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What is a Sonnet?

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

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What is a Sonnet?

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  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

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