Petrarchan sonnet Italian sonnet form in the poems of his that were not translation and adaptation work. As a result, he is often credited for integrating the Petrarchan sonnet into English vernacular tradition. The form also gave rise to an "anti-Petrarchan" convention which may have revealed the mistress to be ugly and unworthy. The convention was also mocked, or adopted for alternative persuasive means by many of the Inns of Court writers during the Renaissance. The sonnet is split in two groups: the "octave" (of 8 lines) and the "sestet" (of 6 lines), for a total of 14 lines. The octave (the
Sonnet 26 composed in iambic pentameter, a type of poetic metre based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions per line. The seventh line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter line. The next contains a final extrametrical syllable or "feminine ending", of which this sonnet has six; it also exhibits an ictus moved to the right (resulting in a four-position figure, codice_1, sometimes referred to as a "minor ionic"): As Stephen Booth notes, Sonnet 26 works on a series of "shows": the word appears in four separate lines of the sonnet. Booth perceives a vague sexual pun in the second half of