His stock-in-trade consists of a few Platonic notions and a few Petrarchan antitheses.

Others, of a different quality, where he is dealing with Platonic subtleties or Petrarchan conceits, have been twisted into so many forms, and tortured by such frequent re-handlings, that it is difficult now to settle a final text.

Taking the structure first (though for the poet the spirit and impetus of the central idea must of course come first)a sonnet on the Italian (Petrarchan) model must consist of fourteen lines of ten syllables each, and must be composed of a major and minor system, i.e. an octave and a sestet.

But it is Shakespeare whose Sonnets (though not conforming to the Petrarchan model) show the most force and fire of any in our language until those of Milton.

To analyse the variations of the Shakesperian, Spenserian and Miltonian forms is, however, unnecessary to our present purpose, as the Sonnet Sequence we are now prefacing is based on the Petrarchan model.

Strictly speaking, the Petrarchan sestet (the last six lines) should have three separate rhymed sounds; the first and fourth lines, the second and fifth, and the third and sixth should form the three rhymes.

Wyatt in his sonnets had used the Petrarchan or Italian form, the form used later in England by Milton and in the nineteenth century by Rossetti.

The Shakespearian sonnet consists of three four-lined stanzas of alternate rhymes clinched by a concluding couplet; the Petrarchan of two parts, an octave, the first eight lines rhymed abbaabba, and a sestet, the concluding six lines arranged variously on a three-rhyme scheme.