The Sonnet -- William Wordsworth

Guest poem sent in by Paul E Collins

(Poem #1920) The Sonnet Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frown'd, Mindless of its just honours; with this key Shakespeare unlock'd his heart; the melody Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound; A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound; With it Camöens sooth'd an exile's grief; The Sonnet glitter'd a gay myrtle leaf Amid the cypress with which Dante crown'd His visionary brow: a glow-worm lamp, It cheer'd mild Spenser, call'd from Faery-land To struggle through dark ways; and when a damp Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand The Thing became a trumpet; whence he blew Soul-animating strains -- alas, too few! -- William Wordsworth

Here's Wordsworth's famous defence of the sonnet, followed by a
playful but thought-provoking parody by Dickinson:

  'Scorn not the sonnet' (Wordsworth)

  Scorn not the sonnet on the sonnet, critic;
    It is a bank where poets love to lie
    And praise each other's ingenuity
  In finding such a form. The analytic
  Reader may stigmatise as parasitic
    The mirror-image of a mystery,
    The echo of lost voices, find it dry,
  And intellectually paralytic.
    Yet 'tis a child of Fancy, light and live,
  A fragile veil of Nature, scarcely worn
    (Of Wordsworth's two, of Shakespeare's none, survive);
  Empty not then the vials of scorn upon it.
    Nor, since we're on the subject, should you scorn
  The sonnet on the sonnet on the sonnet.

  - Peter Dickinson

The latter notes that Wordsworth, who wrote more than 500 sonnets in his
lifetime, produced two of these 'meta-sonnets' (the other being 'Nuns Fret
Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room') and Shakespeare, who wrote 154, none at
all.

Dickinson's selection of rhymes for 'critic' - and the self-referential
closing couplet - may raise a smile. One has to wonder what Wordsworth, ever
the serious Romantic, would have made of his "parasitic ingenuity".

Paul

[Martin adds]

The final two lines of Dickinson's parody are absolutely brilliant. I wonder
why Unauthorized Versions[1] didn't pick this one up.

[1] an absolutely delightful anthology of poems paired with their parodies,
which both Thomas and I are huge fans of. We once ran a theme based on the
book (see links), which today's pair of poems would have fitted very nicely
into.

[Links]

Biography of Wordsworth:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wordsworth

And of Dickinson:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Dickinson

The poem/parody theme:
  http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/376.html
  http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/378.html
  http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/380.html