Sonnet 127 - Structure

Structure

John Kerrigan examines the rhyme schemes in the sonnets very closely and clearly makes that the point that even though we now pronounce words differently than we did 400 years ago, we are not clueless as to how the words were pronounced. After Kerrigan examines what he names “the internal and external evidence available to us,” he concludes that the imperfect rhymes may in fact be more imperfect today than there were 400 years ago, but there is no real harm in reading the sonnets with a modern accent. Kerrigan finds the lack of scholarly work done about the meter of the sonnets to be “unfortunate given the incredible richness of the metrical patterns in the sonnets. The sonnets are written in iambic pentameter, a line consisting of five metrical feet, each foot containing two syllables, the first unstressed and the second stressed. In practice, good verse written in iambic pentameter contains variations in this basic pattern. Instead of the usual foot, some feet may instead contain a trochee (stressed followed by unstressed), a spondee (two stressed), or a pyrrhic (two unstressed).”