What is a Sonnet?

1. What is a Sonnet? • Sonnets are short lyric or sometimes narrative poems • Great diversity of form and subject matter • Initially about love and courtship • Over time it began to be used to address religious, political, and personal issues • Can be presented as occasional poem—poems that memorialize or celebrate specific day or occasion • Can be presented in sequence

2. Basic Sonnet Structure • 14 lines • Single stanza • Iambic pentameter line • Intricate rhyme scheme • Rhyming couplet at the end • Contain a twist in ideas or in the narrative

3. English Sonnet • Also known as Shakespearean sonnet • Three quatrains (4 line poetic section) with a final couplet • abab cdcd efef gg It can: • Present three views of perspectives on a problem or scenario with conclusion in final couplet

4. The English Sonnet Or in its modified form it can have : • 2 main units • Octave—eight line section—rhyming abbaabba • Sestet—six line section—rhyming cdecde or variation (e.g. cdccdc) • Ends with rhyming couplet (e.g. gg) • Octave presents problem or poses scenario that is answered or resolved in sestet • As a result, The meaning of the poem is often emphasized by the structure of the sonnet

5. Modification of the Sonnet • Sometimes poets utilize imperfect rhyme at the of stanzas instead of perfect rhyme • They can also dispense with the rigid quatrain structure (4 lines explicating one central idea) and simply utilize the octave-sestet structure