Poet’s Workshop: Understanding the Sonnet

Although free verse and unmetered poetry have become the norm in recent decades, many poets still find freedom through form. The sonnet, one of poetry’s most honored forms, is a valuable tool for honing one’s poetic skill.

The basic form of a sonnet is simple; fourteen lines are arranged in alternating rhyme patterns. A variety of patterns can be used; and although the poem should be in iambic pentameter, this requirement has also become malleable in recent years. Overall, the form is one of the most flexible in poetry. In any sonnet, the change in rhyme, called the volta, is used to alert the reader to a change in the subject matter. So, when composing your sonnet, be creative and flexible with the exact arrangement of the rhymes; but be sure that the volta occurs exactly where the thought or idea shifts in the poem.

The two major variations of the form are the Italian and the English sonnet.

In the Italian variation, the first eight lines, called the octave, are rhymed in the following pattern:

abba
abba

These eight lines are then followed by six lines, called a sestet. The sestet can be composed in any of the following rhyme patterns:

cdcdcd
cddcdc
cdecde
cdeced
cdcedc
etc.

The only strict rule when composing the sestet is to avoid using a couplet in the final two lines. However, as with most poetry “rules”, this one has been bent and broken by artists of considerable stature.

Other variations on the Italian sonnet have included the following rhyme schemes:

abba
acca
(sestet)

abba
cdcd
effefe

Some often-cited examples of the Italian sonnet include “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” by John Keats and “The World is Too Much with Us” by William Wordsworth.

The English sonnet also bears the name of its most famous user: William Shakespeare. In this variation on the form, three quatrains are followed by a couplet in the following pattern:

abab
cdcd
efef
gg

Although the rhyme scheme makes the placement of the volta more flexible, the volta still usually occurs in the final quatrain or the final couplet. Shakespeare’s sonnets provide excellent studies of this form, especially the twenty-ninth.

The Spenserian sonnet is another form, arguably less-used than the most widespread Italian and English forms. Developed by Edmund Spenser, the rhyme pattern is as follows:

abab
bcbc
cdcd
ee

As you can see, this form bears much in common with the English, being composed of three quatrains and a couplet.However, the carrying of the “b” rhyme into the second quatrain and the “c” rhyme into the third is a technique developed by Spenser in his Elizabethan masterwork, The Faerie Queene.

Obviously, the challenge inherent in writing a sonnet is crafting your thoughts around a preordained form. For modern writers, this presents an interesting intellectual puzzle; but in centuries past, metered, rhymed poetry was the only poetry! You may notice that the framework a sonnet provides gives you more flexibility when you begin to adjust or revise your work. Overall, if you can stay within the octave/sestet and the quatrain/couplet forms, you can be a bit flexible with the rhyme schemes and create a sonnet of your own.