Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific--and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien."

The first eight lines rhyme: a, b, b, a, a, b, b, a; the last six: c, d,
c, d, c, d. Thus the sonnet halts only at one place, the interval
between the eighth and the sixth lines, where the rest is welcome, while
the emphasis, instead of coming out so brazenly at the end, reaches its
climax in the next to the last line, dying away gradually. The order of
the eight lines in the modern sonnet is almost invariably unchanged, but
the sestet is varied as the movement of the thought dictates.

As to sonnet construction little can be said here or, if one wished to
go into detail, so much could be said that it would fill this volume a
dozen times. Keats, Wordsworth and Rossetti, to say nothing of a dozen
or more modern sonneteers, are safe models to follow. One trifling
suggestion seems in order. There are so many really good sonnets now
that a second-rate production is a drug on the market. Except as an
exercise it is altogether superfluous. A first-class sonnet must be
grounded first on an idea and then rewritten and worked over until the
idea has found a fit setting. Commonplaceness either in the idea or its
expression is alike fatal.

VII

THE BALLADE AND OTHER FRENCH FORMS

CHAPTER VII

THE BALLADE AND OTHER FRENCH FORMS

The Anglo Saxons were a hard-drinking race whose bards chanted
interminable battle songs to tables of uncritical, mead-filled heroes.
As a result the English language grew up without many of the finer
points of verse and bare especially of all fixed forms. It was this
latter lack which Austin Dobson sought to supply by imitating in English
the ballade, triolet, villanelle and other verse arrangements at that
time used only by the French and not very generally among them.

_The Ballade_

Of these the ballade is the best known, and Dobson's "Ballade of the
Pompadour's Fan" is subjoined as one of the most popular and most easily
imitated.

"Chicken skin, delicate, white,
Painted by Carlo Van Loo,
Loves in a riot of light,
Roses and vaporous blue;
Hark to the dainty frou-frou!
Picture above if you can
Eyes that would melt like the dew--
This was the Pompadour's fan!