Not In A Silver Casket Cool With Pearls

“Not In A Silver Casket Cool With Pearls” is a sonnet in the Shakespearean or English tradition, which indicates three quatrains, or stanzas of four lines each, followed by a couplet, or a stanza of two lines, composed in an end-rhyme pattern of abab cdcd efef gg. (Note: Some printings of the poem omit stanza breaks, so that all 14 lines are spaced evenly; the rhyme scheme remains.)

The sonnet is a fixed verse form characterized by 14 lines. Its name derives from the Italian word for little song. While not always a love poem, the sonnet has long been a popular choice for romantic verse. “Not In A Silver Casket Cool With Pearls” adheres to a meter of ten syllables per line. Many of the lines are in iambs. An iamb is a metric foot characterized by an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Iambs create a rising meter: ba-DUM, ba-DUM, ba-DUM:

         (o)r RICH with RED coRUNdum OR with BLUE (Line 2)

A variation in this pattern comes at the last line, which begins with a stressed syllable followed by an