradiction of this poetic custom of the period. Your want of familiarity with the accustomed movement of verse in our time, brings into more distinct notice the genuine poetical motions of your genius. Having been admitted to the laboratory, and privileged to witness the action and reaction of your thought, as it crystallized into song, I perceived, for the first time, how high sentiment, by which you have from youth been inspired, may become the habitual movement of the mind, at an age when so many, if they live at all in spirit, are but nursing the selfish and distorted fancies of morose singularity. To you the world has been a brotherhood of noble souls, – too few, as we thought, for your companionship, – but which you have enlarged by the admission to one rank of those who have gone, and of us who remain to love you and listen to your oracles. The men and the charming women who recognized your voice when it was that of one crying in the wilderness – “Prepare ye the way of our Lord,” are joined, in your commemorative sonnets, with those who hearken to its later accents, proclaiming the same acceptable year of the Lord.

      It is the privilege of poets – immemorial and native to the clan – that they should share the immortality they confer. This right you may vindicate for your own. The honors you pay, in resounding verse, to Channing, to Emerson, to Margaret Fuller, to Hawthorne, Thoreau, and the rest of the company with whom you trod these groves, and honored these altars of the Spirit unnamed, return in their echoes to yourself. They had their special genius, and you yours no less, though it found not the same expression with theirs. We please our love with the thought that, in these sonnets and canzonets of affection, you have celebrated yourself with them; that the swift insight, the ennobling passion for truth and virtue, the high resolve, the austere self-sacrifice, the gentle submission to a will eternally right, in which these friends, so variously gifted, found a common tie, – all these are yours also, – and may they be ours! The monuments and trophies of genius are perishable, but the soul’s impression abides forever, forma mentis æterna. To that imperishable, ever-beauteous, self-renouncing, loyal, and steadfast Spirit of the Universe which we learned to worship in our youth, and which has never forsaken our age and bereavement, may these offerings, and all that we are, be consecrated now and forever!

      Concord, January 1, 1882.

      AN ESSAY

      “Scorn not the sonnet,” said Wordsworth, and then gave us at least fifty noble reasons why we should not, – for so many at least of his innumerable sonnets are above languor and indifference, and all of them above contempt. Milton was more self-restrained than Wordsworth, and wrote fewer sonnets, every one of which is a treasure, either for beauty of verse, nobility of thought, happy portraiture of persons, or quaint and savage humor, – like that on “Tetrachordon,” and the elongated sonnet in which he denounces the Presbyterians, and tells them to their face, “New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large.” Shakespeare unlocked his heart with sonnets in another key than Milton’s, – less conformed to the model of the Italian sonnet, but more in keeping with English verse, of which Shakespeare had the entire range. His sonnets are but quatrains following each other by threes, with a resounding couplet binding them together in one sheaf, and his example has made this form of the sonnet legitimate for all who write English verse, – no matter what the studious or the pedantic may say. Surrey also, who first used the sonnet in English, wrote it in this free manner of Shakespeare, as well as in the somewhat stricter form that Sidney employed, and it is only of late years that they have tried to shut us up to one definite and unchanging sequence and interplay of rhyme. Mr. Alcott in these new sonnets, the ripe fruit of an aged tree, has used the freedom that nature gave him, and years allow: he has written with little uniformity in the order and number of his rhymes, but with much regard to the spirit of the sonnet as a high form of verse. I fancy that Dante (who may be called the father of the sonnet, though not the first to write it) chose this graceful and courteous verse, because it is so well suited to themes of love and friendship. When he would express sorrow or anger, or light and jesting humor, he had recourse to the canzonet, the terza rima, or what he called the ballad, – something quite unlike what we know by that name. Mr. Alcott has followed in the same general course; his sonnets are one thing, his canzonets another: though the difference in feeling, which prompts him to use one form rather than the other, cannot always be definitely expressed. It is felt rather than seen, and seen rather by the effect of the finished poem than by the light of any rule or formal definition.

      Definiteness, in fact, must not be looked for in these poems; nor is it the characteristic of the highest poetry in any language. Verse may be powerful and suggestive, or even clear in the sense of producing a distinct impression on the mind, without being definite, and responding to all the claims of analysis. I take it that few readers will fail to see the central thought, or the vivid portraiture in each of these sonnets and canzonets; but fewer still will be able to explain precisely, even to their own minds, what each suggestive phrase and period includes and excludes in its meaning. For this fine vagueness of utterance, the sonnet has always given poets a fair field, and our present author has not gone beyond his due privilege in this respect, though he has availed himself of it more frequently than many would have done. The mottoes and citations accompanying each sonnet may help the reader to a meaning that does not at once flash in his eyes. But he must not expect to conquer these verses at a single reading. The thought of years, the labor of months, has been given to the writing of them; and the reader ought not to complain if he take as much time to comprehend them as the author took to write them. They are worth the pains of reading many times over, and even of learning them by heart, for which their compendious form well fits them.

      It may be complained that these sonnets lack variety. This is indeed a fault into which sonneteers often fall, – our best collection of American sonnets hitherto – those of Jones Very – being open to this censure. It will be found, perhaps, that the sameness of rhyme and thought is often but an appearance, – the delicate shade of meaning being expressed, in a vocabulary of no large extent, by a rare process of combining and collocating words. Certain phrases recur, too, because the thought necessarily recurs, – as when the oratory of Phillips and of Parker, as of others, is characterized by the general term, eloquence. In the poverty of our language, there is no other term to use, while the qualifying words and their connection sufficiently distinguish between one person and another. The critical are referred

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