Sonnet Glossary

Blank Verse

Poetry that is in meter but not rhymed. Spenser 's early sonnets and much of Milton 's poetry are in blank verse.

Elizabethan Sonnet

Also English sonnet or Shakespearean sonnet. Form in which the rhyme scheme is abab,cdcd,efef,gg. This adaptation of the Italian model allowed for the sparser rhymes of the English language and also encouraged a "summing up" couplet at the end. This change probably contributed to the development of the sonnet as a dramatic form.

Iambic Pentameter

A meter in which there are five iambs (pairs of unstressed and stressed syllables) in each line. An iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. The word "deceive" is an iamb. Most sonnets are in iambic pentameter, though Shakespeare 's Sonnet 145 and a few sonnets by Thomas Hardy are in tetrameter (four iambs per line), and some of Sir Philip Sidney 's sonnets (see Loving in truth...") use hexameter (six iambs). Ideally, the poet will temper the iambic pentameter pattern by occasionally substituting for an iamb another type of foot whose stress is different, thus avoiding a metronomic effect.

Petrarchan Sonnet

Original Italian sonnet form in which the sonnet's rhyme scheme divides the poem's 14 lines into two parts, an octet (first eight lines) and a sestet (last six lines). The rhyme scheme for the octet is typically abbaabba. There are a few possibilities for the sestet, including cdecde, cdcdcd, and cdcdee. This form was used in the earliest English sonnets by Wyatt and others.

Sonnet

From the Italian for "little song," a poem usually rhymed, 14 lines long, and in iambic pentameter. For background on the pre-English sonnet, see Professor Robert Canary 's informative web page, The Continental Origins of the Sonnet. For a helpful brief history of the form, see The Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Spenserian Sonnet

Sonnet with the interlocking rhyme scheme used by Edmund Spenser as follows: abab,bcbc,cdcd,ee. For an example, see "Happy ye leaves, whenas those lily hands".