A,B,A,B,B,C,B,C....
""_ HE English Sonnet," with its melancholy memories of algebraic rhymeschemes, was the theme of a BBC Book of Verse programme. The compiler confined himself principally to consideration of prosody, tracing the sonnet’s evolution from the Petrarchan model to the Shakespearean, back via Milton to the Petrarchan again, in terms of rhyme, octave, and sestet, He did not speculate on the cause of these changes and was content to leave the Miltonic reaction, which abandoned the rhymed couplet closing the sonnet (that had been the distinctive English contribution to the original Italian) as an unexplained but regrettable fact. Nor did he deal with the evolution of subject-matter, from the amorous to the religious, to the patriotic, to the philosophical, to the religious again (there is rumoured to exist a long series by Wordsworth of "Ecclesiastical Sonnets"), in any but a summary manner. But the rigid insistence on the sonnet as existing only in its prosodical character had a certain austere grandeur. However, one is left to wonder whether there is not something else, harder to define, which singles out the spirit of the sonnet from other forms of verse, and what this may be. :
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 379, 27 September 1946, Page 11
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194A,B,A,B,B,C,B,C.... New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 379, 27 September 1946, Page 11
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