In Constable's case the interest was religious and the poet
was personally a man of devout feeling. Writing from the Tower, where
for a time he was detained, he says, "Whether I remain in prison or go
out, I have learned to live alone with God." At the conclusion of the
third part of the Harleian Miscellany transcript, the author says: "When
I had ended this last sonnet, and found that such vain poems as I had by
idle hours writ, did amount just to the diametrical number 63,
methought it was high time for my folly to die, and to employ the
remnant of my wit to other calmer thoughts less sweet and less bitter."
It was probably in a mood like this that the poet turned from his
devotion to an earthly love and began to write his "Sonnets in honor of
God and his Saints." In this group, as in the other, he expresses that
passion for beauty characteristic of the renaissance, but here he shows
the lack of a clear conception as to where the line should be drawn
between earthly and heavenly beauty. In Constable we see the new
revelation barely emerging from the darkness, the human hand reaching
out in art toward the divine, but not knowing how to take and hold the
higher in its grasp. These sonnets are as "conceitful" as the others,
but the collection illustrates an early effort to turn the poetic energy
into a new field, to broaden the scope of subject-matter possible in
sonnet-form. The poet was evidently a close student of the
sonnet-structure.
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