That’s 7:30pm at Hall’s Croft

Assist ye extempore gods of rime for I am sure i shall turn sonnets!
Quartos fill’d with his most high deserts.

So go through the first 17 sonnets and look for the sprung lines. (in the quarto facsimile or a sparsely edited version) There are an awful lot of examples. Almost every sonnet!

Is this coz the writer is unsure of his line and how to handle the right amount of content to space. I mean sentences don’t have the rigour of the metre. They are easier to create and refute. They offer larger scope than a line.

Towards the end of the sequence from about 137-154 he is busting lines open less frequently. and breaking them up into smaller parts more.

My point is that a sonnet with 14 end-stopped lines is actually a rarity in this series of sonnets. part of Shakespeare’s stylistic change is packing vital information into small packages.

The sonnet in Elizabethan times was compared to the Bed of Procrustes. Procrustes had a bed and if his victims didn’t fit coz they were too long, he chopped a bit off. If they were too short, he stretched them until they fit.

Take a look at sonnets 50 + 51 for examples of riding the verse like a horse!

Compare the verse of RIchard 2nd +- 1593, to A Winter’s Tale +- 1610. The first is riming couplets telling a tale of woe, throughout the second is sparse blank verse stuffed with raw emotion.

Rambling on is easy. Hitting the right note sublimely takes work and lots of practice.