Commentary on The Sea and the Skylark
It is a regular Petrarchan sonnet, rhyming abbaabbacdcdcd, with a clearly marked division between octave and sestet, with, unusually, each section being again divided into half, into two quatrains or two tercets, as the case may be.
In the octave, Hopkins compares two ancient sounds: that of the sea, and that of a songbird, the skylark, one of whose favourite haunts is sand dunes. The first quatrain deals with the sea. Hopkins is walking along the shore near the North Wales town of Rhyl, some six or seven miles from the college. Rhyl was then an up-and-coming tourist resort on account of its wide sandy beach. Walking westwards, he would have the sea on his right hand. He remarks particularly on the contrasting sounds of the high and the low tide
In the style of Petrarch, an Italian poet of the sixteenth century, who created both a form of the sonnet and presented a courtly ideal of womanhood.
A sonnet is a poem with a special structure. It has fourteen lines, which are organised in a particular manner, usually characterised by the pattern of rhyming, which changes as the ideas in the poem evolve.
The 8-line stanza of a Petrarchan sonnet, always occupying the first eight lines. It sometimes has a division halfway, creating two quatrains. It poses a problem or describes some single object or incident.
The 6-line stanza of a Petrarchan sonnet, occupying the last six lines, sometimes divided into tercets or couplets. It often resolves the problem posed in the octave or comments significantly on it.
A 3-line unit of verse, usually forming part of a sestet. Sometimes it rhymes within itself, sometimes it has the same rhyme scheme as a following tercet.
