Picking the greatest sonnets of all time involves personal taste and fancy. (So if you disagree with my choices, please feel free to compile your own.) Perhaps the most interesting thing about my personal canon is that most of the sonnets chosen are fairly recent. This leads me to believe that the “death” of poetry has been greatly exaggerated. Perhaps the second most interesting thing is where Shakespeare ranks. For my purposes here, I will define the term “sonnet” according to its original meaning of “little song,” concentrating on poems of around fourteen lines, give or take.
1)
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My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun |
| –William Shakespeare |
2) Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away
3) Meditation in the Woods
by Don Thackrey
He walks into the woods to meditate
On Fall and what it presages for him
As Summer’s candles flare and immolate
Themselves, then sputter feebly as they dim.
He listens to the whispering of leaves
Rehearsing striking colors in surrender,
Then notes a wheeling hawk that screams and grieves
To mock the season’s bold deceits of splendor;
For soon enough the woods, the hawk, and he
Will crowd together in the whited vault
That Fall constructs each year for life’s debris.
With rue he ponders how Mankind’s first fault
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe . . .
But darkling thrush and dancing daffodil:
Are they to be in thrall to debts we owe,
Must everything that lives endure Fall’s chill?
He asked forgiveness of the woods and bird . . .
But if they answered him, we haven’t heard.
Don Thackrey spent his formative years on farms and ranches of the Nebraska Sandhills before modern conveniences, and much of his verse reflects that experience. He now lives in Dexter, Michigan, where he is retired from the University of Michigan. His verse has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies. His prose includes a book on Emily Dickinson. A volume of his verse is forthcoming from the Dakota Institute Press.
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Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly? |
| –William Shakespear |
