What Is a Sonnet?

The sonnet is a type of poem that has been a part of the literary repertoire since the thirteenth century. Sonnets can communicate a sundry of details contained within a single thought, mood, or feeling, typically culminating in the last lines. For example: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” This famed opening of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet 43” resonates as perhaps the most famous single line of sonnet poetry.

 

The word “sonnet” stems from the Italian word “sonetto,” which itself derives from “suono” (meaning “a sound”). The sonnet form was developed by Italian poet Giacomo da Lentini in the early thirteenth century. Many Italians of the time period wrote sonnets, including Michelangelo and Dante Alighieri. However, the most famous Renaissance Italian poet of sonnets was Petrarch.

 

A sonnet consists of 14 lines. Shakespearean sonnets are typically governed by the following rules:

• The 14 lines are divided into four subgroups
• The first three subgroups have four lines each, which makes them “quatrains,” with the second and fourth lines of each group containing rhyming words
• The sonnet then concludes with a two-line subgroup, and these two lines rhyme with each other
• There are typically ten syllables per line

 

A rhyme scheme is the rhyming sequence or arrangement of sounds at the end of each line of poetry. It is typically represented by using letters to demonstrate which lines rhyme with which.

For example:

Roses are red—A
Violets are blue—B
Sugar is sweet—C
And so are you—B

 

A Shakespearean sonnet employs the following rhyme scheme across its 14 lines—which, again, are broken up into three quatrains plus a two-line coda:

ABAB CDCD EFEF GG

 

Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18”:

 

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? 

Thou art more lovely and more temperate. 

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, 

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date. 

 

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, 

And often is his gold complexion dimmed; 

And every fair from fair sometime declines, 

By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed; 

 

But thy eternal summer shall not fade, 

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st, 

Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade, 

When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st. 

 

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, 

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

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