A sonnet is a form of poetry which has fourteen lines and adheres to a particular pattern of rhyme and line length, usually five feet per line. There are two general forms of sonnets: Shakespearean (or English) and Petrarchan (or Italian), however the structure and theme of sonnets can differ. Sonnets are usually written on love, nature, time and death and they are short but convey deep and philosophical meaning.
Nature has been a popular source among poets since time in memorial, and the sonnet with its structural form is the best form of expressing the natural theme. Here are the best sonnets about nature, each showing the unique position and persuasive expression of the poet.
6 Best Sonnets About Nature
1- “The World Is Too Much With Us” by William Wordsworth
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
The sonnet is against the modern civilization and how people have slowly faded away from nature. He complains that people are so occupied with business, amass of wealth and property that they have forgotten the splendor of nature.
Thus, the poet conveys a desire for a time when people appreciated nature more, saying that he would rather be a Pagan, who may have seen the divine in nature, than belong to a society that takes no notice of the sea and wind, and other works of the nature.
2- “Sonnet 18” by William Shakespeare
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
In the sonnet, the author compares his beloved to a summer’s day and concludes that the lady is more beautiful and moderate. He laments that summer can be scorching or short and temporary, but NOT his beloved’s beauty.
Unlike the summer which withers and alters, the beloved’s “eternal summer” will never alter because it has been immortalized in the poem. Shakespeare promises that as long as people are able to read and look, the beloved’s beauty will be immortal in the sonnet’s verses.
3- “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.
Shelley’s sonnet is about a traveller who stumbles across the destroyed statue of the ancient king Ozymandias. The statue has an inscription, which proclaims the king is great, but the background scene, a vast empty desert, denies this declaration.
The sonnet indicates the alarming message i.e. the human achievements and the inescapable fall of the empire. This further explores the great and powerful Ozymandias, now is nothing more but a skull, with the desert having enveloped all that was once his kingdom, making a statement that everything that humans build is but temporal.
4- “Sonnet XXIII” by John Milton
Methought I saw my late espoused saint
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,
Whom Jove’s great son to her glad husband gave,
Rescued from death by force, though pale and faint.
Mine, as whom washed from spot of child-bed taint
Purification in the Old Law did save,
And such, as yet once more I trust to have
Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind:
Her face was veiled; yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined
So clear as in no face with more delight.
But O, as to embrace me she inclined,
I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.
Milton sees his dead wife in his dream, and after waking up he compares her to Alcestis, the woman who was dead but got revived. The part of the dream is clear and affecting, which represents his wife as being in a state of purity and serenity.
Milton’s yearning and sadness are clear when he wakes up and realizes he has lost her again to the reality of daylight. Love and loss dominate the themes of the sonnet, as well as the possibility of reunion after death with the beloved, to which the imagery of nature adds to the meaning of the poet’s meditations.
5- “Bright Star” by John Keats
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.
Keats expresses his wish for the constancy of a star that shines, and keeps a vigilant eye on the world’s affairs. However, he negates the star’s loneliness and opts to remain constant while being in close proximity to his beloved.
He wants to be with her forever and feel her breath on his face, her heartbeat, and the struggle of this painting between constant togetherness and the impermanence of life. The theme of timelessness and changeability is reflected in the sonnet due to its elaboration of the nature’s stability and the fluctuation of human feelings.
See also: Sonnets 29 Literary Devices
