Notes
- This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain : Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Sestett". Encyclopædia Britannica . Vol. 24 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 702.
A sestet is six lines of poetry forming a stanza or complete poem. A sestet is also the name given to the second division of an Italian sonnet (as opposed to an English or Spenserian Sonnet), which must consist of an octave, of eight lines, succeeded by a sestet, of six lines.
The etymology of the word can be traced to the Italian word sestetto, meaning “sixth”. [1] [2] The origin of the sonnet form has been traced to poems by Giacomo di Lentino in Sicily. [3] The original sonnet form is the Sicilian Sonnet (also in octave and sestet) rhyming ABABABAB CDECDE or CDCDCD. It is generally believed that the first eight lines derive from the Sicilian form of the Stramboto.
The first recognized and documented user of this poetical form was the Italian poet Petrarch. In the usual course the rhymes are arranged ABCABC, but this is not necessary.One example is from Srasimum's Sestet which has a rhyme scheme of AACBBC.
"Solid Determination to Ultimate Goals" — Srasimum's Sestet by Nicola A. Viriditch
Early Italian sonnets, and in particular those of Dante, often close with the rhyme arrangement ABCCBA, but in languages where the sonority of syllables is not so great as it is in Italian, it is incorrect to leave a period of five lines between one rhyme and another. In the quatorzain, there is, properly speaking, no sestet, but a quatrain followed by a couplet, as in the case of English sonnets. Another form of sestet has only two rhymes, ABABAB, as is the case in Gray's famous sonnet On the Death of Richard West.
The sestet marks the turn of emotion in the sonnet. As a rule, with the octave having been more or less objective, reflection should make its appearance in the sestet, with a tendency to the subjective manner. For example, in Matthew Arnold's The Better Part, the rough inquirer, who has had his own way in the octave, is replied to as soon as the sestet commences:
Wordsworth and Milton are both remarkable for the dignity with which they conduct the downward wave of the sestet in their sonnet. The French sonneteers of the 16th century, with Ronsard at their head, preferred the softer sound of the arrangement AABCCB. The German poets have usually wavered between the English and the Italian forms.
The term sonnet derives from the Italian word sonetto. It refers to a fixed verse poetic form, traditionally consisting of fourteen lines adhering to a set rhyming scheme. Originating in 13th-century Sicily, the sonnet was in time taken up in many European-language areas, mainly to express romantic love at first, although eventually any subject was considered acceptable. Many formal variations were also introduced, including abandonment of the quatorzain limit – and even of rhyme altogether in modern times.
Poetry analysis is the process of investigating the form of a poem, content, structural semiotics, and history in an informed way, with the aim of heightening one's own and others' understanding and appreciation of the work.
Ottava rima is a rhyming stanza form of Italian origin. Originally used for long poems on heroic themes, it later came to be popular in the writing of mock-heroic works. Its earliest known use is in the writings of Giovanni Boccaccio.
A rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhymes at the end of each line of a poem or song. It is usually referred to by using letters to indicate which lines rhyme; lines designated with the same letter all rhyme with each other.
An octave is a verse form consisting of eight lines of iambic pentameter or of hendecasyllables. The most common rhyme scheme for an octave is ABBA ABBA.
The Sicilian School was a small community of Sicilian and mainland Italian poets gathered around Frederick II, most of them belonging to his imperial court in Palermo. Headed by Giacomo da Lentini, they produced more than 300 poems of courtly love between 1230 and 1266, the experiment being continued after Frederick's death by his son, Manfred.
The Petrarchan sonnet, also known as the Italian sonnet, is a sonnet named after the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca, although it was 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 consists of a total of fourteen hendecasyllabic lines in two parts, the first part being an octave and the second being a sestet.
"The Soldier" is a poem written by Rupert Brooke. It is the fifth and final sonnet in the sequence 1914, published posthumously in 1915 in the collection 1914 and Other Poems.
The Sicilian octave is a verse form consisting of eight lines of eleven syllables each, called a hendecasyllable. The form is common in late medieval Italian poetry. In English poetry, iambic pentameter is often used instead of syllabics. The form has a prescribed rhyme scheme (ABABABAB). Although only the final two rhymes are different from the much more common ottava rima, the two eight-line forms evolved completely separately. According to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, scholars disagree on the origin of the Sicilian octave, but all agree that it is related to the development of the first eight lines of the sonnet. It is not clear whether the octave emerged first and influenced the sonnet or vice versa.
Sonnet 1 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a procreation sonnet within the Fair Youth sequence.
Sonnet 29 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is part of the Fair Youth sequence. In the sonnet, the speaker bemoans his status as an outcast and failure but feels better upon thinking of his beloved. Sonnet 29 is written in the typical Shakespearean sonnet form, having 14 lines of iambic pentameter ending in a rhymed couplet.
Sonnet 41 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a part of the Fair Youth section of the sonnets addressed to an unnamed young man. While the exact date of the composition is unknown, it was originally published in the 1609 Quarto along with the rest of the sonnets.
The volta is a rhetorical shift or dramatic change in thought and/or emotion. Turns are seen in all types of written poetry. In the last two decades, the volta has become conventionally used as a word for this, stemming supposedly from technique specific mostly to sonnets. Volta is not, in fact, a term used by many earlier critics when they address the idea of a turn in a poem, and they usually are not discussing the sonnet form. It is a common Italian word more often used of the idea of a time or an occasion than a turnabout or swerve.
The sonnets of Petrarch and Shakespeare represent, in the history of this major poetic form, the two most significant developments in terms of technical consolidation—by renovating the inherited material—and artistic expressiveness—by covering a wide range of subjects in an equally wide range of tones. Both writers cemented the sonnet's enduring appeal by demonstrating its flexibility and lyrical potency through the exceptional quality of their poems.
"The World Is Too Much with Us" is a sonnet by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth. In it, Wordsworth criticises the world of the First Industrial Revolution for being absorbed in materialism and distancing itself from nature. Composed circa 1802, the poem was first published in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807).
A masculine ending and feminine ending or weak ending are terms used in prosody, the study of verse form. "masculine ending" refers to a line ending in a stressed syllable. "feminine ending" is its opposite, describing a line ending in a stressless syllable. This definition is applicable in most cases; see below, however, for a more refined characterization.
"The Good-Morrow" is a poem by John Donne, published in his 1633 collection Songs and Sonnets.
Love Is Not All: It Is Not Meat nor Drink is a 1931 poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, written during the Great Depression.
"Holy Sonnet XIV" – also known by its first line as "Batter my heart, three-person'd God" – is a poem written by the English poet John Donne. It is a part of a larger series of poems called Holy Sonnets, comprising nineteen poems in total. The poem was printed and published for the first time in Poems in 1633, two years after the author's death. In the 1633 edition the sequence of the poems was different from that found in Herbert Grierson’s edition from 1912; that is why Holy Sonnet XIV features as Holy Sonnet X in older publications. However, the majority of twentieth-century and later editions of Donne's Holy Sonnets are found to prefer and use the order proposed by Grierson and thus include the sonnet as the fourteenth in the cycle.
"Sonnet II", also known by its opening words as "As Due By Many Titles", is a poem written by John Donne, who is considered to be one of the representatives of the metaphysical poetry in English literature. It was first published in 1633, two years after Donne’s death.
