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Updated: May 2, 2025
There was an unfinished sonnet which he had begun three days ago. The octet was finished and the first two lines of the sestet. He would never finish it now. It had no longer any reason to be; for it was a cry to ears which were now deaf, a question, an appeal, which demanded an answering smile, a consenting echo; and the lips, the only lips which could frame that answer, were dumb.
To the Petrarchan purist this is clearly no sonnet at all, in spite of its fourteen five-beat, rhyming lines. For the distinction between octave and sestet has disappeared, there is a threefold division of the first twelve lines, and the final couplet gives an epigrammatic summary or "point" which Petrarch took pains to avoid.
It must have fourteen lines, neither more nor less, with five beats or "stresses" to the line. Each line must end with a rhyme. In the arrangement of the rhymes the sonnet is made up of two parts, or rhyme-systems: the first eight lines forming the "octave," and the last six the "sestet." The octave is made up of two quatrains and the sestet of two tercets.
There is a main pause in passing from the octave to the sestet, and frequently there are minor pauses in passing from the first quatrain to the second, and from the first tercet to the last. Almost all of Petrarch's sonnets follow this rhyme-scheme: for the octave, a b b a a b b a; for the sestet, either c d e c d e or c d c d c d. This strict "Petrarchan" form has endured for six centuries.
The possible combinations are infinite, but the law of logical relation between octave and sestet, premise and conclusion, is immutable.
It has been adopted by poets of every race and language, and it is used to-day as widely or more widely than ever. While individual poets have constantly experimented with different rhyme-schemes, particularly in the sestet, the only really notable invention of a new sonnet form was made by the Elizabethans.
Wordsworth defended Milton's frequent practice of letting the thought of the octave overflow somewhat into the sestet, believing it "to aid in giving that pervading sense of intense unity in which the excellence of the sonnet has always seemed to me mainly to consist." Most lovers of the sonnet would differ here with these masters of the art.
He built up each poem, that is, in two parts, the octave, a two-rhymed section of eight lines at the beginning, followed by the sestet, a six line close with three rhymes.
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