3. • Italian in origin
• The word sonnet comes
from Italian sonetto,
meaning "little sound" or
"little song.
• Sonnets are usually
love poems.
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9. SONNET 18
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 dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st 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.
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14. Fourteen small broidered berries on the hem
Of Circe’s mantle, each of magic gold;
Fourteen of lone Calypso’s tears that rolled
Into the sea, for pearls to come of them;
Fourteen clear signs of omen in the gem
With which Medea human fate foretold;
Fourteen small drops, which Faustus, growing old,
Craved of the Fiend, to water Life’s dry stem.
It is the pure white diamond Dante brought
To Beatrice; the sapphire Laura wore
When Petrarch cut it sparkling out of thought;
The ruby Shakespeare hewed from his heart’s core;
The dark, deep emerald that Rossetti wrought
For his own soul, to wear for evermore.
~ ~ ~ Eugene Lee-Hamilton
17. AMORETTI, SONNET 41
Is it her nature or is it her will,
To be so cruel to an humbled foe?
If nature, then she may it mend with skill,
If will, then she at will may will forgo.
But if her nature and her will be so,
that she will plague the man that loves her most:
And take delight t'increase a wretch's woe,
Then all her nature's goodly gifts are lost.
And that same glorious beauty's idle boast,
Is but a bait such wretches to beguile:
As being long in her love's tempest tossed,
She means at last to make her piteous spoil.
Of fairest fair let never it be named,
That so fair beauty was so foully shamed.
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19. Fourteen small broidered berries on the hem
Of Circe’s mantle, each of magic gold;
Fourteen of lone Calypso’s tears that rolled
Into the sea, for pearls to come of them;
Fourteen clear signs of omen in the gem
With which Medea human fate foretold;
Fourteen small drops, which Faustus, growing old,
Craved of the Fiend, to water Life’s dry stem.
It is the pure white diamond Dante brought
To Beatrice; the sapphire Laura wore
When Petrarch cut it sparkling out of thought;
The ruby Shakespeare hewed from his heart’s core;
The dark, deep emerald that Rossetti wrought
For his own soul, to wear for evermore.
~ ~ ~ Eugene Lee-Hamilton
20. SONNET 73
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
21. Laura
by Petrarch
Translated by Morris Bishop
She used to let her golden hair fly free
For the wind to toy and tangle and molest;
Her eyes were brighter than the radiant west.
(Seldom they shine so now.) I used to see
Pity look out of those deep eyes on me.
("It was false pity," you would now protest.)
I had love's tinder heaped within my breast;
What wonder that the flame burned furiously?
She did not walk in any mortal way,
But with angelic progress; when she spoke,
Unearthly voices sang in unison,
She seemed divine among the dreary folk
Of earth. You say she is not so today?
Well, though the bow's unbent, the wound bleeds on.
22. The White Doe
A pure-white doe in an emerald glade
Appeared to me, with two antlers of gold,
Between two streams, under a laurel's shade,
At sunrise, in the season's bitter cold.
Her sight was so suavely merciless
That I left work to follow her at leisure,
Like the miser who looking for his treasure
Sweetens with that delight his bitterness.
Around her lovely neck "Do not touch me"
Was written with topaz and diamond stone,
"My caesar's will has been to make me free."
Already toward noon had climbed the sun,
My weary eyes were not sated to see,
When I fell in the stream and she was gone.
