Excerpt: ...Spenserian in artistic merit is the sonnet: but the two are for very different purposes, the one being nearly always used in long, clearly connected series, generally narrative, the other nearly always as an independent poem. Even when sonnets are written in 'sequences, ' the relation of the individual sonnets to each other is rarely very close; the unity of the whole sequence (as in Rossetti's House of Life, for example, or Mrs. Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese) is one merely of general tone and subject. Some of Shakespeare's sonnets are bound together by an intimate unity like stanzas of one poem; others are completely detached. Occasionally a poem is composed of three or four sonnet-stanzas, as Leigh Hunt's The Fish, the Man, and the Spirit, but even then each sonnet remains an independent whole. The word 'sonnet, ' borrowed with the metrical form from Italy in the late sixteenth century, 61 was at first used loosely for almost any short poem on love not obviously a 'song'; but soon the term became restricted to a poem of fourteen 5-stress iambic lines arranged according to one of two definite rime schemes or their modifications. These two rime schemes are 120 the original Italian abba abba cde cde and the English abab cdcd efef gg. Italian Sonnet. The organization of the subject matter of an Italian sonnet is (at least theoretically) as fixed as that of the rimes. The whole should aim to convey without irrelevant detail a single thought or feeling. The first quatrain, abba, should introduce the subject; the second, abba, should develop it to a certain point, at which a pause occurs; such is the octave. The sestet continues in the first tercet, cde, the thought or feeling in a new direction or from a new point of view, and in the second, cde, brings it to a full conclusion. 62 The rime sounds of the octave and those of the sestet should be harmonious but not closely similar. It stands to reason that very few poets have enslaved themselves to...