character of time in elizabethan sonnet sequences

Surrey's sonnets have a tenderness and grace, occasional lyrical melody, and genuine-looking sentiments which are absent from Wyatt's. Both Wyatt and Surrey imitated in their sonnets the conventional thoughts of Petrarch, which rendered them somewhat artificial and insincere. The rhyme-scheme followed is a b a b, a b a b, a b a b, c c. The feature of the Surreyesque pattern is the division of the fourteen lines into four units-three quatrains (four lines) and the ending couplet (two lines). This pattern came to be termed the Shakespearean pattern. Whereas Wyatt mostly adhered to the Petrarchan pattern, Surrey invented a new one for his sonnets, which later was to be adopted by most Elizabethan sonneteers the most prominent of whom was Shakespeare. The octave in a Petrarchan sonnet always has the rhyme-scheme abbaabba, though the sestet may have one of the various patterns such zscdcdcdorcddcee. The thought in a Petrarchan sonnet may be compared to a wave which goes on rising and reaches its highest altitude with the eighth line and then starts petering out till it dies at the end. With the ninth line comes the volta or the turn of thought. In between the octave and the sestet there is a marked pause indicated on paper by some blank space. Moreover, most of them follow the Patrarchan pattern that is, each has two parts-an octave (eight lines) followed by a sestet (six lines). Wyatt was much under the spell of his model Petrarch, and out of his thirty-two sonnets, seventeen are but adaptations of Petrarch's. Wyatt's lead was accepted by Surrey whose sonnets were likewise published after his death, in the Miscellany. Though he wrote much earlier, it was in 1557, a year before Elizabeth was coronated (and some fifteen years after his death), that his sonnets were published in Tottle's Miscellany.

Character of time in elizabethan sonnet sequences