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Home  »  The World’s Best Poetry  »  The Sonnet

Bliss Carman, et al., eds. The World’s Best Poetry. 1904.

Descriptive Poems: I. Personal: Great Writers

The Sonnet

William Wordsworth (1770–1850)

SCORN not the sonnet; critic, you have frowned,

Mindless of its just honors; with this key

Shakespeare unlocked his heart; the melody

Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch’s wound;

A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound;

With it Camoëns soothed an exile’s grief;

The sonnet glittered a gay myrtle leaf

Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned

His visionary brow; a glow-worm lamp,

It cheered mild Spenser, called from fairy-land

To struggle through dark ways; and when a damp

Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand

The thing became a trumpet; whence he blew

Soul-animating strains,—alas! too few.