Sonnet

A sonnet is a lyric poem consisting of a single stanza of fourteen iambic pentameter

lines linked by an intricate rhyme scheme. There are two major patterns of rhyme in sonnets
written in the English language:
1. The Italian or Petrarchan sonnet (named after the fourteenth-century Italian poet
Petrarch) falls into two main parts: an octave (eight lines) rhyming abbaabba followed
by a sestet (six lines) rhyming cdecde or some variant, such as cdccdc. Petrarch’s
sonnets were first imitated in England, in both their stanza form and their standard
subject—the hopes and pains of an adoring male lover—by Sir Thomas Wyatt in the
early sixteenth century. The Petrarchan form was later used, for a great variety of
subjects, by Milton, Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, D. G. Rossetti, and other
sonneteers, who sometimes made it technically easier in English (which does not have
as many rhyming possibilities as Italian) by introducing a new pair of rhymes in the
second four lines of the octave.
2. The Earl of Surrey and other English experimenters in the sixteenth century also
developed a stanza form called the English sonnet, or else the Shakespearean sonnet,
after its greatest practitioner. This sonnet falls into three quatrains and a concluding
couplet: abab cdcd efef gg. There was a notable variant, the Spenserian sonnet, in which
Spenser linked each quatrain to the next by a continuing rhyme: abab bcbc cdcd ee.
John Donne shifted from the hitherto primary subject, sexual love, to a variety of religious
themes in his Holy Sonnets, written early in the seventeenth century; and Milton, in the latter
part of that century, expanded the range of the sonnet to other matters of serious concern.
Except for a lapse in the English Neoclassic Period, the sonnet has remained a popular form to
the present day and includes among its distinguished practitioners, in the nineteenth century,
Wordsworth, Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, and in the twentieth century, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay,
W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, and Dylan Thomas. The stanza is just long enough
to permit a fairly complex lyric development, yet so short, and so exigent in its rhymes, as to
pose a standing challenge to the ingenuity and artistry of the poet. The rhyme pattern of the
Petrarchan sonnet has on the whole favored a statement of a problem, situation, or incident in
the octave, with a resolution in the sestet. The English form sometimes uses a similar division
of material, but often presents instead a repetition-with-variation of a statement in each of the
three quatrains; in either case, the final couplet in the English sonnet usually imposes an
epigrammatic turn at the end.
Following Petrarch’s early example, a number of Elizabethan authors arranged their poems
into sonnet sequences, or sonnet cycles, in which a series of sonnets are linked together by