The Shakespearean sonnet, or English sonnet, consists of three quatrains and a couplet. In Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus”, for example, the octave describes the appearance of the Statue of Liberty, while the sestet records the words the statue speaks to the nation’s immigrants. The poem’s turn comes as the lines transition from the octave to the sestet. The final six lines, or sestet, may fluctuate in their pattern, but generally follow a rhyme of cdecde, cdcdcd, or cddcdd. This sonnet begins with an eight-line octave following a rhyme scheme of abbaabba. The Petrarchan sonnet, also called the Italian sonnet, is named after the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca who popularized the form in the 14th century. The two most common variations are known as the Petrarchan sonnet and the Shakespearean sonnet. It is in the rhyme structure that many sonnets vary.
This pattern continues for fourteen lines, wherein the end words of each line also rhyme according to a particular schema. The line “Shall I com pare thee to a summer’s day”, for example, stresses every second syllable, for a total of ten syllables. Each line of a sonnet is written in iambic pentameter, a meter made up of five sets of unstressed-stressed syllable blocks, called iambs. A sonnet is a 14-line poem containing a specific meter and rhyme scheme.
