Sonnets

A sonnet is a "little song." A very old form that originated in medieval Italy, the sonnet was first made popular by Petrarch, who serenaded his lady love Laura with sonnets.

The Italian, or Petrarchan, sonnet is a poem of 14 lines that has the following form and rhyme scheme:

abba abba cdecde or some other variation of cd or cde, such as ccddee or cddcee or cdcdee or cdcdcd. (Because an Italian sonnet can end with a rhymed couplet, you need to look carefully at the rest of the poem to make sure it's not an English sonnet--which is described further down below.)

As Nelson Miller says in his excellent online guide to sonnets, the sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines that attempts to contrast two ideas, or bring together to different things, or to raise a question and answer.

The Italian sonnet, therefore, is often referred to having an octave (two quatrains) and a sestet. There is often something referred to as a "turn" in the poem because of the shift from one idea to its contrasting counterpart. The octave and the sestet are marked by the rhyme scheme rather than by obvious stanza breaks, because sonnets are usually printed in one "chunk."

The English sonnet, also referred to as the Elizabethan or Shakespearean sonnet, allows for a bit more variety in rhyme. This is in keeping with the demands of English, which has a very rich vocabulary, but fewer rhymes. There are several variations on the English sonnet, including the Spencerian Sonnet and the Wordsworthian sonnet, which incorporate aspects of the Italian sonnet. English sonnets are written in iambic pentameter. See Nelson's website (above) for more detail on this.

Meanwhile, here's a basic overview of the Shakespearean sonnet.

Rhyme scheme is abab cdcd efef gg. Many times you will find a list of questions or points in the three quatrains, and a point or commentary in the final couplet.

Often poets have written sonnet cycles, or a "crown" of sonnets, in which sonnets on the same theme share first and last lines -- the second one beginning with the last line of the first one and so on until the final one, which ends with the first line of the first sonnet. A heroic crown of sonnets is a sequence of fifteen sonnets that follows this pattern--the fifteenth sonnet is then made up of one line from each of the preceding sonnets.

Hope this basic guide is helpful as you do the work of wrestling with Brooks's off-rhymed sonnets in the sequence "Gay Chaps at the Bar."

After working with Brooks's sonnets and reading Rules for the Dance, will experiment with writing our own sonnets.