Well, where else ya gonna find such a rich supply of pure BS?

Rapaire, man, I got no rumble witchoo, so put the knife away. I just figgered ya shouldn't be loading up these folks wit' heavy words widout no definishuns, like "Alexandrine". So I did da homewoik, see?

A

PS: The sonnet form is called the Petrarchan sonnet form -- not Petrachian. It is a rhyming pattern found, for example, in many of the sonnets written by John Donne (of "no manne is an islande" fame). It is also referred to by some as the Italian sonnet, in contrast to the Shakespearian form of sonnet. The Petrarchan sonnet's defining characteristic is a strong division between the first eight lines of the sonnet and the last six. The first eight lines, the octave, establish the subject of the poem in a certain way, and the next six, the sestet, counter the octave by shifting the perspective of the poem in some way. The place where the poem turns from the octave to the sestet is therefore called the volta, which is Italian for "turn."

The rhyme scheme of the most traditional Petrarchan sonnet consists of two sets of four lines rhymed abba (each of these is called an Italian quatrain), followed by rhymes of cdecde in the sestet. While the rhymes of the octave are relatively stable in Petrarchan sonnets, poets tend to vary the rhymes of the sestet, using many different combinations of the c, d, and e rhymes to round out the poem.

When this form of verse was brought to England, together with other Italian verse forms, by Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547) in the 16th century, it was modified (apparently by Henry Howard, who retranslated some of Petrarch's sonnets which Wyatt had translated earlier) to what is now called the Shakespearean form: this has three quatrains, each with an independent rhyme scheme, and is ended with a rhymed couplet (abab;cdcd;efef;gg). Again, the sonnets often formed a sequence of independent but related sets of love poems. An early example is Sir Philip Sydney's Astrophel and Stella (1591). Shakespeare's own 154 sonnets were published in 1609: the dates of their composition are not known.

Any further question on the issue should be addressed to M. Rapaire as soon as he feels better! :>))...

A