English sonnet
Old Virgil who would write ten lines, they say, Old poets foster’d under friendlier skies, “Poets and Their Bibliographies” by Lord Alfred It connotes the true poet’s loneliness and yet his resolute exultation in the liberty in which his exile and isolation produces.Ĩ. Wordsworth), with one who has allegedly not-Shelley. It juxtaposes a poet who has purportedly given up (i.e. Like Jeffers’ poem, this is also a poem about not giving up. Shelley “deplores” Wordsworth’s entrance into the “blind and battling” horde. The poet who writes, “The world is too much with us late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: / Little we see in Nature that is ours, / We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!” slaps Shelley and Jeffers in the face when he renounces his old creed, forgoes his erstwhile principles. We loathe traitors more than the enemy because traitors are supposed to know what is right they are supposed to know better. In order to engender such revulsion and grievance, Wordsworth had to at first inspire affection and adoration. Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be. Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stoodĭeserting these, thou leavest me to grieve, On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar: Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore. Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn. That things depart which never may return:Ĭhildhood and youth, friendship and love’s first glow, “To Wordsworth” by Percy Shelley (1792-1822) While Wordsworth received monetary compensation for his eminent position, such money would be “blood money” in Jeffers’ as well as Shelley’s opinion: It is like serving Mammon ere God it is sacrificing the poetical to the political.ĩ. He took up political and religious matters whereas he should have concerned himself with the aesthetically True and Beautiful. Wordsworth, to Jeffers as well as Shelley, denied his liberty as a poet when he became the Poet Laureate of England. He spurned the world in order to pursue his poetry.
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The determined and resolute Jeffers, living in his ascetic’s abode in rural California, was an outcast and recluse. That, often fallen, never has lain prone.įrankly, this is a poem about not giving up. The same cowardice of custom, the same dumbĭevil that drove our Wordsworth to becomeīy cowardly craft it grows his inmost own -Īnd bind with more tremendous vows a spirit Like Satan’s, but to gain some humbler crumb “When I Behold the Greatest” by Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)įall out of heaven, wings not by pride struck numb The sea-metaphor, to me, is a mundane one, albeit Longfellow captures the essence of Milton’s stature amidst his peers by alluding to the nautical ninth-wave, which is quite original.) I could have perhaps swapped Jeffers’ sonnet for Longfellow’s, but I wanted to canvas a larger time-period and include at least one or two poems with a more negative intonation (poor Wordsworth gets the brunt of it), and Jeffers’ poem, although embittered, appeals to me because of its contemporary vigor and density and also its timelessness.ġ0 Greatest Poems about Death 10. Yeats.” I have also had to leave out some extraordinary sonnets, such as Longfellow’s “Milton” (-in which he depicts Milton as the “ninth-wave,” a nautical allusion to the largest wave in a sequence of waves and at which point the sequence starts over again. There are innumerable other short poems addressed to other poets which are wonderful and remarkable, from Ezra Pound’s modernist poem “A Pact” to W.H. I forewarn you that these are the 10 greatest English Sonnets addressed to or concerning other poets and are not even the 10 greatest short poems concerning other poets.