In Cornwall and Across the Sea :: :: University of Virginia Library

What are the sonnet's province? Not conceits
On trivial themes from classic fable brought,
And tricked in phrases studiously sought
From Spenser and, his brother bee-hive, Keats,
But portraits of the spectacle which meets
The poet's eye, when such a fight is fought
Or such a glimpse of such a glory caught
Or when some tale of fire his fury heats.
Sonnets should seize the floating thought or sight
And fix it like the graphic plate which takes
The impress of the image in the light
And, with long pains developed after, makes
The features or the landscape, which it scanned
In Nature's breadth, yet truth of detail, stand.

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II.

And therefore Wordsworth's sonnets do we love,
Wholesome and hearty, simple and direct;
He strove not after mystical effect,
Nor divers hues in patchwork interwove,
Which rival not the plumage of the dove,
So perfect in its prism, but the specked
And garish clothes which savages select
When the trade-schooner runs into a cove
Of coral isles. He tells us what he felt—
A simple man with open sympathy—
Seeing the morning haze from London melt,
Or gazing on the glorious tracery
Of “King's,” or sitting by his cottage fire.
A king himself for satisfied desire.