THE SONNET

The sonnet is a lyrical form of poetry, this mean that it speaks about private and personal feelings. Following the Petrarch’s model, the sonnet was organized into an octave and a sestet; the octave had the function to pose the problem, the sestet tried to provide a solution. When the sonnet enter Great Britain, Wyatt simply tried to translate Petrarch sonnet in English but, since English language was very different from Italian, English sonneteers were compelled to adopt and transform the structure of Petrarch’s model and the new structure was born and it went under the name of “Elizabethan sonnet”. It was organized into three quatrains, that pose three different aspect of the same problem, and a rhyming couplet that solve the problem. There are only two final lines for the solution because is something that sticks to the mind. In English rhythm depends on the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllabus, in Italian it depends on the number of the syllabus.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

This is a William Shakespeare’s sonnet, I understand that this is a sonnet because it is organized into 14 lines: three quatrains and a rhyming couplet, so it is an English sonnet. It belongs to a collection because the title resumes the beginning of the work.

In this three quatrain the author make a comparison between a young man and the summer; when somebody compare someone with the summer it means that is something beautiful. But nobody knows the name of the mysterious man, he is called “the fair youth” and we know only the initials of his name “W.H.”

In the first and the second quatrain the author underline the imperfection of the summer: its temperature and its length. In the third part the young became the subject.