Sunday Sonnet

SONNETS ARE FULL OF LOVE
by Christina Rossetti


Sonnets are full of love, and this my tome
Has many sonnets: so here now shall be
One sonnet more, a love sonnet, from me
To her whose heart is my heart’s quiet home,
To my first Love, my Mother, on whose knee
I learnt love-lore that is not troublesome;
Whose service is my special dignity,
And she my loadstar while I go and come
And so because you love me, and because
I love you, Mother, I have woven a wreath
Of rhymes wherewith to crown your honored name:
In you not fourscore years can dim the flame
Of love, whose blessed glow transcends the laws
Of time and change and mortal life and death.

Sunday Sonnet

SILENCE
by Edgar Allan Poe


There are some qualities--some incorporate things,
That have a double life, which thus is made
A type of that twin entity which springs
From matter and light, evenced in solid and shade.
There is a two-fold Silence--sea and shore--
Body and soul. One dwells in lonely places,
Newly with grass o'ergrown; some solemn graces,
Some human memories and tearful lore,
Render him terrorless: his name's "No More."
He is the corporate Silence: dread him not!
No power hath he of evil in himself;
But should some urgent fate (untimely lot!)
Bring thee to meet his shadow (nameless elf,
That haunteth the lone regions where hath trod
No foot of man) commend thyself to God!

Sunday Sonnet

IF THE ROSE COULD SPEAK
Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen


Within the rose I found a trembling tear,
Close curtained in a gloom of crimson night
By tender petals from the outer light,
I plucked the flower and held it to my ear,
And thought within its fervid breast to hear
A smothered heart-beat throbbing soft and low.
I heard its busy life-blood gently flow,
Now far away and now so strangely near.
Ah, thought I, if these silent lips of flame
Could be unsealed and fling into the air
Their woe, their passion, and in speech proclaim
Their warm intoxication of despair;--
Then would I give the rose into thy hand;
Thou couldst its voice, beloved, not withstand.

Sunday Sonnet

THE FRAILTY OF MAN'S LIFE
by Philip Ayres


The life we strive to lengthen out,
Is like a feather rais'd from ground,
Awhile in air 'tis tost about,
And almost lost as soon as found;

If it continue long in sight,
'Tis sometimes high and sometimes low,
Yet proudly aims a tow'ring flight,
To make the more conspicuous show.

The air with ease its weight sustains,
Since 'tis by Nature light, and frail;
Seldom in quiet state remains,
For troops of dangers it assail.

And after various conflicts with its foes,
It drops to Earth, the Earth from whence it rose.

Sunday Sonnet

50 (from the Growth of Love sequence)
by Robert Bridges


THE world comes not to an end: her city-hives
Swarm with the tokens of a changeless trade,
With rolling wheel, driver and flagging jade,
Rich men and beggars, children, priests and wives.
New homes on old are set, as lives on lives;
Invention with invention overlaid:
But still or tool or toy or book or blade
Shaped for the hand, that holds and toils and strives.

The men to-day toil as their fathers taught,
With little better'd means; for works depend
On works and overlap, and thought on thought:
And thro' all change the smiles of hope amend
The weariest face, the same love changed in nought:
In this thing too the world comes not to an end.

Sunday Sonnet

XLIII
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning


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 candle-light.
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.

Sunday Sonnet

IN VIA EST CISTERNA
by Mark Jarman


All she remembers from her Latin class
Is a phrase she echoes for her granddaughter.
Lately I hear in everything she says
A depth that she covers up with laughter.
In the road is a well. But in her mind
It fills with blanks, like a shaft of sand and pebbles.
A well is in the road. It is profound,
I'm sure, it is a phrase with many levels.
And then, I see one: the woman with five husbands
Met Jesus there. But my mother had only one --
Unless now having lost him she understands
That he was never who she thought, but someone
Who was different men with different women through the years.
In the road is a well. It fills with tears.





Sonnet courtesy of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English and originally appeared in Jarman's Unholy Sonnets

Sunday Sonnet

WORK WITHOUT HOPE
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge


All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair--
The bees are stirring--birds are on the wing--
And Winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.
Yet, well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,
For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!
With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live.

Sunday Sonnet

SLEEP
by Thomas Bailey Aldrich


When to soft Sleep we give ourselves away,
And in a dream as in a fairy bark
Drift on and on through the enchanted dark
To purple daybreak, little thought we pay
To that sweet, bitter world we know by day.
We are clean quit of it, as is a lark
So high in heaven no human eye may mark
The thin swift pinion cleaving through the gray.
Till we awake ill fate can do no ill,
The resting heart shall not take up again
The heavy load that yet must make it bleed;
For this brief space the loud world's voice is still,
No faintest echo of it brings us pain.
How will it be when we shall sleep indeed?

Sunday Sonnet

XIV
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning


If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love's sake only. Do not say
"I love her for her smile--her look--her way
Of speaking gently,--for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day"--
For these things in themselves, Beloved, may
Be changed, or change for thee,--and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry,--
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love's sake, that evermore
Thou mayst love on, through love's eternity.

Sunday Sonnet

WONDER AND JOY
by Robinson Jeffers


The things that one grows tired of--O, be sure
They are only foolish artificial things!
Can a bird ever tire of having wings?
And I, so long as life and sense endure,
(Or brief be they!) shall nevermore inure
My heart to the recurrence of the springs,
Of the gray dawns, the gracious evenings,
The infinite wheeling stars. A wonder pure
Must ever well within me to behold
Venus decline; or great Orion, whose belt
Is studded with three nails of burning gold,
Ascend the winter heaven. Who never felt
This wondering joy may yet be good or great:
But envy him not: he is not fortunate.

Sunday Sonnet

OF HIS LADY'S OLD AGE
by Pierre de Ronsard

When you are very old, at evening
You'll sit and spin beside the fire, and say,
Humming my songs, "Ah well, ah well-a-day.
When I was young, of me did Ronsard sing."
None of your maidens that doth hear the thing,
Albeit with her weary task foredone,
But wakens at my name, and calls you one
Blest, to be held in long remembering.

I shall be low beneath the earth, and laid
On sleep, a phantom in the myrtle shade,
While you beside the fire, a grandame gray,
My love, your pride, remember and regret;
Ah, love me, love, we may be happy yet,
And gather roses, while 'tis called to-day.



Translated by Andrew Lang

Sunday Sonnet

LVI
by George Henry Boker


The lagging days crawl slowly to their end,
The weeks sum up in months, and glide away,
The jolly bells proclaim it New Year's Day,
As if they felt the wicked times would mend.
But I, alas! I see the old things wend
Under new names, with scarce a change, to say
How the fresh mortal differs from the clay
Over whose sins the pitying grasses bend.
So we, who boast our love of matchless height,
Might find like boasts were in their dusty bones;
And when beneath such dumb, sepulchral stones
Ourselves are laid forever out of sight,
Some pair may rob us of our sovereign right,
Some poet shame thy poet's tenerest tones.

Sunday Sonnet (on a Monday)

CHRISTMAS EVE
by Mathilde Blind


Alone--with one fair star for company,
The loveliest star among the hosts of night,
While the grey tide ebbs with the ebbing light--
I pace along the darkening wintry sea.
Now round the yule-log and the glittering tree
Twinkling with festive tapers, eyes as bright
Sparkle with Christmas joys and young delight,
As each one gathers to his family.

But I--a waif on earth where'er I roam--
Uprooted with life's bleeding hopes and fears
From that one heart that was my heart's sole home,
Feel the old pang pierce through the severing years,
And as I think upon the years to come
That fair star trembles through my falling tears.

Sunday Sonnet

PENELOPE
by Glen Levin Swiggett

Penelope is more than legend, more
Than sign of faithfulness one thinks is due
In marriage, for her story gives us, through
The keeping of the secret vow she swore,
The tale's eternal ending, o'er and o'er
Repeated, since in absence suitors woo
Ulysses' wife who his long overdue
Return awaits to drive them from her door.

'Tis strange that one could write of martial deed
So well and then a tale so simply tell
As Homer has done in his Odyssey,
Where wooers fight in rivalry, and feed,
With interwoven bits of pastoral
And hints of medieval chivalry.



[This sonnet was part of a group of Swiggett's sonnets entitled Famous Women: Sacred and Profane (1960). To read more from this collection, click here

Sunday Sonnet

THE HARVEST MOON
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


It is the Harvest Moon! On gilded vanes
And roofs of villages, on woodland crests
And their aerial neighborhoods of nests
Deserted, on the curtained window-panes
Of rooms where children sleep, on country lanes
And harvest-fields, its mystic splendor rests!
Gone are the birds that were our summer guests,
With the last sheaves return the laboring wains!
All things are symbols: the external shows
Of Nature have their image in the mind,
As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves;
The song-birds leave us at the summer's close,
Only the empty nests are left behind,
And pipings of the quail among the sheaves.

Sunday Sonnet

SONNET
ON A YOUTH WHO DIED OF EXCESSIVE FRUIT-PIE


Currants have checked the current of my blood,
And berries brought me to be buried here;
Pears have pared off my body's hardihood,
And plums and plumbers spare not one so spare:
Fain would I feign my fall; so fair a fare
Lessens not fate, but 'tis a lesson good:
Gilt will not long hide guilt; such thin-washed ware
Wears quickly, and its rude touch soon is rued.
Grave on my grave some sentence grave and terse,
That lies not, as it lies upon my clay;
But in a gentle strain of unstrained verse,
Prays all to pity a poor patty's prey;
Rehearses I was fruit-full to my hearse,
Tells that my days are told, and soon I'm toll'd away!


from Harper's New Monthly Magazine (1852)

Sunday Sonnet

PRETTY WORDS
by Eleanor Wylie


Poets make pets of pretty, docile words:
I love smooth words, like gold-enameled fish
Which circle slowly with a silken swish,
And tender ones, like downy-feathered birds:
Words shy and dappled, deep-eyed deer in herds,
Come to my hand, and playful if I wish,
Or purring softly at a silver disk,
Blue Persian kittens, fed on cream and curds.

I love bright words, words up and singing early;
Words that are luminous in the dark, and sing;
Warm lazy words, white cattle under trees;
I love words opalescent, cool, and pearly,
Like midsummer moths, and honied words like bees,
Gilded and sticky, with a little sting.

Sunday Sonnet

AZRAEL'S BAR
by Stephen Vincent Benet


He stood behind the counter, mixing drinks;
Pride for the old, who like their liquor tart,
Green scorn frappé to cheer the sick-at-heart,
False joy, as merry as a bed of pinks.
He had the eyes of a sarcastic lynx
And in his apron was a small black dart
With which he stirred, secretive and apart,
His shaker, till it rang with poisonous clinks.
I fumbled for the rail. "The same, with gin?
Love -- triple star -- you like the velvet kick?"
I shook with the blind agues of the sick.
Then, through lost worlds, his voice, "Fini, old friend?"
He poured black drops out, cold as dead men's skin:
"So? This is what we always recommend --"

Sunday Sonnet

IN MEMORIAM
by George Moreby Acklom


It fell as softly as the winter's snow:
There was no sound of storm nor any stress,
No fevered daring of Death's mightiness,
No struggle for a strong man's overthrow:
Just some few hours of moaning, soft and low,
Some hard-drawn breathing, quickly hushed, ah yes!
And then,--and then,--small white limbs motionless,
While we who wait must whisper as we go.
A face and voice we looked for lovingly
Lost from the fellowship of our small band:
One little ripple of Life's restless sea
Soothed into stillness by the Master's hand,
And missing here:--but a white soul to stand
In the vast Temple of Eternity.