Shelley’s reaction to Wordsworth’s shifting political attitudes through the sonnet isn’t just an allusion to a form favored by the older poet: it’s a clever use of a genre defined by the element of change.
Turbulent desires, love’s joys and frustrations, and erotic encounters characterized the sonnet throughout its history. In the early 1300s, Petrarch composed his Italian Rime Sparse, a series of 366 poems devoted to his love for Laura, a married woman who continually rejected his romantic overtures. Later, in the sixteenth century, Sir Thomas Wyatt introduced the form to English poetry with sonnets like “Whoso list to hunt, I know where there is a hind” and “The long love that in my heart doth harbor.” The 154 sonnets Shakespeare composed throughout his career, largely addressed to the anonymous Dark Lady or Fair Youth, would go on to solidify the form’s place in English literary history. However, following the Renaissance period, the sonnet largely went out of fashion. In the Romantic era, Wordsworth was among the first poets to revive the genre, often using themes of nature as his inspiration.
To quickly review the basics of a sonnet: fourteen lines, a rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG (if you’re feeling Shakespearean) or ABBA ABBA CDCDCD (if you’re nodding to Pertrarch), and a volta. Iambic pentameter customarily set the poem’s rhythm, investing each line with a rhythm akin to the human heart. However, the last defining feature of the genre—the "volta," or the "turn" in thought that occurs following lines 8 or 12—is actually the most important. The genre’s simple structural elements made it the perfect form for writers to intensely, succinctly concentrate on his subject: nobody forces a poet to write a sonnet, and because of this it’s crucial to ask what changes in a sonnet, why, and how.
Why would Shelley use such a condensed poetic structure, when he could flesh out his frustrations more explicitly in a longer form? Breaking down variations on the sonnet’s traditional structures, we’ll see that Shelley borrows from both Shakespeare and Petrarch to admonish Wordsworth’s conservative ideals.
Although the sonnet seems to follow the Shakespearean model most closely, with its strongest turn occurring after line 12, it actually combines elements of Shakespearean and Petrarchan structures. One could argue that the poem loosely adheres to Petrach’s structure—an octave followed by a sestet—but Shelley’s description of Wordsworth’s earlier virtues carries through to his admiration of the older poet’s work on “truth and liberty,” even though a colon breaks up lines 8 and 9. The rhyme scheme is a bit tricky: lines 1-8 follow the standard Shakespearean ABABCBCD, but lines 9 and 10 - ending in “stood” and “multitude” are slant rhymes, meaning their sounds don’t fully align. Then, like lines 1-8, the last four lines alternate, with “weave” rhyming with “grieve,” and “liberty” with “be.” As we can see, the first half of the scheme matches Shakespeare, while the last four reflect Petrarch.
Like Shakespeare, Shelley takes twelve full lines to remember how Wordsworth used to be, using only lines 13 and 14 to quickly express his feelings on the older poet’s drastic change. The abnormal rhymes in lines 9 and 10 show the incompatibility of Wordsworth’s former “rock-built refuge” with his new ideas, while Shelley’s combination of rhyme schemes nods to both sonnet traditions. Wordsworth, by adopting a new set of beliefs, literally dismantles his past work, splitting the minds of his poetic followers in two.
