Form, Time, and the “First English Sonnet”

Abstract

ABSTRACT The earliest known English poem rhyming ababcdcdefefgg appears within John Metham's 1448/9 romance Amoryus and Cleopes. Scholarship cannot, however, easily claim Metham's lyric as the first English sonnet: contrary to past suggestions, available historical and manuscript evidence indicates that he did not intentionally create a sonnet, but rather composed in the form accidentally. This inset lyric's rhyme scheme therefore represents, possibly uniquely in English, sonnet form without the sonnet tradition. Despite this isolation, however, attentive reading shows that the lyric achieves certain effects very like those produced by later English sonnets. The common features underpinning these effects even in a text not knowingly written as a sonnet might help criticism isolate factors that make up form's essence or quiddity.