Rhyme, Meter, and Scansion

Although Sidney, and many other poets writing in English, employed the Italian form, there are some inherent difficulties in writing a Petrarchan sonnet in English; the chief difficulty is explained by W.H. Auden in his introduction to the Signet Classic edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets:  "Compared with Italian, English is so poor in rhymes that it is almost impossible to write a Petrarchan sonnet in it that seems effortless throughout." (Auden, xxv-xxvi)  Shakespeare chose a form, later to be known as the Shakespearean, or Elizabethan, sonnet form, that has seven rhymes in all, instead of the five Petrarchan rhymes (two of which are carried throughout half the sonnet, requiring much flexibility in the chosen rhymes).  The rhyme scheme breaks the poem down into three quatrains (rhymed abab cdcd efef) and a closing couplet (gg):

This form tends to give the sonnet its own distinct progression.  Each quatrain is like a crisp, bitten-off thought, forming a logical progression through the third quatrain.  The closing couplet either nicely summarizes the thought building through the first twelve lines, or creates an unforeseen conclusion (as in Sonnet 128's final line "Give them your fingers, me your lips to kiss").  In Sonnet 43, we see the progression of thought through the first three quatrains thus:  First, the speaker says that his eyes see best when he sleeps because he sees the bright, shining vision of his lover in dreams.  In the second quatrain, he says that if a mere vision of the lover makes sleep's shadows bright, then how beautiful and luminescent would the lover appear, in the flesh, in the light of day (which is put to shame by the lover's radiance)?  In the third stanza, he answers his own rhetorical question by saying that his eyes would be made blessed by seeing the lover in person during the day rather than settling for the dream-vision.  The closing couplet sums everything up nicely by saying that days are dark nights when the lover is not present, and that nights are like day in comparison because of seeing the lover in dreams.

Meter is also an important factor in looking at the form of Sonnet 43.  Like most sonnets of this period, Sonnet 43 is primarily in iambic pentameter.  Iambic pentameter is a rhythm made up of lines of five iambs each, an iamb being an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.  All poetic considerations aside, this should sufffice as an example of pure iambic pentameter (bold type indicates a stressed syllable):

For the most part, sonnet 43 adheres to the rhythms of iambic pentameter; however, there are some points at which Shakespeare deviates from the meter.  (This is a good thing, rather than a bad thing, in the hands of a good poet; more about this topic can be found in the Dramatic Interpretations page.)  Sonnet 43, subjected to scansion, reads like this:

As you can see, the meter sticks mostly to iambic pentameter; even the occasions when it deviates from the meter serve primarily to lend added weight (and possibly reinforce meaning) to the words unnaturally stressed ("clear day", line 7; "dead night", line 11).  Rhythmic deviations in this sonnet are much like eddies in a river; the strong current of iambs running beneath the surface serve to push the poem along.