A sonnet is a fourteen-line poem, usually in iambic pentameter, with a fixed rhyme scheme and a turn, the volta, where the thought changes direction. The best-known sonnet example is Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”, which rhymes ABAB CDCD EFEF GG and turns at line 9. The 21 sonnets below are quoted in full: 18 classics from 1595 to 1922, grouped by form (Shakespearean, Petrarchan, Spenserian and the ones that bend the rules), and three new sonnets written for this page.
Each poem comes with a note on its form, the line where it turns, what changes there and one thing worth borrowing. Five later sonnets, still in copyright, are described near the end as further reading; they aren't quoted or counted. For the method itself (scansion, rhyme banks and drafting a sonnet step by step), read the guide to writing a sonnet, which also takes apart Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 and Wordsworth's “The World Is Too Much with Us,” so neither is repeated here.
| Section | What you'll find | Sonnets |
|---|---|---|
| SectionShakespearean sonnets | What you'll findShakespeare's Sonnets 18, 116 and 130, Keats, McKay | Sonnets1–5 |
| SectionPetrarchan sonnets | What you'll findMilton, Wordsworth, Keats, Browning, Rossetti, Lazarus, Hopkins, Millay | Sonnets6–13 |
| SectionSpenserian sonnet | What you'll findA name written in the sand and washed away twice | Sonnets14 |
| SectionSonnets that bend the rules | What you'll findDonne, Shelley, a curtal sonnet by Hopkins, Owen | Sonnets15–18 |
| SectionModern sonnets | What you'll findFrost, Brooks, Heaney, Hayes and others, named and described | Sonnets– |
| SectionNew sonnets | What you'll findA piano tuner, a ghostwriter, a lost-and-found office | Sonnets19–21 |
Shakespearean sonnet examples
The Shakespearean, or English, sonnet is three quatrains and a couplet, rhymed ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Each quatrain usually takes one step of the argument, and the couplet closes it, often with a twist. It never needs more than two words on one rhyme, which makes it easier to write in English than the Italian form below.
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 dimm’d,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st 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.
The first two quatrains find fault with summer: too short, too hot, sometimes clouded, always fading. Line 9 turns on “But,” and the subject changes from summer's faults to a summer that won't end. The couplet says how: as long as anyone reads these lines, the person in them stays alive. Borrow the shape. Spend eight lines on the comparison and six on why it fails.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.
A definition by negation: the first quatrain says what love is not, the second gives two images of what it is (a sea-mark that storms can't move, and the star sailors steer by, whose height can be measured though its worth can't), and the third sets it against Time and his sickle. The turn comes late, in the couplet, which switches from argument to a dare. The guide to repetition looks at the word play in lines 2 to 4: alters and alteration, remover and remove.
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red, than her lips red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
Love poets of Shakespeare's day praised women with a stock list: eyes like suns, coral lips, snowy skin, hair like golden wire. Shakespeare takes the list apart, one cliché per line, for twelve lines. The couplet turns the joke into a compliment: she is as rare as any woman ever flattered by “false compare.” It is the clearest example on this page of a turn saved for the last two lines.
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
One sentence carries all fourteen lines. Each quatrain opens with “When,” and the turn comes in the middle of line 12, at the dash before “then,” so the couplet arrives without a pause. What changes is scale: after three quatrains of things he may never write or feel, the speaker stands alone on the shore of the world and watches love and fame shrink to nothing. The fear was real: Keats died in 1821, at twenty-five, long before this sonnet was printed. Borrow the syntax: three “when” clauses and one “then” can hold a Shakespearean sonnet together on their own.
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
McKay wrote it in response to the Red Summer of 1919, when white mobs attacked Black communities in cities across the United States. The first eight lines repeat a condition, “If we must die,” and line 9 turns it into a call to stand together. The strict form is part of the force: a poem this angry, held in perfect rhyme, sounds controlled rather than desperate. A story that Winston Churchill read it aloud during the Second World War has never been confirmed.
Petrarchan sonnet examples
The Petrarchan, or Italian, sonnet splits into an octave rhymed ABBAABBA and a sestet, most often CDECDE or CDCDCD. The octave sets out a situation or a problem, and the sestet answers it. Finding four rhymes on each of two sounds is hard in English, which is why the poets who choose this form tend to show off a little.
Methought I saw my late espoused Saint
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,
Whom Joves great son to her glad Husband gave,
Rescu’d from death by force though pale and faint.
Mine as whom washt from spot of child-bed taint,
Purification in the old Law did save,
And such, as yet once more I trust to have
Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind:
Her face was vail’d, yet to my fancied sight,
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shin’d
So clear, as in no face with more delight.
But O as to embrace me she enclin’d,
I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night.
The rhyme scheme is strict (ABBAABBA CDCDCD), but the turn ignores line 9. The dream runs on through the sestet, and the poem turns only in its last line, when the speaker wakes. Milton was blind by then, so waking brings back his night. In the myth of the opening, Hercules, the son of Jove, rescues Alcestis from death and returns her to her husband. A turn held back this long works when the whole poem has been building toward one fact.
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
ABBAABBA CDCDCD. The octave looks: London at dawn, before the smoke, open to the fields. The sestet turns from the view to the viewer (“Ne’er saw I, never felt”) and ends on the city as a sleeping body. One moment, two angles: the sonnet as a photograph followed by its caption.
Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
The octave is one extended metaphor: reading as travel, books as kingdoms, Homer as a land Keats had only heard about until George Chapman's translation let him in. The sestet turns to discovery and gives it two similes, an astronomer spotting a planet and an explorer seeing an ocean. (Keats named the wrong explorer; the guide to literary devices in poetry has the story.) The last line stops dead: after all that motion, the men simply stand and stare.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
ABBAABBA CDCDCD, built on one repeated phrase. The turn is quiet: the octave measures love in abstractions (depth, breadth, height, right, praise), and the sestet measures it in a life (old griefs, childhood faith, lost saints) before it reaches past death. A list that grows more personal as it goes can make its own turn.
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
The octave asks to be remembered three times. At line 9, on “Yet,” the speaker takes the request back: better to be forgotten than to make someone sad. The sestet rhymes CDDECE, an uncommon pattern that leaves “had” and “sad” to close the poem. Few turns go further than one that takes back the poem's own request.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
ABBAABBA CDCDCD. The octave defines the Statue of Liberty against the Colossus of Rhodes: a woman, not a conqueror, a welcome, not a threat. At line 9 the statue speaks, and the sestet is entirely her voice. In 1903 the poem was cast on a bronze plaque and mounted in the statue's pedestal. If your subject can talk, try giving it the sestet.
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Hopkins kept the Petrarchan rhymes (ABBAABBA CDCDCD) and threw out the regular meter. He called his system sprung rhythm, “measured by feet of from one to four syllables,” so a line counts its stresses, not its syllables. Listen to the octave clog with heavy words (seared, bleared, smeared, smudge) and the sestet open at “And for all this,” where the damage people do gives way to a freshness nature never runs out of. Sound can do the work of the turn.
Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,
And lay them prone upon the earth and cease
To ponder on themselves, the while they stare
At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere
In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese
Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release
From dusty bondage into luminous air.
O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,
When first the shaft into his vision shone
Of light anatomized! Euclid alone
Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they
Who, though once only and then but far away,
Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.
A sonnet about geometry: real beauty is the pure form Euclid saw, and everyone else is just talking. The sestet (CDDCCD) turns at “O blinding hour,” from scolding the talkers to the moment Euclid first saw, and then brings back the first line, broken across lines 11 and 12, so the ending rereads the opening. The last image is sound, not sight: a sandal set down on stone, heard from far away.
A Spenserian sonnet example
Edmund Spenser linked his quatrains by carrying a rhyme over from each one to the next: ABAB BCBC CDCD EE. It needs more rhymes than the Shakespearean form and fewer than the Petrarchan, and it makes the argument feel continuous.
One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washèd it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
“Vain man,” said she, “that dost in vain assay
A mortal thing so to immortalize,
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wipèd out likewise.”
“Not so,” quod I, “let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name.
Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.”
Follow the linked rhymes: away and prey come back as assay and decay, immortalize and likewise as devise and eternize. The sonnet is also a small dialogue, with the woman's objection in the second quatrain and the poet's reply, opening on “Not so,” at line 9. It makes the same promise as Sonnet 18, that verse outlasts its subject, but lets the subject argue back. (“Eke” means also; “quod” means said.)
Sonnets that bend the rules
Once a form is familiar, the departures carry meaning. These four keep the sonnet's compression and its turn and change something else: the rhyme scheme, the length or the order of the parts.
Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy:
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
A Petrarchan octave (ABBAABBA) with an English ending: the sestet rhymes CDCDEE and closes on a couplet. The octave besieges a town; the sestet, turning on “Yet,” is a marriage that needs a divorce. Look at the verbs in lines 2 and 4: three gentle ones (knock, breathe, shine) replaced by violent ones (break, blow, burn). Donne's better-known Holy Sonnet, “Death, be not proud,” uses the same hybrid shape.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
The rhyme scheme, ABABACDC EDEFEF, belongs to no standard form; the rhymes interlock like the broken pieces of the statue. Shelley wrote it in a friendly contest with Horace Smith, who published a sonnet on the same subject. The poem is a frame story in fourteen lines (a speaker repeats what a traveller told him about an inscription), and its real turn is the three words after the king's boast: “Nothing beside remains.”
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim:
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Hopkins called this a curtal (shortened) sonnet. In his preface he describes it as built in proportions “resembling those of the sonnet proper, namely 6 + 4 instead of 8 + 6,” plus a half-line tail. The first part is a catalogue of spotted, streaked, mixed things; the second turns from things to their qualities, and the two-word tail lands the praise. If fourteen lines feel padded, a curtal sonnet keeps the proportions and loses the slack.
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
An English octave (ABABCDCD) and a sestet that rhymes EFFEGG, so the poem is Shakespearean in its rhymes and Petrarchan in its two parts. Owen drafted it in 1917 at Craiglockhart War Hospital, where Siegfried Sassoon helped him revise it; Sassoon changed “dead” to “doomed” in the title. The octave is the front, where guns replace funeral bells; the sestet is home, where grief is a blind pulled down at dusk. Two places, two halves, one turn.
Modern sonnets to read next
Poets never stopped writing sonnets, but most from after the 1920s are still in copyright, so they are named here rather than quoted. All are easy to find in recent anthologies or on the publishers' pages.
- Robert Frost, “Design” (in A Further Range, 1936). A Petrarchan sonnet about a white spider, a white flower and a dead moth, with only three rhyme sounds in all fourteen lines. Its question is whether anything designed the scene at all.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay, Fatal Interview (1931). A whole sequence of love sonnets written from a woman's point of view, in strict rhyme and meter.
- Gwendolyn Brooks, “the sonnet-ballad” (in Annie Allen, 1949). A woman asks her mother where her lover has gone: he has gone to war. The title says what it is, a ballad's story and refrain held in sonnet form.
- Seamus Heaney, “Clearances” (in The Haw Lantern, 1987). A sequence of sonnets in memory of the poet's mother, built from small domestic memories rather than grand statements.
- Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018). More than seventy sonnets, each with the same title as the book, inspired by Wanda Coleman's American Sonnets. They keep the length and the compression and take the form somewhere new.
Three new sonnets, with notes
These were written for this page, one in each of the main modes: a Petrarchan sonnet, a Shakespearean sonnet and an unrhymed sonnet that keeps only the length and the turn. If you want to try one yourself, the poetry prompts include starting points for both main forms.
She shows me in and leaves me with the light
of late October and the fork. I hear
the A ring in the parlor, thin and clear
above his glasses and his hymnbook. White
felt threaded through the strings, I work them tight,
one pair and then the next, and lean an ear
into the beats until they disappear:
the work of thirty years. I get it right.
Then she is in the doorway, asking me
to leave the G alone. “Just leave it slack.
It drove him mad on Sundays.” I agree,
and fold the felts away, and start to pack,
then play his hymn for her, and there’s the G,
flat as he left it. For a breath, he’s back.
ABBAABBA CDCDCD. The octave is all craft: a piano tuner bringing the paired strings into unison until the beating between them stops, and it ends on pride, “I get it right.” The sestet asks him to leave one note wrong, because the wrong note is the dead man. Notice that the octave never says who “his” glasses belong to; the reader works it out at the turn.
For six weeks I have worn another voice:
his “Look,” before he lies; his father’s store;
the “we” he uses when he made the choice;
the layoffs, which he calls “a closing door.”
I give him back his childhood: sawdust, heat,
the bell above the door, the farming men
who paid on Fridays, if they paid; the street
he crossed to school. I made up half. And then
he reads the draft, and at the airport bar
he cries a little at the part I wrote
about his father’s hands. “That’s who we are,”
he says, and wants it for the closing quote.
His name goes on the cover. That’s the deal.
I made the hands up. But the tears were real.
Each quatrain takes one step: learning the client's voice, inventing his past, watching him believe it. The “we” of line 3 comes back in line 11, now meaning a family instead of a company. The couplet does what Shakespeare's couplets do at their best. It adds a fact the quatrains withheld, and that fact changes how the whole poem reads.
Umbrellas, mostly. Black ones, by the hundred.
A cello case without a cello in it.
Two hearing aids. A set of someone’s teeth.
Sixty-one left gloves and nineteen right ones.
A wedding dress, still bagged, from Track Eleven.
A laptop holding someone’s PhD,
backed up to nothing, which nobody’s claimed
since March. We keep it on the highest shelf.
But yesterday a man came in and asked
for a blue scarf, hand-knitted, with a hole
his daughter made the winter she was learning.
We had it. And he held it to his face
and stood there at the counter, and the line
behind him waited, and nobody spoke.
No rhyme, loose pentameter, fourteen lines and a turn at line 9 on “But.” The octave is an inventory, funny and a little sad; the sestet is one claimed object. This is the modern sonnet's bargain: drop the rhyme, keep the compression and the turn, and the poem still reads as a sonnet. The line about the highest shelf is the hinge, the first sign that the speaker cares about what nobody comes back for.
How to read a sonnet
Every sonnet on this page yields to the same four questions. Try them on a poem you have to write about, or on a draft of your own.
- Letter the rhymes
Write A, B, C and so on at the end of each line. ABBAABBA in the first eight lines means Petrarchan, ABAB CDCD means Shakespearean, and a rhyme carried from one quatrain into the next (ABAB BCBC) means Spenserian. Anything else, like “Ozymandias,” is a choice worth commenting on.
- Find the turn
Look for the line where the thought changes: a “but” or “yet,” a new person addressed, a shift from past to present or from description to judgment. Note the line number. Line 9 is the usual place, but Keats turns inside line 12 and Milton in the last line, and those exceptions are usually the point.
- Name what each part does
Give every quatrain, octave or sestet a verb: compares, lists, complains, answers, reverses. In Sonnet 116 the parts define, illustrate, defy and dare. If two parts do the same job, the poem is circling, and that is worth noticing too.
- Read the ending against the opening
Ask what the last lines know that the first line didn't. “Shall I compare thee” ends on the poem's own survival; “Remember me” ends on “forget and smile.” Then read the poem aloud and mark the beats, as the guide to meter in poetry shows, to hear where the rhythm pushes against the sense.
To check your lettering, paste a sonnet into Strokes and ask the Strokes Assistant to mark its rhyme scheme and say where it thinks the turn falls. Where its answer and yours differ, read those lines aloud again.
Mistakes when writing about sonnets
| Mistake | What it sounds like | What to say instead |
|---|---|---|
| MistakeCalling every sonnet Shakespearean | What it sounds like“Remember” is a Shakespearean sonnet. | What to say insteadIt rhymes ABBAABBA in the octave, so it is Petrarchan. |
| MistakeAssuming the turn is at line 9 | What it sounds likeMilton turns at line 9. | What to say insteadThe rhymes divide at line 9, but the turn comes when he wakes, in the last line. |
| MistakeTreating the couplet as a summary | What it sounds likeThe couplet sums up the poem. | What to say insteadSay what the couplet adds: Sonnet 130’s couplet turns a joke into a compliment. |
| MistakeReading the speaker as the poet | What it sounds likeShakespeare had a mistress with dark hair. | What to say insteadThe speaker describes his mistress; the poem mocks a convention. |
| MistakeCounting syllables, not stresses | What it sounds likeHopkins’s lines have the wrong number of syllables. | What to say insteadHopkins counts stresses; he called it sprung rhythm. |
| MistakeIgnoring the rule-breaking | What it sounds like“Ozymandias” follows a normal rhyme scheme. | What to say insteadIts interlocking rhymes fit no standard form, and that suits a broken statue. |
The habit behind most of these is reading the label instead of the poem. A sonnet's form is a set of expectations, and the interesting thing to write about is usually where this particular poem meets them or refuses to. One device does much of that work: the turn often works by juxtaposition, setting the second part against the first so that each changes the other.
Frequently asked questions
Does a sonnet have to rhyme or be in iambic pentameter?
Most sonnets before the twentieth century do both, but the form has survived without either. Hopkins kept the rhymes of "God's Grandeur" and replaced the meter with sprung rhythm, which counts stresses instead of syllables. Many contemporary sonnets drop rhyme and strict meter and keep fourteen lines, compression and a turn, as "Lost and Found" on this page does.
Does a sonnet always have fourteen lines?
Almost always, and a fourteen-line count is the first thing to check. The best-known exception is Hopkins's curtal sonnet, "Pied Beauty," which shrinks the form to ten and a half lines while keeping its proportions and its turn. A poem of fourteen lines with no turn at all is rare in the tradition, so if you find one, it is worth pointing out.
What is a sonnet sequence?
A series of sonnets read together, often telling a story or tracing a relationship. Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, Spenser's Amoretti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 44 Sonnets from the Portuguese and Millay's Fatal Interview are famous sequences. A crown of sonnets is a stricter kind, in which each poem begins with the last line of the one before.
