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The sonnet (from the Italian "sonneuo," meaning "little song") owes much of its long-standing popularity to the Italian poet Petrarch. By the mid-sixteenth century, this fixed poetic form was adopted by the English, who borrowed the fourteen-line pattern and many of Petrarch's literary conventions. English writers did, however, alter the rhyme scheme to allow for more variety in rhyming words: while an Italian sonnet might rhyme abba, abba, edc, edc an English or Shakespearean sonnet rhymes abab, cded, efef, gg.
In all but three of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets ("Sonnet 99." "Sonnet 126" and "Sonnet 145") the first three groups of four lines each are known as quatrains, and the last two lines are recognized as a couplet. The three breaks between the quatrains and the couplet serve as convenient places where the writer's train of thought may take a different direction. In "Sonnet 116," the second quatrain
Why did Shakespeare write this poem? Explain what experiences he might have had that would make him write a statement like this.
Rewrite this poem in modern language and in the modern poetic style of free verse, making the same points that Shakespeare makes and using his imagery.
Stands apart from the first and the third because it attempts to describe what love is, instead of what it is not. The couplet continues the line of thinking of the quatrains, offering a formal logical proof of the sonnet's assertions and negations.
A few of this sonnet's lines, such as 3 and 13, are written in perfect iambic pentameter. Iambic meter, the most familiar rhythm of the English language, is the succession of alternately stressed by lables: an iamb is a group of two syllables in which the fust is unstressed and the second is stressed. The use of "penta" (meaning "live") before "meter" means that there are five iambs per line.
Most of "Sonnet 116." however, fights against the establishment of any regulated rhythm. The first line begins with a hammering of stressed syllables, as if a judge were rapping a gavel; the meter is also disrupted because of the line's lack of an end-stop, and its continuation on the next line. More obstructions to the poem's rhythmic flow are presented by such heavily accented tongue twisters as "Love's not Time's fool" (line 9) and "But bears it out even to the edge" (line 12), and another run on time between lines 9 and 10. As is often the case with Shakespeare's sonnets, the mood and meaning of the words is reinforced by their rhythm, or lack thereof,