Approximately a year later, William Jaggard's miscellany, The Passionate Pilgrim, appeared, containing twenty poems, five of which are known to be Shakespeare's - two of the Dark Lady sonnets (Sonnets 138 and 144) and three poems included in the play Love's Labour's Lost. The sonnet is a difficult art form for the poet because of its restrictions on length and meter.Īlthough the entirety of Shakespeare's sonnets were not formally published until 1609 (and even then, they were published without the author's knowledge), an allusion to their existence appeared eleven years earlier, in Francis Meres' Palladis Tamia (1598), in which Meres commented that Shakespeare's 'sugred Sonnets' were circulating privately among the poet's friends. Shakespeare uses five of these in each line, which makes it a pentameter. An iamb is a metrical foot consisting of one stressed syllable and one unstressed syllable - as in dah-DUM, dah-DUM dah-DUM dah-DUM dah-DUM.
The rhythmic pattern of the sonnets is the iambic pentameter. In Shakespeare's sonnets, the rhyme pattern is abab cdcd efef gg, with the final couplet used to summarize the previous 12 lines or present a surprise ending. Full Glossary for Shakespeare's SonnetsĪ sonnet is a 14-line poem that rhymes in a particular pattern.
