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                      SONNETS

                        AND

                     CANZONETS.


                         BY

                  A. BRONSON ALCOTT.


          “LOVE CAN SUN THE REALMS OF LIGHT.”
                                  _Schiller._


                       BOSTON:

                  ROBERTS BROTHERS.

                        1882.


                 _Copyright, 1882_,
               BY A. BRONSON ALCOTT.


                  UNIVERSITY PRESS:
            JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE.




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                          CONTENTS.

                        INTRODUCTION.

                                                                PAGE

  TO A. BRONSON ALCOTT, A LETTER BY F. B. SANBORN               5-10

  AN ESSAY ON THE SONNET                                       11-35

  SONNETS OF ILLUSTRATION                                      21-35
       I. Love in Spring                                          21
      II. The Maiden in April                                     22
     III. The Estrangement                                        23
      IV. Love in Time                                            24
       V. To those of Noble Heart                                 24
      VI. The Ocean a blessed God                                 27
     VII. The Nightingale                                         28
    VIII. The Fair Saint                                          29
      IX. Love a Poor Palmer                                      30
       X. Love against Love                                       31
      XI. Death                                                   32
     XII. Ah, Sweet Content!                                      34
    XIII. The Poet’s Immortality                                  34

                         PART FIRST.
  PROEM                                                           39
  DOMESTIC SONNETS AND CANZONETS                                41-8

                        PART SECOND.
  SONNETS OF CHARACTER                                        94-145
  A PROPHETIC ODE                                            146-149

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TO A. BRONSON ALCOTT,

UPON READING HIS OCTOGENARIAN POEMS.


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!

                                               F. B. SANBORN.

  CONCORD, January 1, 1882.

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AN ESSAY ON THE SONNET AND THE CANZONET.




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THE SONNET AND THE CANZONET.


“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 to Homer, who never fails to repeat the same word, or the
same verse, when it comes in his way to do so.

But to return to the sonnet itself. Landor, to whom as to Thoreau,
Milton was the greatest English poet, thought that the blind Puritan
had made good his offence against the Psalms of David, by the
sonnet on the slaughtered saints of Piedmont. “Milton,” he says,
“was never half so wicked a regicide as when he lifted up his hand
and smote King David. He has atoned for it, however, by composing
a magnificent psalm of his own, in the form of a sonnet. There are
others in Milton comparable to it, but none elsewhere.” And then the
wilful critic goes on to say, putting his words into the mouth of
Porson: “In the poems of Shakespeare, which are printed as sonnets,
there is sometimes a singular strength and intensity of thought,
with little of that imagination which was afterward to raise him
highest in the universe of poetry. Even the interest we take in the
private life of this miraculous man, cannot keep the volume in our
hands long together. We acknowledge great power, but we experience
great weariness. Were I a poet, I would much rather have written the
‘Allegro,’ or the ‘Penseroso’ than all those.” Monstrous as this
comment seems to us, there is a certain truth in it, the sonnet in
large quantities always producing weariness; for which reason, as I
suppose, Dante interspersed his love sonnets in the “Vita Nuova” and
the “Convito,” with canzonets and ballads. His commentaries--often
of a singular eloquence--also serve as a relief to the formal verse,
as his melodious Tuscan lines do to the formality of his poetical
metaphysics. A person, says Landor, “lately tried to persuade me that
he is never so highly poetical, as when he is deeply metaphysical. He
then quoted fourteen German poets of the first order, and expressed
his compassion for Æschylus and Homer.” Dante’s metaphysics were of a
higher cast, and so interfused with love and fair ladies