The chapter looks at the metrical form of the sonnet, showing that there is considerable variation to both sonnets and theories of the sonnet.
But the city he conjures up in that sonnet is sleeping and silent, and there are no magical bells to summon him back there.
It reminded one of that snide definition of a sonnet as having three quatrains and a couplet but no poetry.
This sonnet is split between the unredeemed barrenness of existential experience and the irrational act of faith.
But these sonnets, written at different times as "portraits" of each, were to prove as unstable as his relations with the women who inspired them.
In the love sonnets that he inspired, the strange, disruptive rhymes also became a music to complement emotional and spiritual themes.
But the two media - carefully constructed sonnets versus staged, enacted representation - produce very different effects, especially with respect to implied authority.
Its semantic split is not a border line that crosses the sonnet and divides it into intellectual and existential parts.
