Back to the deeps of Life’s tumultuous sea.
Although the run-on line between the terzetti is perhaps open to a slight objection, the rhyme-arrangement is absolutely correct, the inadmissible rhyming couplet at the end of the poem being of course avoided. Other sonnets on the sonnet written in English, German, or French, are quoted in Metrik, ii, § 534
§ 309. The first English sonnet-writers, Wyatt and Surrey, departed considerably from this strict Italian form, although they both translated sonnets written by Petrarch into English. Their chief deviation from this model is that, while retaining the two quatrains, they break up the second chief part of the sonnet, viz. the terzetti, into a third quatrain (with separate rhymes) and a rhyming couplet. Surrey went still further in the alteration of the original sonnet by changing the arrangement and the number of rhymes in the quatrains also, whereas Wyatt, as a rule, in this respect only exceptionally deviated from the structure of the Italian sonnet. The greater part of Wyatt’s sonnets (as well as Donne’s, cf. Metrik, ii, § 541) have therefore the scheme abba abba cddc ee, whereas other forms, as e.g. abba abba cd cd ee occur only occasionally (cf. Metrik, ii, § 535).
This order of rhymes, on the other hand, was frequently used by Sir Philip Sidney, who on the whole followed the Italian model, and sometimes employed even more accurate Italian forms, avoiding the final rhyming couplet (cf. ib. § 538). He also invented certain extended and curtailed sonnets which are discussed in Metrik, ii, §§ 539, 540
§ 310. Of greater importance is Surrey’s transformation of the Italian sonnet, according to the formula abab cdcd efefgg. This variety of the sonnet—which, we may note in passing, Surrey also extended into a special poetic form consisting of several such quatrains together with a final rhyming couplet (cf. Metrik, ii, § 537)—was very much in favour in the sixteenth and at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Samuel Daniel, and above all Shakespeare, wrote their sonnets mainly[200] in this form, sometimes combining a series of them in a closely connected cycle. As a specimen of this most important form we quote the eighteenth of Shakespeare’s sonnets:
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,