Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE SONNETS. I HAVE said that the Youth of the Sonnets is the poet’s guiding Ideal, ? that he is the dear friend and teacher, who is himself an ideal poet. But he is not so described in the first fourteen sonnets. They show him, from the moment of his creation, a youth of peerless beauty and plastic nature. In character he is germinal. Every excellence of virtue and of skill in expression is his in embryo. The poet, writing under the inspiration of his native love of Verse, fills this mould of beauty with the fundamental principles of Poetic Expression, while his lines glow with the emotions which the beauty of these principles excite. The poet figures this process as framing or building. As the work progresses, the fervor increases. But at first it is the poet who teaches, exhorts, and tenderly or passionately remonstrates. At length, in the 14th sonnet, the first symptom of the success of the argument arises. Till then the flow of influence has been from the poet to the Youth; but in the ninth line,
But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive, we have the first formal recognition of the influence of the Youth upon the poet. Yet this is only apparent, for the fervent quality of the 13th sonnet is evidently due to the silent effect of the Youth’s beauty upon the poet as the work advances. This first passage of the Sonnets may therefore be termed the building of the poet’s Ideal. From fairest creat'1r00 desire increase, That thereby beaut) . se might never die; But as the riper should by time decease, His tender heir might bear his memory. But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes, Feed'st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel, Making a famine where abundance lies, Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel: Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament, And onl…
