The sonnet traveled from Italy to England by way of the Tudor poet and diplomat Thomas Wyatt, whom Poem of the Day will feature tomorrow as part of the Sun’s weeklong homage to this enduring and versatile form. Though the English or Shakespearean sonnet — developed not by Shakespeare, as it happens, but by Wyatt’s contemporary, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey — quickly became an entrenched innovation, the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet has remained popular among poets writing in English. The Shakespearean sonnet builds its momentum over the course of three quatrains, to deliver the final punch in a closing couplet. The Petrarchan sonnet, like today’s selection by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950), instead spends its abbaabba octet fomenting a problem, which it then resolves more ruminatively in the closing sestet, whose rhyme scheme may vary. Here the rhyming pattern is cdcdcd, as the sardonic speaker concludes that sexual desire, on whose power she has just spent eight lines meditating, nevertheless has its limits.  

I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed 
by Edna St. Vincent Millay 
 
I, being born a woman and distressed 
By all the needs and notions of my kind, 
Am urged by your propinquity to find 
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest 
To bear your body’s weight upon my breast: 
So subtly is the fume of life designed, 
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind, 
And leave me once again undone, possessed. 
Think not for this, however, the poor treason 
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain, 
I shall remember you with love, or season 
My scorn with pity, — let me make it plain: 
I find this frenzy insufficient reason 
For conversation when we meet again. 

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.