The Sonnet

Sonnet means a small sound or small song in medieval Italian. Sonnets were devised in Italy by Petrarch in the 15th century, and this stylized from of poem quickly spread to France and Britain. A sonnet is a lyric poem of 14 rhyming lines of equal length: iambic pentameters in English, alexandrines in French, hendeca syllables in Italian.

In addition to a number of fixed rhyme schemes, the sonnet is characterized by a change in mood - a dramatic "turning point.

The rhyme schemes of the sonnet usually follow these patterns.

(1)  The Italian sonnet (also called the Petrarchan sonnet after Petrarach, the first sonneteer) has an 8‐line ‘octave’ of two quatrains, rhymed abbaabba, followed by a 6‐line ‘sestet’ usually rhymed cdecde or cdcdcd. The change from octave to sestet usually coincides with a ‘turn’ (Italian, volta) in the argument or mood of the poem. In another variant form used by the English poet John Milton, however, the ‘turn’ is delayed to  around the tenth line. Some later poets—notably William Wordsworth—have used this feature of the ‘Miltonic sonnet’ and relaxed the rhyme scheme of the octave to abbaacca. The Italian (Petrarchian) pattern has remained the most widely used in English and other languages.

 

(2)  The English sonnet (also called the Shakespearean sonnet, as it was Shakespeare who popularized the form in English) comprises three quatrains and a final couplet, rhyming ababcdcdefefgg. The Spenserian sonnet, a variant introduced by the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser,  links the three quatrains by rhyme, in the sequence ababbabccdcdee. In either form, the ‘turn’ is in the final couplet, which may sometimes achieve the neatness of an epigram.

The sonnet was devised or at least popularized by Petrarch in the 14th century as a major form of love poetry, and was then  adopted in Spain, France, and England in the 16th century, and in Germany in the 17th. The standard subject‐matter of early sonnets was the torments of sexual love (usually within a courtly love convention), but John Donne extended the sonnet's scope to religion, while Milton extended it to politics. More or less neglected in the 18th century, the sonnet was revived in the 19th by Wordsworth, Keats, and Baudelaire, and is still widely used.

Some poets have written connected series of sonnets, known as sonnet sequences or sonnet cycles. The outstanding early English examples are Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella (1591), Spenser's Amoretti (1595), and Shakespeare's Sonnets (1609); later examples include Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and W. H. Auden's ‘In Time of War’ (1939). A group of sonnets formally linked by repeated lines is known as a crown of sonnets.