Wordsworth and Michelangelo: Between Translation and Appropriation

Between 1805 and 1806 ,Wordsworth tried his hand at translating sonnets from Michelangelo's Rime. Three of them were first collected in 1807 in the section entitled "Miscellaneous Sonnets" of Poems, in Two Volumes (Curtis ed., 1983: 143-145). tThey were modelled on Milton's as recorded in the Notes he dictated to Isabella Fenwick in 1843: "In the cottage of Town End, one afternoon in 1801, my Sister read to me the Sonnets of Milton. I had long been acquainted with them, but I was particularly struck on that occasion by the dignified simplicity and majestic harmony that runs through most of them,--in character so totally different from the Italian, and still more so from Shakespeare's fine Sonnets. I took fire, if I may be allowed to say so, and produced three sonnets that same afternoon, the first I ever wrote except an irregular one at School. Of these three the one only I distinctly remember is T grieved for Bonaparte'" (Curtis ed., 1993: 19). The statement was confirmed with some reservations, in a letter, November, 1802: "Milton's sonnets ... I think manly and dignified compositions, distinguished by simplicity and unity of object and aim, and undisfigured by false or vicious ormaments. They are in several places incorrect, and sometimes uncouth in language, and, perhaps, in some, inharmonious; yet, upon the whole, I think the music exceedingly well suited to its end, that is, it has an energetic and varied flow of sound crowding into narrow room more of the combined effect of rhyme and blank verse than can be done by any other kind of verse I know of" (De Selincourt ed., EY: 379). Here Wordsworth vented feelings and opinions he transformed and metapoetically transferred to the Prefatory Sonnet (late 1802): "Nuns fret not at their Convent's narrow room" (Curtis ed., 1983: 133), and, later, paid homage to Milton by translating and publishing one of his sonnets--originally written in Italian, "Giovane piano e semplicetto amante" as "A plain youth, Lady, and a simple lover"--in the Morning Post, October 5, 1803. Wordsworth's expressive continuity flows from his correspondence to the poetic text, praised because "'twas pastime to be bound / Within the sonnet's scanty plot of ground" (10-11), affording the reader to "find short solace there" (14)--and eventually, to the Fenwick Notes. His liking for the form was re-stated in 1827 in a sonnet opening with an almost peremptory invitation, at once poetic and metapoetic: "Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned" (Hayden ed., 1977, II: 635), in keeping with nearly thirty years' exploration of its resources and potentialities. Traditionally devoted to the excercise of lyrical verse first in Italy and later on thoughout Europe, the sonnet is used by Wordsworth to support the poetics of self-expression expounded in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), where poetry is defined as the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (Hayden ed., 1977, I: 886). In the 1827 sonnet, Wordsworth expresses it again through various metaphors that paradoxically attribute his own poetics to a string of European sonneteers: Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Camoens, Spenser, and Milton, as "in his hand / The Thing became a trumpet; whence he blew / Soul-animating strains--alas, too few!"--twenty-three sonnets in all, five in Italian. The imprinting is given by Petrarch and Cinquecento Petrarchists (Bembo, Della Casa, Vittoria Colonna), revisited by Milton who adopts the classical quatorzain: an octave composed of two quatrains with enclosed rhymes and a sestet with a varied rhyme scheme, overshadows the indigenous Elizabethan and Shakespearean version, consisting of three quatrains with new rhymes in each of them, and a final couplet. Wordsworth's handling of the Italian pattern influences and impacts on both octave and sestet like Milton's, as the binary structure of the Italian sonnet is often disrupted by having the octave flow into the sestet, especially through a frequent recourse to enjambement (over 50% in Milton, nearly 40% in Wordsworth, counting only the sonnets from Poems, in Two Volumes). …