(4) An examination of the rimes again will show that greater strictness prevails in the octave than in the sestet.  The most regular type of the octave may be represented by a b b a a b b a, turning therefore upon two rimes only.  The sestet, though it contains but six lines, is more liberal in the disposition of its rimes.  In the sonnet which we are examining, the rime system of the sestet in c d d e c e—­containing, as we see, three separate rimes.  In the sestet this is permissible, provided that there is not a riming couplet at the close.

(5) Again, with reference to the rime, it will be observed that the vowel terminals of the octave and the sestet are differentiated.  Anything approaching assonance between the two divisions is to be counted as a defect.

(6) It is evident that there is unity both of thought and mood in this sonnet, the sestet being differentiated from the octave, only as above described.

(7) It is almost unnecessary to add that there is no slovenly diction, that the language is dignified in proportion to the theme, and that there is no obscurity or repetition in thought or phraseology.

These rules will appear to the young reader of poetry as almost unnecessarily severe.  But it must be remembered that the sonnet is avowedly a conventional form (though in it much of the finest poetry in our language is contained), and as such the conventional laws attaching to all prescribed forms must be observed to win complete success.

Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton have lent the authority of their great names to certain distinct variations from the rigid Petrarchan type.  The peculiarity of Spenser’s sonnets is that the rime of the octave overflows into the sestet, thus marring the exquisite balance which should subsist between the two parts, and yielding an effect of cloying sweetness.  Although the famous stanza-form which he invented in his “Faerie Queene” has found many imitators, his sonnet innovations are practically unimportant.

The Shakespearean sonnet, on the contrary, must be regarded as a well-established variant from the stricter Italian form.  Though Shakespeare’s name has made it famous, it did not originate with him.  Surrey and Daniel had habitually employed it, and in fact it had come to be recognized as the accepted English form.  Its characteristic feature, as the following sonnet from Shakespeare will show, was a division into three distinct quatrains, each with alternating rimes, and closed by a couplet.  The transition of thought at the ninth line is usually observed:—­

  “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
  I all alone beweep my outcast state,
  And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
  And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
  Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
  Featured like him, like him with friends possess’d,
  Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,