tailieunhanh - IELTS Academic Reading Sample 91 - Variations on a theme the sonnet form in English poetry

IELTS Academic Reading Sample 91 - Variations on a theme the sonnet form in English poetry sẽ giúp các bạn biết được cách thức làm bài thi cũng như củng cố kiến thức của mình, chuẩn bị tốt cho kì thi sắp tới. Mời các bạn tham khảo. | You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28-40 which are based on Reading Passage 91 on the following pages. Variations on a theme the sonnet form in English poetry A The form of lyric poetry known as the sonnet or little song was introduced into the English poetic corpus by Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder and his contemporary Henry Howard Earl of Surrey during the first half of the sixteenth century. It originated however in Italy three centuries earlier with the earliest examples known being those of Giacomo de Lentino The Notary in the Sicilian court of the Emperor Frederick II dating from the third decade of the thirteenth century. The Sicilian sonneteers are relatively obscure but the form was taken up by the two most famous poets of the Italian Renaissance Dante and Petrarch and indeed the latter is regarded as the master of the form. B The Petrarchan sonnet form the first to be introduced into English poetry is a complex poetic structure. It comprises fourteen lines written in a rhyming metrical pattern of iambic pentameter that into say each line is ten syllables long divided into five feet or pairs of syllables hence pentameter with a stress pattern where the first syllable of each foot is unstressed and the second stressed an iambic foot . This can be seen if we look at the first line of one of Wordsworth s sonnets After-Thought I thought of thee my partner and my guide . If we hreak down this line into its constituent syllabic parts we can see the five feet and the stress pattern in this example each stressed syllable is underlined thus I thought of thee my partner and my guide . C The rhyme scheme for the Petrarchan sonnet is equally as rigid. The poem is generally divided into two parts the octave eight lines and the sestet six lines which is demonstrated through rhyme rather than an actual space between each section. The octave is usually rhymed abbaabba with the first fourth fifth and eighth lines rhyming with each other and the second third sixth