Henry Constable and the Petrarchan Sonnet

  
IAMBIC

  • The most commonly used English foot.

  • "an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable"

  • As the stressed syllable follows the unstressed syllable, the iamb is a "rising meter".

  • As one iambic foot is composed of two syllables, the iamb is a "duple meter".

  
 
PENTAMETER
  • "A metric line is named according to the number of feet composing it."
  • i.e. trimeter: three feet; octameter: eight feet
  • pentameter: five feet
  
THE SONNET

  • "A lyric poem consisting of a single stanza of fourteen iambic pentameter lines linked by an intricate rhyme scheme."

  
THE PETRARCHAN SONNET
  • also called the Italian sonnet
  • named after Petrarch
  • composed of an octave (abbaabba) and a sestet (cdecde OR cdccdc)
  • The subject matter was primarily that of the adoration of a young male lover.
 Information taken from M.H. Abram's A Glossary of Literary Terms.
 

     Constable makes a deliberate decision to use the Petrarchan sonnet rather than the English or Shakespearian sonnet.  This decision is in keeping with his moral and religious choices to reject the Church of England, and consequently, England herself. 

 
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created by Heather C. Milligan