Sonnet 18 this sonnet: it is not the actual young man who will be eternalized, but the description of him contained in the poem, and the poem contains scant or no description of the young man, but instead contains vivid and lasting descriptions of a summer day; which the young man is supposed to outlive. Sonnet 18 is a typical English or Shakespearean sonnet, having 14 lines of iambic pentameter: three quatrains followed by a couplet. It also has the characteristic rhyme scheme: "abab cdcd efef gg". The poem reflects the rhetorical tradition of an Italian or Petrarchan Sonnet. Petrarchan sonnets typically
Sonnet introduced, such as CDCDCD. Petrarch typically used an ABBA ABBA pattern for the octave, followed by either CDE CDE or CDC CDC rhymes in the sestet. The symmetries (ABBA vs. CDC) of these rhyme schemes have also been rendered in musical structure in the late 20th century composition "Scrivo in Vento" by Elliott Carter, inspired by Petrarch's Sonnet 212, "Beato in Sogno".) In English, both the English or Shakespearean sonnet, and the Italian Petrarchan sonnet are traditionally written in iambic pentameter. The first known sonnets in English, written by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, used the