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Shakespearean sonnet's first quatrain usually serves to introduce a conflict or a topic which is later solved or summarized in the couplet.

It was derived from the older Petrarchan or Italian Sonnet . Henry Howard , Earl of Surrey , created early examples in the 16th Century , but the form is strongly associated with William Shakespeare because of his authorship of a famed collection published in 1609 (see Shakespeare's Sonnets ).

This example, Shakespeare's ''Sonnet 116'', illustrates the form:

:Let me not to the marriage of true minds
:Admit impediments. Love is not love
:Which alters when it alteration finds,
:Or bends with the remover to remove.

:O no, it is an ever fixed mark
:That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
:It is the star to every wandering baroque,
:Whose worth's unknown although his height be taken.

:Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
:Within his bending sickle's compass come;
:Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
:But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

:If this be error and upon me proved,
:I never write, nor no man ever loved.

Clearly, sonnet 144 is in a poem form of 14 lines, 10 stressed and unstressed syllables (iambic pentameter), three quatrains and one ending couplet with the rhyme scheme of: a b a b c d c d e f e f g g.

:1. Two loves I have of comfort and despair, A
:2. Which like two spirits do suggest me still: B
:3. The better angel is a man right fair, A
:4. The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill. B
:5. To win me soon to hell, my female evil, C
:6. Tempteth my better angel from my side, D
:7. And would corrupt my saint to be a devil, C
:8. Wooing his purity with her foul pride. D
:9. And whether that my angel be turn'd fiend, E
:10. Suspect I may, yet not directly tell; F
:11. But being both from me, both to each friend, E
:12. I guess one angel in another's hell: F
:13. Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt, G
:14. Till my bad angel fire my good one out. G


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