Scorn not the sonnet,

STUDENT!

Ballads might have emerged as accompaniment to dancing, but another poetic form – the sonnet – appeared as song. The term denoting the form, the Italian word 'sonetto', is derived from a Provencal word meaning a songlet. The sonnet became immensely popular in England in the Elizabethan times. Shakespeare, the Sweet Swan of Avon, wrote a collection of 154. But, as a matter of fact, Shakespeare might have never written any sonnets and never written any plays in blank verse, had not two other poets lived, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. The latter was the first to use blank verse in English literature − ten syllables a line, five stresses, no rhyme − as the most suitable medium for translating Virgil. As for Wyatt, he wrote the first English sonnets.

The sonnet had been accepted for a long time in Italy as the most suitable medium for a love-poem. Dante, the author of the Divine Comedy, wrote sonnets. The Renaissance poet Petrarch used the sonnet consistently to address his beloved Laura. With Petrarch the sonnet had 14 lines and was divided into two parts − the octave, containing eight lines, and the sestet, containing six lines. The rhyme-scheme was strict: octave – abba, abba; sestet – cde, cde, or any other combination of two or three rhymes. Such a verse form was easy to manage in Italian, because Italian has many rhyming words. But English poets found it difficult to stick to Petrarchian form as English has far fewer perfect rhymes. Other combinations of rhymes were invented. Some poets concluded their sonnets with a rhyming couplet, a practice followed by Shakespeare.