'The sonnet is the perfect poetic form to express love.' Evaluate up to four sonnets of your choice in light of this quotation.

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Jodi Isaacs

28/04/2007

COURSEWORK ASSIGNMENT POETRY – THE SONNET

“The sonnet is the perfect poetic form to express love.”  Evaluate up to four sonnets of your choice in light of this quotation.

        The sonnet is a poem, which always consists of fourteen lines and has ten syllables in each line.  It is the ideal form to express the poet’s true emotions because a sonnet is a very tight form of writing and it consists of a very compact structure.  The sonneteer has to craft his/her expressive feelings into only fourteen lines, which makes the writing extremely emotional and strong.  Fourteen lines form a complete poem, because of its rounded structure and its even, structural number.  There are two forms of sonnets, one being the Shakespearian and the other being the Petrarchan.

        The Shakespearian contains three quatrains and one final couplet.  All the three quatrains have focused on different aspects containing a slightly different subject; yet they will somehow be linked right the way through.  Although, to end of the sonnet, the final couplet will end with a twist, perhaps emphasising either sorrow or heartbreak.  The pattern of the Shakespearian sonnet is 4-4-4-2.

        The Petrarchan sonnet consists of an octave, which are the first eight lines and a sestet, which are the last six lines.  The turning point comes at the end of the octave.  Often, the pause is positioned in various places throughout the sonnet, and usually this type of sonnet has an arranged rhyming technique.

The Petrarchan sonnet I am about to evaluate is by a sonneteer called Elizabeth Barrett Browning.  They are called ‘How do I love thee?’ and ‘If Thou Must Love Me.’ 

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Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born on March 6th, in 1806.  She was the eldest daughter of Edward and Mary Moulton-Barrett.  She was a fairly talented child, reading rapidly and writing odes at the age of nine.  At 15, Elizabeth contracted some sort of disease. Elizabeth was much slower to recover for some reason, and, it was around then that she started talking about her constant illness.  However, she never let anything stop her from reading and writing.  

Later in her life, she married Robert Browning and six months after the wedding, Robert’s mother died and in order to cheer ...

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