Laid in my quiet bed, in study as I were,
I saw within my troubled head a heap of thoughts appear:
And every thought did show so lively in mine eyes,
That now I sighed, and then I smiled, as cause of thought doth rise.
(Earl of Surrey: How no Age is Content with his Own Estate, in Tottel's Songs and Sonnets. Arber's Reprint, p. 30. Pub. 1557.)
Her forehead jacinth like, her cheeks of opal hue,
Her twinkling eyes bedeck'd with pearl, her lips as sapphire blue;
Her hair like crapal stone, her mouth O heavenly wide;
Her skin like burnish'd gold, her hands like silver ore untried.
(Sir Philip Sidney: Mopsa, in the Arcadia. ab. 1580.)
IV. THE SONNET
The sonnet is an Italian verse-form, in fourteen five-stress lines, introduced into England at the time of the Italian literary influences of the sixteenth century. Almost from the first, the English sonnet has been divided into two classes: one based on more or less strict imitation of the structure of the Italian form, and variously called the Italian, the regular, or the legitimate sonnet; the other taking the Italian sonnet as the point of departure, but constructed according to more familiar English rime-schemes, and commonly called the Shaksperian or the English sonnet.
The origin of the sonnet in southern Europe is a matter of some disagreement. Some scholars trace it to the canzone strophe (e.g. Gaspary, in his Geschichte der Italienischen Literatur), others to the combination of the ottava rima with a six-line stanza (Welti, in his Geschichte des Sonettes in der deutschen Dichtung), others to Provençal and even German influence. (See Schipper, vol. ii. pp. 835 ff., and Lentzner's Das Sonett und seine Gestaltung in der englischen Dichtung, p. 1.) It seems first to have been a recognized form in Italy in the latter part of the thirteenth century (see Tomlinson's The Sonnet: its Origin, Structure, and Place in Poetry); and was made glorious by Dante, Michael Angelo, Tasso, Ariosto, and—above all—Petrarch. On the different forms of the Italian sonnet, see Tomlinson's essay, just cited.
"The object of the regular or legitimate Italian sonnet," says Mr. Tomlinson, "is to express one, and only one, idea, mood, sentiment, or proposition, and this must be introduced ... in the first quatrain, and so far explained in the second, that this may end in a full point; while the office of the first tercet is to prepare the leading idea of the quatrains for the conclusion, which conclusion is to be perfectly carried out in the second tercet, so that it may contain the fundamental idea of the poem." (pp. 27, 28.)