Poets of
the Household
← Back to forms

Poetic form

Sonnet

A fourteen-line lyric form with a tight rhyme scheme and a deliberate turn of thought (the volta). One of the longest-running forms in English poetry.

Fourteen lines in iambic pentameter. ABAB CDCD EFEF GG (Shakespearean) or ABBA ABBA with a sestet variant (Petrarchan). A volta turns the argument between octave and sestet, or before the closing couplet.

The sonnet began in 13th-century Sicily as a short lyric tied to song, then crossed into Italian high culture with Petrarch, whose 14th-century Canzoniere fixed the convention of an eight-line octave answered by a six-line sestet. When the form reached Tudor England in the 1500s through translators like Wyatt and Surrey, it was reshaped: three quatrains and a closing couplet replaced the octave-sestet halves, and Shakespeare made that English variant the dominant shape in the language.

What gives the sonnet its staying power is the volta — the turn. Fourteen lines is just long enough to set up a thought and then complicate it. The Petrarchan octave proposes; the sestet responds. The Shakespearean three quatrains accumulate; the couplet redirects. A poet writing a sonnet is, in effect, designing a small argument that has to land in a particular metrical and rhyming envelope.

The form has survived because it scales: love poems (Petrarch, Shakespeare's first 126), spiritual address (Donne's Holy Sonnets, Hopkins's "Terrible Sonnets"), political grief (Wordsworth's "London, 1802"), and contemporary work in every register. The discipline of the rhyme and meter pushes poets toward compression — many sonnets work because there is no room to waste a line.

In the household tradition the sonnet is uncommon as a primary form, but it appears in English-language devotional verse on subjects like the Ahl al-Bayt (as), where the closing couplet's redirection lends itself naturally to a closing salaam or prayer. The form is welcoming to a poet writing across traditions.

Structure

Line count and meter

Fourteen lines, each in iambic pentameter — five iambs (an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one) for a count of ten syllables per line. Substitutions are common and welcome; Hopkins's sprung-rhythm sonnets stretch the meter substantially while keeping the fourteen-line envelope.

Rhyme schemes

The two dominant English variants:

  • Shakespearean (English): ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Three quatrains plus a closing couplet. The couplet often delivers the volta — a redirection, summary, or reversal of the three quatrains' argument.
  • Petrarchan (Italian): ABBA ABBA in the octave, with a sestet that rhymes CDECDE, CDCDCD, or one of several variants. The volta lands between line 8 and line 9 — the octave proposes, the sestet answers.

A third variant, the Spenserian (ABAB BCBC CDCD EE), interlocks quatrains by carrying a rhyme forward. It is less common than the other two.

The volta

The volta — Italian for "turn" — is the structural heart of the sonnet. It is the moment where the poem reorients. Many sonnets fail not because their meter or rhyme is wrong but because they describe a situation in fourteen lines without ever turning it. The turn is what distinguishes a sonnet from a fourteen-line stanza.

Closing couplet (Shakespearean variant)

The couplet's job is rarely to summarize. The most effective Shakespearean couplets surprise: a question, a reversal, a small concession that complicates everything that came before. Reading the sonnet's first twelve lines and then writing the couplet last is a useful discipline.

Common pitfalls (not rules)

  • Sustaining iambic pentameter without ever varying it produces a mechanical, sing-song feel; consider deliberate substitutions for emphasis.
  • Loading the closing couplet with paraphrase ("And so I love you very much indeed") wastes the form's most charged location.
  • Forgetting the volta — describing a feeling for fourteen lines without ever turning it — produces a fourteen-line stanza, not a sonnet.
  • Forced rhymes that sacrifice diction often signal that the rhyme scheme is fighting the thought; sometimes the answer is to start over with a different opening rhyme rather than salvage the wrong word.

Variations

  • Petrarchan (Italian)

    Octave ABBA ABBA + sestet in one of several rhyme variants (CDECDE, CDCDCD). Volta between lines 8 and 9.

  • Shakespearean (English)

    Three quatrains ABAB CDCD EFEF + closing couplet GG. Volta typically before the couplet.

  • Spenserian

    ABAB BCBC CDCD EE — quatrains interlock by carrying a rhyme forward. Less common in English than the other two.

Lines from the tradition

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Sample Poet

The opening couplet sets up the comparison the rest of the sonnet refines and then transcends in the famous closing couplet ("So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee").

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.
Sample Poet

Hopkins's sprung-rhythm Petrarchan opening compresses an entire theology into two lines; the volta turns on "And for all this, nature is never spent."

Try this

Write a Shakespearean sonnet about a single specific object — a kitchen tool, a piece of clothing, a worn book — where the closing couplet turns the description into a meditation on a person who handled it.

  1. Hold iambic pentameter for the first twelve lines, then break the meter deliberately once in the couplet.
  2. No abstract words ("love", "time", "soul") in the first twelve lines.
  3. The couplet must reverse, complicate, or undercut the first twelve lines — not summarize them.
Share your poem

Further reading

  1. Sonnet (opens in a new tab) — Poetry Foundation

    Plain-English overview with examples across variants.

  2. Sonnet (opens in a new tab) — Academy of American Poets

    Concise history of the form with annotated examples.

  3. A Brief Guide to the Sonnet (opens in a new tab) — Academy of American Poets

    Longer essay covering Petrarchan, Shakespearean, and modern variants.