The Sonneteer

A demonstration of structured form

View the repository through any of the indexes

The Sonneteer is two things at once. It is a library of sonnets, and it is a demonstration of open standards-based e-text technologies (in this case, XML) in support of a focused, but generalized, application: presenting a loose collection of poems with some attention to their formal aspects.

Thanks to my sponsors, to Mulberry Technologies, Inc. for everything; to the Cocoon Project for the software with which is it now being served and to 4Suite for the XML/XSLT platform software on which it was originally developed (the ease of this migration demonstrating the excellence of both these toolkits); to BizTechSource of Shepherdstown for serving up the pages; to contributors to XSL-List (particularly those who have helped me with one or another detail outside my range of expertise); to everyone who's put stuff up on line that I've — gratefully — lifted or learned from. And especially to those particular friends who gave me early feedback. Anyone who wants to chime in, please don't hesitate to do so by e-mailing the Sonneteer.

Be careful! Looking at this library may whet your appetite, not for more sonnets but for more features. That's not the idea, or it is. Electronic technologies, at this early stage in their upspringing, have a tendency to be generative of desiderata. This is a fancy way of saying that what an electronic tool commonly prompts first is more ideas of what the electronic medium should do, not more insight into the subject under study. At this stage of the game, few electronic media have transparency. They are too new and variable. In time to come, this project may come to seem a quaint archaism. For now, you'll likely find that The Sonneteer makes you think of a critique or a feature request, since this is the natural and appropriate response to a novel technology in its “immediate” age, before it has come to be natural to the eye, or ear. (See XML on a Shoestring for more along these lines.)

A library of sonnets

Indexes to the sonnets

• by author
• by title
• by first line
• by rhyme scheme

The sonnet makes a fascinating study because it encapsulates in miniature the entire development of English-language prosody from the Early Modern Period (as early as the court of Henry VIII), when English poetry became newly exposed to Italian courtly forms, through to the present.

More could be said — but here, will not be — about the intrinsic interest of the sonnet as a poetic form, about its singular and revealing history, and about how its formal qualities may be echoed, albeit framed and even “confined” or teased, in the automated modes of text processing that drive this experiment. The Sonneteer springs, in fact, from a set of technologies designed for all kinds of writing, yet “tuned” here for the sonnet.

Any poem here may be viewed in a visual layout framed to the expectations of either a strict Petrarchan sonnet (octaves and sestets), or the looser Elizabethan (quatrains with a couplet): in this way some kind of contrast between the two extremes may be more evident, and how each single poem fits one or the other, or neither or both. The fact that a given instance does not “fit” a particular view of the sonnet form is part of what these presentations are meant to dramatize. The rhyme scheme of a sonnet is often the surest guide to how strictly it adheres to the unwritten rules; but attention also has to be paid to the rhetorical flow of argument from one quatrain to another, to where the bridge or “turn” is (sometimes it strays from the normative position after line 8), to whether a couplet is pronounced in the final two lines, to metrical phenomena such as enjambment, and so forth.

The reference view of poems in this collection is designed to look reasonably good when printed. For that matter, if you find yourself interested in these, you probably know that any number of excellent collections of English poetry are available in more portable or more amenable forms. Patronize your local book store!

Occasionally, the Sonneteer has allowed the indulgence of a few notes on one or another particular poem: these also appear in the reference view. For the most part, this collection will have to speak for itself.

An XML demonstration

See the XML source of any poem in this library by selecting source code. (Or link to /Sonneteer/source to see what the source of this page looks like.)

The materials on this site are delivered to your web browser in a language it can understand (HTML): but the source text files are created and maintained in a format designed just for that purpose, and therefore superior for the tasks. The site shows, in a simple way, how even a small XML tag set can be put to work to support fairly complex and scalable operations, much more simply and effectively than is now possible using other formats. Many claims can be and have been made for XML and for certain design principles that may be applied to XML systems. This site exercises such principles in an effort both to test and define them.

All theory aside, this claim can be made in fact: to add a sonnet to this collection, the Sonneteer need only to refer to a single instance of the poem, marked up with XML in the manner demonstrated. This is only of significance to you if you have ever developed and maintained a web site, in which case you may appreciate how much work the creation and maintenance of variant renditions and indexes are, with all the links that hold everything together, most especially if content needs to be changed or amended (thus requiring every rendition to be updated). In The Sonneteer, this kind of work is entirely automated by a set of stylesheets (some more complex than others); accordingly, the site design is far more scalable than would otherwise be the case, and the maintainer can focus on editorial issues, not technical ones. (It currently takes the Sonneteer as little as five minutes of hand work to add a sonnet to the collection, letting the system generate all views and index updates. Another bonus is that a new form of indexing or retrieval can also be added at any time, without touching a single page.)

The fitness of XML/XSLT technologies for these tasks is also amply demonstrated by the Sonneteer's flexible handling of variants of the form — as are hidden away in this library — that can considerably stretch the boundaries of what we call a “sonnet”. When faced with unpredicted input, this system does not break but does what it can.

XML on a Shoestring will cover all this in much more detail.

Sonnets! Sonnets! Sonnets!

• Eric Blomquist's Sonnet Central has the most thoughtful, painstaking and amazingly large collection of sonnets on the net.
• The sonnet form is not only an English one! check out Sonetos del Siglo de Oro: Golden Age Spanish Sonnets.
• A Google search for “sonnet history” picks up some good stuff. Or search for “sonnet form”.

Dedicated to sonnet-writers everywhere.

The Sonneteer was developed by Wendell Piez, July-August 2003, and minimally modified when migrated to a new platform, March 2006.