Fourteen-line iambic pentameter poems, with lines set in three quatrains and a couplet. For a note explaining this motif or common poetic expression and relating it to Shakespeare's use of it, click here .
Desire can destroy or rejuvenate the persona's capacity to make poems.
The sonnets of this section often describe the relationship in terms of disease, deception, and mortal weakness. You should be able, by now, to follow his handling of traditional poetic forms like the sonnet, and to see his indebtedness to Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, and Spenser. This is a long way from evidence that the poet had a plan for all 154 sonnets, and that that plan was executed in the published volumes which issued from the printer's press. Look closely at his predecessor poets' works before making that claim, though. Petrarchanism was now nearly 100 years old, and the sonnet was to them no more of a novelty than electricity is now to Americans.