Spenserian Sonnet
Quick answer: How the Spenserian sonnet works: the interlocking ABAB BCBC CDCD EE rhyme scheme from the Amoretti, with advice for writing your own linked sonnet.
Between the Italian sonnet and the English one sits a third design, built by Edmund Spenser for his 1595 sequence Amoretti, eighty-nine sonnets charting his courtship of Elizabeth Boyle, the woman he actually married. That last detail matters: unlike Petrarch's unreachable Laura, Spenser's sequence moves towards a wedding, and his sonnet form moves the same way, each quatrain handing its rhyme forward to the next like a relay.
The Spenserian sonnet keeps the English shape of three quatrains and a couplet, but chains the quatrains together. It is harder to write than Shakespeare's version and correspondingly rarer, which makes a good one stand out.
The interlocking scheme
The rhyme scheme is ABAB BCBC CDCD EE. Look at what the pattern does: the B sound bridges quatrains one and two, the C sound bridges quatrains two and three. Only five rhyme sounds serve fourteen lines, and the B and C sounds must each supply four rhyming words. Spenser had form here; he had already invented the nine-line Spenserian stanza for The Faerie Queene, which uses a similar chaining logic. The metre is iambic pentameter throughout, and the couplet still closes the poem, so the ending feels English even while the middle feels woven.
Why the chain changes everything
In a Shakespearean sonnet, each quatrain can be a fresh start. Spenser forbids that. Because each quatrain shares a sound with its neighbour, the poem resists clean breaks; ideas dissolve into one another rather than changing at the stanza line. This gives the form a gliding, continuous motion that suits meditation and slow-building emotion. Amoretti 75, in which the poet writes his beloved's name in sand and the tide erases it twice, shows the effect: the argument about mortality and the counter-argument about verse flow into each other without a visible seam.
Writing one without strangling it
Plan your rhyme sounds before anything else, because B and C each need four workable words. Pick open, common sounds and list six candidate words for each; if you cannot get six, change the sound. Then draft the poem as one continuous sentence of thought, letting clauses spill across the quatrain borders. The chained rhymes will bind what your syntax connects. Save a genuine turn for the couplet, which is the only place the chain breaks, and let that break carry meaning: the one new sound, EE, should arrive with the one new thought.
Best uses and the usual failure
The form suits continuity: courtship over time, tides, seasons, grief that will not stay in compartments. It is a poor fit for jokes or sharp argumentative pivots, which want the cleaner English scheme.
Beginners most often ruin it with rhyme strain. Four words on one sound tempts desperate choices, and one 'thee' or 'doth' dragged in for the rhyme collapses the whole period costume. Modern diction with slant rhymes beats fake Elizabethan with perfect ones.
What poets can take from this
- List six candidate rhyme words for the B and C sounds before drafting.
- Let sentences run across quatrain boundaries; the form rewards enjambment.
- Use slant rhyme rather than archaic diction when the scheme squeezes you.
- Reserve your one real turn for the couplet, where the chain breaks.
- Read Amoretti 75 to hear how seamless the transitions can sound.
Try it yourself
Write a Spenserian sonnet about something that erodes gradually, a coastline, a friendship, a language you are forgetting, letting each quatrain blur into the next.
Questions
What is the Spenserian sonnet rhyme scheme?
ABAB BCBC CDCD EE. The quatrains interlock, with the B and C sounds each shared between two quatrains, and a couplet closes the poem.
Is the Spenserian sonnet the same as the Spenserian stanza?
No. The Spenserian stanza is a nine-line unit rhyming ABABBCBCC, used in The Faerie Queene. The Spenserian sonnet is a fourteen-line poem from the Amoretti, though both share the chaining principle.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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