The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.An Italian sonnet is composed of an octave, rhyming abbaabba, and a sestet, rhyming cdecde or cdcdcd, or in some variant pattern, but with no closing couplet. Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, Sestet - "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. Glows world-wide welcome her mild eyes command Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand With conquering limbs astride from land to land Octave- Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, So didst thou travel on life's common way,Įmma Lazarus's " The New Colossus" Lazarus's poem uses one of the oldest and most traditional patterns for the sestet. Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea: Sestet - Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart Have forfeited their ancient English dowerĪnd give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,įireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, William Wordsworth's " London, 1802" Octave - Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour: The sestet provides resolution for the poem and rhymes variously, but usually follows the schemes of CDECDE or CDCCDC. The octave typically introduces the theme or problem using a rhyme scheme of ABBAABBA. The sonnet is split in two stanzas: the " octave" or "octet" (of 8 lines) and the " sestet" (of 6 lines), for a total of 14 lines. The convention was also mocked, or adopted for alternative persuasive means by many of the Inns of Court writers during the Renaissance. The form also gave rise to an "anti-Petrarchan" convention. As a result, he is often credited for integrating the Petrarchan sonnet into English vernacular tradition. While Surrey tended to use the English sonnet form in his own work, reserving the Petrarchan form for his translations of Petrarch, Wyatt made extensive use of the Italian sonnet form in the poems of his that were not translation and adaptation work. Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey are both known for their translations of Petrarch's sonnets from Italian into English.
The sestet begins with a volta which marks the change in rhyme scheme as well as the chane of the conflict into a solution or some form of resolution The next quatrain explains the problem or provides an exposition to the reader. The octave introduces a problem or conflict in the mind of the speaker, in the first four lines (known as the first quatrain). However, in Italian sonnets in English, this rule is not always observed, and CDDCEE and CDCDEE are also used. In a strict Petrarchan sonnet, the sestet does not end with a couplet (since this would tend to divide the sestet into a quatrain and a couplet). For background on the pre-English sonnet, see Robert Canary's web page, The Continental Origins of the Sonnet. This form was used in the earliest English sonnets by Wyatt and others.
Some other possibilities for the sestet include CDDCDD, CDDECE, or CDDCCD (as in Wordsworth's "Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room" ).
Petrarch typically used CDECDE or CDCDCD for the sestet. The rhyme scheme means the last word of the line should rhyme with the pattern of ABBAABBA or other variants. The rhyme scheme for the octave is typically ABBAABBA.