The English (or Shakespearian) Sonnet

The major features:

It is comprised of three quatrains and a final couplet in iambic pentameter. Rhyme scheme: abab cdcd efef gg. Often, the beginning of the third quatrain marks the "turn", or the line in which the poem's mood shifts and the poet expresses a revelation or epiphany.

This example, Shakespeare's Sonnet 116, illustrates the form:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no, it is an ever fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth's unknown although his height be taken. Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom.     If this be error and upon me proved,     I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

History

The sonnet was introduced into English by Thomas Wyatt in the early 16th century. His sonnets and those of his contemporary the Earl of Surrey were chiefly translations from the Italian of Petrarch and the French of Ronsard and others. Sir Philip Sidney's sequence Astrophel and Stella (1591) started a tremendous vogue for sonnet sequences: the next two decades saw sonnet sequences by William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, Fulke Greville, William Drummond of Hawthornden, and many others.These sonnets were all essentially inspired by the Petrarchan tradition, and generally treat of the poet's love for some woman; the exception is Shakespeare's sequence. In the 17th century, the sonnet was adapted to other purposes, with John Donne and George Herbert writing religious sonnets, and John Milton using the sonnet as a general meditative poem. Both the Shakespearean and Petrarchan rhyme schemes were popular throughout this period, as well as many variants. The fashion for the sonnet went out with the Restoration, and hardly any sonnets were written between 1670 and Wordsworth's time.

Spenserian Sonnet

Major features:

three quatrains and a final rhyming couplet in iambic pentameter rhyme scheme: abab bcbc cdcd ee.

In a Spenserian sonnet there does not appear to be a requirement that the initial octet sets up a problem which the closing sestet answers as is the case with a Shakespearean sonnet. Instead, the form is treated as three quatrains connected by the interlocking rhyme scheme and followed by a couplet. The linked rhymes of his quatrains suggest the linked rhymes of such Italian forms as terza rima.

This example, Sonnet 1 from Spencer's Amoretti, illustrates the form:

Happy ye leaves! when as those lily hands, Which hold my life in their dead doing might, Shall handle you, and hold in love's soft bands, Like captives trembling at the victor's sight. And happy lines! on which, with starry light, Those lamping eyes will deign sometimes to look, And read the sorrows of my dying sprite, Written with tears in heart's close bleeding book. And happy rhymes! bathed in the sacred brook Of Helicon, whence she derived is, When ye behold that angel's blessed look, My soul's long lacked food, my heaven's bliss. Leaves, lines, and rhymes seek her to please alone, Whom if ye please, I care for other none.