The metre is iambic pentameter, that is five pairs of stressed and unstressed syllables to the line. Edmund Spenser’s sonnets are a variant.Īt the break in the sonnet - in Italian after the first eight lines, in English after twelve lines - there is a ‘turn’ or volta, after which there will be a change or new perspective on the preceding idea. Shakespeare’s sonnets follow this pattern. The ‘answer’ or resolution comes in the final couplet.
Its rhymes are arranged according to one of the following schemes: Sonnets are made up of fourteen lines, each being ten syllables long. It is generally believed, however, that Shakespeare’s sonnets were autobiographical, although some dispute this. This may not have been true of all it is a matter of academic debate today. Poems were circulated within groups of educated intellectuals and they did not necessarily reflect the poet’s true emotions, but were a form of intellectual showing-off. For example, Sir Philip Sydney in the Astrophil and Stella sonnet sequence wrote in this mode. It reaches back to the Medieval Romances, where a woman is loved and idealised by a worshipping admirer. The sonnet genre is often, although not always, about ideals or hypothetical situations. Possible candidate for the Fair Youth, Henry WriothesleyĪ sonnet is a poem which expresses a thought or idea and develops it, often cleverly and wittily. There is also an underlying awareness that Time’s inescapable effects may themselves follow an artistic pattern, as they’re compared to the movement of a pen, complicating the usual trope of art immortalizing life.
He tries to to erect the usual artistic defence as in the final line, “My love shall in my verse ever live young.” The speaker addresses the personified figure of Time directly, a device known as apostrophe, in which an unseen listener, often an idea or an object is “spoken to”.
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