Thought’s pure diamond’: The Sonnet at the End of the Century

Abstract

The years around 1880 saw a ‘Sonnettomania’ to rival that of the closing decades of the previous century.¹ ‘Into whatsoever ballroom you went,’ writes Max Beerbohm in ‘1880’, his satirical portrait of the high noon of the aesthetic movement, ‘you would surely find, among the women in tiaras and the fops and the distinguished foreigners, half a score of comely ragamuffins in velveteen, murmuring sonnets, posturing, waving their hands.’² Beerbohm no doubt had in mind young men like Wilfred Scawen Blunt, whose Sonnets and Songs appeared (under the aesthetic pseudonym Proteus) in 1875. The volume’s fashionably yellow front cover is decorated with a sun-motif, and the motto: ‘By thy light I live’. Proteus is (to use the terms of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience) more of a ‘fleshly’ than an ‘idyllic’ poet; his volume consists of reminders that ‘[the] day of love is short, and every bliss/ Untasted now is a bliss thrown away’.³ He also, as his dedication to the sun implies, follows Swinburne in looking to a revived Paganism as an alternative source of values to Christianity. ‘Truce to thee, soul’ laments the effect of Christian asceticism on humanity, and looks forward to a time when the physical and sensual side of existence will be accepted and celebrated: ‘Poor Body, I must take some thought of thee’ (1. 14).