The world is awash with glorious sonnets. You will find six hundred of the best in The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English, edited by Phillis Levin. I have chosen just seventeen – some Shakespearean in form, some Petrarchan, some more modern and a little looser. They deal with faith, hope, love and death – the usual stuff. The Milton and the Manley Hopkins are the two tough ones, I reckon, but on the bus, on the tube, in bed or in the shower, you should be able to master any one of them in a week. I learnt ‘On Westminster Bridge’ on Westminster Bridge. It was in the 1990s, when I was a Member of Parliament.fn1 Late at night, I would slip out of the House of Commons between votes and cross and re-cross the River Thames trying to fix Wordsworth’s lines in my head.
Sonnet 18
by William Shakespeare
(1564–1616)
Shall 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 all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Shakespeare at School
by Wendy Cope
(born 1945)
Forty boys on benches with their quills
Six days a week through almost all the year,
Long hours of Latin with relentless drills
And repetition, all enforced by fear.
I picture Shakespeare sitting near the back,
Indulging in a risky bit of fun
By exercising his prodigious knack
Of thinking up an idiotic pun,
And whispering his gem to other boys,
Some of whom could not suppress their mirth –
Behaviour that unfailingly annoys
Any teacher anywhere on earth.
The fun was over when the master spoke:
Will Shakespeare, come up here and share the joke.
When I consider how my light is spent
by John Milton
(1608–74)fn2
When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
‘Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?’
I fondly ask; but patience to prevent
That murmur soon replies, ‘God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best, his state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.’
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
by William Wordsworth
(1770–1850)
Earth has 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,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or 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!
Toussaint L’Ouverture Acknowledges Wordsworth’s Sonnet ‘To Toussaint L’Ouverture’
by John Agard
(born 1949)fn3
I have never walked on Westminster Bridge
or had a close-up view of daffodils.
My childhood’s roots are the Haitian hills
where runaway slaves made a freedom pledge
and scarlet poincianas flaunt their scent.
I have never walked on Westminster Bridge
or speak, like you, with Cumbrian accent.
My tongue bridges Europe to Dahomey.
Yet how sweet is the smell of liberty
when human beings share a common garment.
So thanks, brother, for your sonnet’s tribute.
May it resound when the Thames’ text stays mute.
And what better ground than a city’s bridge
for my unchained ghost to trumpet love’s decree.
Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
(1792–1822)fn4
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art
by John Keats
(1795–1821)fn5
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art –
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen masque
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors.
No – yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever – or else swoon to death.
From Sonnets from the Portuguese
(Sonnet XLII)
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(1806–61)fn6
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and Ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise;
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith;
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, – I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! – and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
Remember
by Christina Rossetti
(1
830–94)fn7
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
The Windhover
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
(1844–89)fn8
To Christ Our Lord
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
Desespoir
by Oscar Wilde
(1854–1900)fn9
The seasons mend their ruin as they go,
For in the spring the narciss shows its head
Nor withers till the rose has flamed to red,
And in the autumn purple violets blow,
And the slim crocus stirs the winter snow;
Wherefore yon leafless trees will bloom again
And this grey land grow green with summer rain
And send up cowslips for some boy to mow.
But what of Life whose bitter hungry sea
Flows at our heels, and gloom of sunless night
Covers the days which never more return?
Ambition, love and all the thoughts that burn
We lose too soon, and only find delight
In withered husks of some dead memory.
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why
by Edna St Vincent Millay
(1892–1950)fn10
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
Yet Do I Marvel
by Countee Cullen
(1903–46)fn11
I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!
High Flight
by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
(1922–41)fn12
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Of sun-split clouds, – and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air …
Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew –
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
Anne Hathaway
by Carol Ann Duffy
(born 1955)
‘Item I gyve unto my wief my second best bed …’
(from Shakespeare’s will)
The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas
where he would dive for pearls. My lover’s words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
Some nights I dreamed he’d written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer’s hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love –
I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head
as he held me upon that next best bed.
Waking with Russell
by Don Paterson
(born 1963)
Whatever the difference is, it all began
the day we woke up face-to-face like lovers
and his four-day-old smile dawned on him again,
possessed him, till it would not fall or waver;
and I pitched back not my old hard-pressed grin
but his own smile, or one I’d rediscovered.
Dear son, I was mezzo del cammin
and the true path was as lost to me as ever
when you cut in front and lit it as you ran.
See how the true gift never leaves the giver:
returned and redelivered, it rolled on
until the smile poured through us like a river.
How fine, I thought, this waking amongst men!
I kissed your mouth and pledged myself forever.
Wedding
by Alice Oswald
(born 1966)
From time to time our love is like a sail
and when the sail begins to alternate
from tack to tack, it’s like a swallowtail
and when the swallow flies it’s like a coat;
and if the coat is yours, it has a tear
like a wide mouth and when the mouth begins
to draw the wind, it’s like a trumpeter
and when the trumpet blows, it blows like millions …
and this, my love, when millions come and go
beyond the need of us, is like a trick;
and when the trick begins, it’s like a toe
tip-toeing on a rope, which is like luck;
and when the luck begins, it’s
like a wedding,
which is like love, which is like everything.
CHAPTER SIX
A Lot of NonsenseFrom Edward Lear to Monty Python
A little nonsense now and then
is relished by the wisest men.
Roald Dahl (1916–90)
‘Don’t talk to me about a man’s being able to talk sense,’ said William Pitt (1759–1806), at twenty-four Britain’s youngest serving Prime Minister and, with almost nineteen years in office, the second longest serving. ‘Everyone can talk sense. Can he talk nonsense?’
It’s a rare gift. ‘Nonsense and beauty have close connections,’ said the novelist E. M. Forster (1879–1970). ‘Nonsense wakes up the brain cells,’ according to Dr Seuss (1904–91).fn1 ‘And it helps develop a sense of humour, which is awfully important in this day and age.’
Dr Seuss is the American modern master of versified nonsense. The acknowledged European masters of nonsense are the two Victorian pioneers of the genre: Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll.
Lear was an artist, illustrator, musician and composer, as well as a poet and author. One of twenty-one children, as a child he suffered from seizures, as an adult he suffered from bouts of depression: he called them ‘the Morbids’. He had difficulty forming relationships, but no difficulty creating nonsense. He invented all manner of creatures – Pobbles, Quangle-Wangles and Jumblies, among them – and a variety of original words – ‘runcible’ being the most famous. His poems feature a ‘runcible wall’, a ‘runcible hat’, a ‘runcible cat’ and ‘a runcible goose’, as well as a ‘runcible spoon’. Happily, to this day nobody quite knows what ‘runcible’ means.
Lewis Carroll invented words, too. As Charles Lutwidge Dodgson he was a clergyman, mathematician, teacher and portrait photographer. As Lewis Carroll, he was a poet and author. One of eleven children, he suffered from chronic shyness and a severe stammer, except in the company of little girls – for three of whom, the Liddell sisters (daughters of the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, where he lived and worked for many years), he created the story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.