On Seeing the Elgin Marbles

Keats’s “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” is a Petrarchan sonnet (sometimes known as the Italian sonnet, associated with the 14th-century Italian poet Petrarch). This is a 14-line poem divided into two sections. The first section is an eight-line stanza (called an octave) while the second is a six-line stanza (called a sestet). The entire sonnet is written in iambic pentameter, like most English sonnets. An iamb is a metrical foot in which an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed syllable (da-DUM), while “pentameter” means that each line is composed of five such feet. But like most iambic poems, “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” sometimes introduces metrical variations to make the rhythm more dynamic, for instance, by substituting a trochee (DUM-da) or a spondee (DUM-DUM) for the typical iamb in some lines. A good example is Line 5, where the first foot is replaced with a trochee, while the second foot is replaced with a spondee: “Like a / sick ea / gle look / ing at / the sky.”

The sonnet also employs a rhyme scheme, with each of the two sections or stanzas of the sonnet employing its own rhyme scheme: The introductory octave follows an ABBA