sonnetteer
Language: English
Part of speech: verb
Forms: form: sonnetteers
form: sonnetteering
form: sonnetteered
form: sonnetteered
Senses: examples: text: In fact, the Signora had been a celebrated beauty, and had been once a village belle, then an opera dancer; then a prima donna of the San Carlo; sonnetteered by half the abbati and improvisatori idlers from Vesuvius to the Alps; cicisbeo’d by a cardinal, and, in the opinion of the Marchesa di Friolera, whose income had fallen off rapidly at this crisis, subsidized by an Austrian prince.
ref: 1825 November, [George Croly], “The Antonias. A Story of the South.”, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume XVIII, number CVI, Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood & Sons, […], page 617, column 1:
text: A young lover of his daughter, disguised as a menial, undertakes the feat, succeeds, entitles the Colonel to “a many hundred hard dollars;” and having thus whipped and spurred his way to the father’s heart, as he had already sighed and sonnetteered to the young lady’s, all ends in the usual stage-style of happiness—marriage.
ref: 1836 December 10, “The Public Journals. The World We Live In.”, in The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction: […], volume XXVIII, number 809, London: […] J[ohn] Limbird, […], page 394, column 2:
text: I showed all the usual symptoms of the stricken deer—raved, sighed, sonnetteered. I was young then. My attachments are much less volcanic now.
ref: 1843 May, Bon Gaultier [pseudonym; William Edmondstoune Aytoun; Theodore Martin], “My Monomaniacal Experiences”, in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume X, number CXIII, Edinburgh: William Tait, […]; Simpkin, Marshall, & Co., London; and John Cumming, Dublin, page 315, column 1:
text: He has just broken out into verse in praise of Frances, and I send you the paper wherein it appears. There is too much scansion in the rhythm, but the thought is good. Frances, never having been sonnetteered in print except by me, says she feels as if . . . . .
ref: 1874, Mortimer Collins, “1874⁠”, in Frances Collins, editor, Mortimer Collins: His Letters and Friendships, with Some Account of His Life, volume I, London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, […], published 1877, page 185:
text: For love in love-learned Tuscany was then a roaring wind; it came rhythmically and set the glowing mass beating like the sestett of a sonnet. One lived in numbers in those days; numbers always came. You sonnetteered upon the battle-field, in the pulpit, on the Bench, at the Bar.
ref: 1898 August, Maurice Hewlett, “Messer Cino and the Live Coal”, in Macmillan’s Magazine, volume LXXVIII, number 466, London: Macmillan and Co., Limited; New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, section II, pages 298–299:
text: There judged, there sonnetteered, and there pined Pier delle Vigne, from whom Dante, brushing by him in the hell-wood of suicides, tore a gnarly limb.
ref: 1904, Maurice Hewlett, “Into the Southern Hills: Pisa to Certaldo”, in The Road in Tuscany: A Commentary, volume II, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., page 34:
text: He could appreciate too the Gray of The Long Story as well as Gray of The Bard and The Descent of Odin, amused himself with burlesques and minor erotics after the fashion of Whitehead, criticized by parody, sonnetteered in moderation, subscribed a song to the anti-slavery campaign, and so on.
ref: 1963, W[illiam] L[indsay] Renwick, “The New Men”, in English Literature, 1789–1815 (F[rank] P[ercy] Wilson and Bonamy Dobrée, editors, Oxford History of English Literature), Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, pages 129–130:
glosses: Alternative spelling of sonneteer.