Quatorzain
Quick answer: A quatorzain is any fourteen-line poem, especially one that ignores strict sonnet rules. Learn where the term comes from and how poets use it today.
A quatorzain is a poem of fourteen lines, from the French quatorze, fourteen. In modern usage the word usually names a fourteen-line poem that does not follow the recognised sonnet patterns: it may lack a volta, ignore iambic pentameter, or rhyme in some scheme of its own devising. In earlier centuries, though, quatorzain and sonnet were often used interchangeably.
The term earns its keep as a boundary marker. Once you know it, you can ask a genuinely useful craft question about any fourteen-line poem: is this a sonnet, with the form's inherited machinery of turn and resolution, or simply a quatorzain, fourteen lines that happen to stop where sonnets do? Critics in the nineteenth century sometimes used the word as a mild insult for sonnets they judged irregular, and a faint air of the disputed still hangs about it.
How It Works
There are no rules beyond the count: fourteen lines, in any metre, rhymed or not, with or without stanza breaks. What the quatorzain borrows from the sonnet is expectation. A reader who sees fourteen lines listens for a turn, and the poet can satisfy that hunger, tease it, or refuse it entirely.
An invented example of refusal: a poem that lists fourteen things left in a flat after a tenant dies, one per line, no volta, no couplet, just the inventory ending. The flatness is the point, and it works because the sonnet's ghost stands behind the poem, conspicuously not appearing.
Where You Will See It
Elizabethan miscellanies used quatorzain loosely for sonnets of all kinds, and George Gascoigne, one of the earliest English writers on poetics, discussed fourteen-line poems in terms that show the labels were still unsettled. In the modern era the territory is everywhere: many so-called sonnets by poets such as Robert Lowell, whose blank-verse fourteen-liners fill entire books, or the deliberately unruly fourteen-line poems of Ted Berrigan's The Sonnets, sit exactly on the border the word quatorzain was built to mark. Whether you call such poems sonnets or quatorzains is a genuine, ongoing argument.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Use the quatorzain when you want the sonnet's compression without its contract. Fourteen lines is a proven size for a single scene or thought, so keep that virtue and discard whatever machinery fights your material. It is also the friendliest doorway into sonnet writing: draft fourteen free lines on your subject first, then decide in revision whether to tighten them towards metre and rhyme or let them stand as they are.
What poets can take from this
- Decide on purpose whether your poem will honour or ignore the reader's expectation of a turn.
- Use the fourteen-line frame as a drafting box even for poems that will later grow or shrink.
- If you rhyme, invent your own scheme; the quatorzain is the place for patterns no sonnet allows.
- Count your lines after revision, since edits quietly turn quatorzains into thirteen- or fifteen-line poems.
- When submitting, call the poem what it is; editors respect a quatorzain more than a mislabelled sonnet.
Try it yourself
Write a quatorzain of fourteen single-sentence lines, each beginning with the same word, about a job you no longer do. No turn allowed; let accumulation do all the work.
Questions
Is a quatorzain the same as a sonnet?
Every sonnet is a quatorzain, since both have fourteen lines, but not every quatorzain is a sonnet. The sonnet label usually implies a recognised rhyme scheme, metre or at least a volta; quatorzain implies only the line count.
Why would a poet call a poem a quatorzain instead of a sonnet?
Precision, mostly. If a fourteen-line poem ignores sonnet conventions, calling it a quatorzain heads off the criticism that it is a failed sonnet, and signals the looseness was chosen.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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