Petrarchan sonnet Petrarchan sonnet The Petrarchan sonnet is a sonnet form not developed by Petrarch himself, but rather by a string of Renaissance poets. Because of the structure of Italian, the rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan sonnet is more easily fulfilled in that language than in English. The original Italian sonnet form divides the poem's 14 lines into two parts, the first part being an octave and the second being a sestet. The rhyme scheme for the octave is typically ABBAABBA. The sestet is more flexible. Petrarch typically used CDECDE or CDCDCD for the sestet. Some other possibilities for the sestet include
Sonnet 93 of experienced readers of the sequence, as it is followed by a far more striking sonnet, 94, and such readers might always be tempted to turn to the utterly unformulaic sonnet that follows. Sonnet 93 is notionally an English or Shakespearean sonnet. The English sonnet has three quatrains, followed by a final rhyming couplet. However, in terms of its syntactical units, sonnet 93 breaks down into 6 lines, another 6, then the closing couplet. It still follows the typical rhyme scheme of the form, "abab cdcd efef gg" and is composed in iambic pentameter, a type of poetic metre based