Let's quickly go over what we've learned about the Petrarchan sonnet. The Petrarchan sonnet is a received form that has 14 lines and a slightly flexible rhyme scheme. The first eight lines, or octave, almost always follow an 'abbaabba' rhyme scheme, but the rhyme scheme of last six line...
The Italian octave (otherwise known as the Sicilian octave) essentially follows the same rules as the first eight lines of the Petrarchan sonnet. It is unknown whether the octave branched from the sonnet or vice versa, but most historians agree that the two are almost certainly related. The fo...
of a sonnet that gained popularity at this time. Even though according to Mayne, Francesco Petrarch was the founder of this form of love poetry and worked on it in the 14th century, representatives of the Renaissance popularized this style. This is another proof that the poets of this genre...