The literary
madrigal is, like the sonnet, a kind of poem that began
as an Italian song and was imitated by English poets in the Renaissance.
More than the sonnet, the madrigal retained its connection with music;
to this day there are madrigal societies that perform and record these.
The literary madrigal began to appear in the midst of English sonnet sequences,
along with other poems called "songs," apparently as a way of allowing
the poet a freedom not permitted by any sonnet form, whether Petrarchan,
Shakespearean,
or any other nonce fourteen-line
sonnet. Longer irregular poems of the seventeenth century (such as
William Drummond's "Phoebus Arise") bridge a gap between the madrigal and
more loose and expressive forms such as the irregular ode (misnamed "Pindarique";
see irregular ode)
and Milton's "monody," Lycidas. Few literary madrigals have been
written since the early seventeenth century, perhaps because the form is
not very well defined, being nothing more than an irregularly rhymed and
metered poem of about twelve to twenty lines.
THIS
life, which seems so fair,
Is like a bubble blown up in the air
By sporting children's breath,
Who chase it everywhere,
And strive who can most motion it bequeath:
And though it sometime seem of its own might,
Like to an eye of gold, to be fixed there,
And firm to hover in that empty height,
That only is because it is so light.
But in that pomp it doth not long appear;
For even when most admired, it in a thought,
As swelled from nothing, doth dissolve in nought.
--William Drummond of Hawthornden
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