Spenserian sonnet

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The Spenserian sonnet is a sonnet composed of three quatrains and a final rhyming couplet in iambic pentameter with the rhyme scheme abab bcbc cdcd ee.

It is a sonnet variation developed in the sixteenth century by English poet Edmund Spenser. While few poets have used this form, it serves as a bridge between the Petrarchan sonnet, also known as the Italian sonnet, and the Shakespearean sonnet, also known as the English sonnet.

In a Spenserian sonnet there does not appear to be a requirement that the initial octet sets up a problem which the closing sestet answers as is the case with a Shakespearean sonnet. Instead, the form is treated as three quatrains connected by the interlocking rhyme scheme and followed by a couplet. The linked rhymes of his quatrains suggest the linked rhymes of such Italian forms as terza rima.

This example, Sonnet 1 from Spencer's Amoretti, illustrates the form:

Happy ye leaves! when as those lily hands,

Which hold my life in their dead doing might,

Shall handle you, and hold in love's soft bands,

Like captives trembling at the victor's sight.

And happy lines! on which, with starry light,

Those lamping eyes will deign sometimes to look,

And read the sorrows of my dying sprite,

Written with tears in heart's close bleeding book.

And happy rhymes! bathed in the sacred brook

Of Helicon, whence she derived is,

When ye behold that angel's blessed look,

My soul's long lacked food, my heaven's bliss.

Leaves, lines, and rhymes seek her to please alone,

Whom if ye please, I care for other none.

Spenserian sonnet

See also