Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE SONNET, by CONDE BENOIST PALLEN


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE SONNET, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Within the sonnet's glittering limit lies
Last Line: A master's voice may shake the firmament!
Subject(s): Sonnet (as Literary Form)


I

Within the sonnet's glittering limit lies
The diamond's royal fire, Wordsworthian verse
Wedding high thought with noble music, terse
With wisdom; there the opalescent dyes
Of love-light from a Petrarch's brimming eyes;
The luted plaint that chastened Dante's curse;
Miltonic echoes organ pealed, the nurse
Of solemn sounds brought down from midnight skies.

It measures with the royal tread of kings,
And treasures wealth too precious to be hid
In wanton rhymes and idly footed lines;
Or upward soaring, as an eagle, wings
Its way to empyrean calms amid
The tuneful silence of the topmost Apennines.

II

They say the sonnet is a narrow pale,
A little garden straitly hedged around
Where only slender flowerets may be found,
But no brave blossom lusty with the gale
And the untempered sun; and in its bound
Pale poets gently pipe in plaintive sound
The sifted sweetness of love's distant bale
On reeds all murmurous of the underground.

Yet trumpet tongues have found swift utterance here
And freedom loosed her fiery-hearted levin,
And earth has trembled with the solemn fear
Of harmonies breathed from the stooping heaven
E'en in this slender compass closely pent
A master's voice may shake the firmament!





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