Dec 29, 2009
“Batter my heart, three-personed God” is a sonnet, a short lyric poem of fourteen lines. In the Renaissance, two kinds of sonnets were popular. The Shakespearean, or English, sonnet has three quatrains, rhyming abab, cdcd, efef, and a final couplet, rhyming gg, which usually contains a short statement of the theme. The Petrarchan, or Italian, sonnet is divided into an octave rhyming abbaabba, and a sestet rhyming cdecde; the sestet moves from the questions, causes, or complaints presented in the octave to answers, effects,...
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