ur lines must contain nothing
else.

The following example by Frank Dempster Sherman not only describes this
form of verse but is an excellent quatrain in itself:

"Hark at the lips of this pink whorl of shell
And you shall hear the ocean's surge and roar:
So in the quatrain's measure, written well
A thousand lines shall all be sung in four."

_The Sonnet_

It is the ambition of many a versifier to be known as a maker of
sonnets. Doubtless this love for the form is prompted not only by its
possibilities but even more by its traditions. Shakespeare, Milton,
Wordsworth and Rossetti, to mention only a few of the celebrated names,
were masters of the sonnet, though it must be said that the version used
by the earlier English writers was not the one we know to-day.
Shakespeare's seventy-third sonnet may serve as a fair example of the
arrangement of the lines in the early Elizabethan period, though even in
his day the present rhyming order was passing gradually into use.

"That time of year thou may'st in me behold
When yellow leaves or few or none do hang
Upon the boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceivest which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long."

This fourteen lines, as an examination will discover, might be written
in three four-line stanzas with an additional two lines as an
epigrammatic envoy. In fact it can scarcely be called a sonnet at all,
and the last two lines come out with such force as to offend the ear
accustomed to the more modern form.

The sonnet by Keats, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," is an
excellent illustration of the change in the rhyming system and emphasis.

"Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne:
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard