Sonnet Analyzation

English poetry has always welcomed the sonnet form ever since the sixteenth century. It was greatly popular however in the Elizabethan period as this was when thousands of sonnets were written and many of them were used to express love or passion. Since then, most poets writing in English have found the sonnet form very appealing and have attempted their own sonnet writing. The very first sonnets were written in the early thirteenth century in Italy, by a Sicilian lawyer named Giacomo de Lentino. It spread to Tuscany and was popularised by various Italian sonneteers. During the sixteenth century it spread across Europe and was soon bought to England by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard Earl of Surrey.

The Italian and the English sonnets vary greatly in their forms. The Italian form has fourteen lines with a strict but varied rhyme scheme, whereas the English form has fourteen lines and is made up of iambic pentameters. It ends in a rhyming couplet as well so their rhyme schemes also differ greatly. As the Italian language is richer in rhyming words than English is, the English sonnet form reduces the amount of rhyming words needed.

One of the first English sonneteers was Sir Thomas Wyatt. Sir Thomas Wyatt was born in 1503 at Allington Castle in Kent. He attended St Johns College in Cambridge and later undertook diplomatic duties for King Henry VIII which resulted in him travelling across Europe. He married Lord Cobham’s daughter, Elizabeth Brooke, with whom he had two children but they were soon divorced as he had accused her of adultery and left her. He was himself then accused of courting Anne Boleyn before her marriage to Henry VIII and due to this was imprisoned in the Tower of London, only to be released soon after. W...

... middle of paper ...

...aises that past poets made about their lovers are simply predictions of the beauty of his lover, indicating that his lovers beauty is such that it is like the exaggerated descriptions of past poets. This is a clear contradiction to what he says in ‘Sonnet 130’. In the sestet of ‘Sonnet 106’, he says that the preceding poets imagined the beauty of their idealised lovers but were still able to praise them more greatly than people now could as people now experience the beauty that the earlier poets imagined, but are unable to praise them equally as well. The poet may also be endeavouring to say that he admires the skill that poets of the past had and feels that poets now lack that same skill as they are unable to have the same effect as the preceding poets did and because the beauty they illustrate is not imagined – it is right there in front of them to see.