Sonnet 29 | Style
The sonnet (from the Italian “sonnetto”, or “little song”) owes much of its long-standing popularity to the Italian poet Petrarch. By the mid-sixteenth century, this fixed poetic form was adopted by the English, who borrowed the fourteen-line pattern and many of Petrarch’s literary conventions. English writers did, however, alter the rhyme scheme to allow for more variety in rhyming words: while the lines of an Italian sonnet might rhyme abba, abba, cdc, dcd, an English or Shakespearean sonnet rhyme pattern might be abab, cdcd, efef, gg.
In all but...
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