cepts rimes based alone on the final syllable,--harbár, banér,
suffré, displeasúr, although by no system can they be accounted
pure rimes. Wyatt is clearly hampered both by an unsettled
technique and an unsettled language. Surrey's version shows
the advance. ¹

Love that doth raine and line within my thought
and buylt his seat within my captyve brest
clad in the armes wherein with me he fowght
oft in my face he doth his banner rest
But she that tawght me love and suffre paine
my doub(t)ful hope & eke my hote desire
with shamfast looke to shadoo and refrayne
her smyling grace convertyth streight to yre
And cowarde Love then to the hart apace
taketh his flight where he doth lorke and playne
his purpose lost, and dare not shew his face.
for my lorde's gilt thus fawtles byde I payine;
yet from my Lorde shall not my foote remove
sweet is the death that taketh end by love.

Although this version is as literal as the other, by abandoning the
rime-scheme of the Italian sonnet, the difficulty of the rendition
has been greatly decreased. It is unnecessary here to apologize
for the so-called "Elizabethan sonnet"; the form used by Shake-
speare needs no defense. For, whereas the frequency of rimes in
Italian makes the Italian sonnet normal in that language, in Eng-
lish, except in the hands of the greatest masters, it tends to
degenerate into mere verbal ingenuity. It is always an exotic.
Certainly Wyatt's experiments in the Italian form would not en-
courage imitators. Surrey here shows, then, both his independence
and his critical ability in preferring a form more consonant with the
genius of the language. And his use of it was carried over into the
next generation. The two forms of the sonnet produce quite differ-
ent effects. The Italian sonnet, as Petrarch uses it, automatically
breaks into the octave and the sextet, the octave stating the gen-
eral condition and the sextet giving the concrete application. As
the Elizabethan sonnet consists of three quatrains and a couplet,
there is no such mechanical break; the idea, therefore, is developed

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