use of this poetic form:--

and when a damp
Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand
The Thing became a trumpet; whence he blew
Soul-animating strains,--alas too few.

The Shakespearean sonnet consists of three quatrains followed by a
couplet,--the usual English form up to the seventeenth century. Milton
adopted the Italian, or Petrarchian model, which has continued to be the
standard sonnet form in our modern poetry. In the Miltonic, or Italian,
sonnet a group of eight lines, linked by two rhymes each occurring four
times, is followed by a group of six lines linked by three rhymes each
occurring twice. The octave and the sextet are severed from each other by
the non-continuance of the rhymes of the former into the latter. At the
end of the octave, or near it, is usually a pause, marking the
culmination of the thought, and the sextet makes an inference or rounds
out the sense to an artistic whole.

Read Wordsworth's sonnets, _Happy the feeling from the bosom thrown,_ and
_Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room._

I.

The date of this sonnet is unknown. From the fact that it comes first in
the series as arranged by the poet, it is inferred that it is the
earliest sonnet he chose to publish.

4. the jolly Hours. See note on Comus 986.

5-6. To hear the nightingale before the cuckoo was for lovers a good
sign. This superstition is a motive in the _Cuckoo and the Nightingale_,
a poem formerly attributed to Chaucer, and as such "modernized" by
Wordsworth, but now known to be the work of Sir Thomas Clanvowe. Stanza X
of this poem is thus given by Wordsworth:--

But tossing lately on a sleepless bed,
I of a token thought which Lovers heed;
How among them it was a common tale,
That it was good to hear the Nightingale
Ere the vile Cuckoo's note be uttered.

9. the rude bird of hate. This gives to the cuckoo altogether too bad a
character. The bird has on the whole a fair standing in English poetry.
We must think of the very pleasing _Ode to the Cuckoo_,--written either
by Michael Bruce or by John Logan,--as well as of the passage in which
Shakespeare makes Lucrece ask (line 848),--

Why should the worm intrude the maiden bud?
Or hateful cuckoos hatch in sparrows' nests?

Look up other nightingale and cuckoo songs; for example, Keats's _Ode to
a Nightingale_, an