Sonnet
Quick answer: A sonnet is a 14-line poem, usually in iambic pentameter, built around a turn of thought. Learn its history, the main types, and how to write your own.
A sonnet is a fourteen-line poem, traditionally written in iambic pentameter, that develops a single idea and then turns it, complicates it, or answers it before the final line. The name comes from the Italian sonetto, a little sound or little song. The form began in thirteenth-century Sicily, was perfected by Petrarch, and crossed into English through Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey in the 1500s. Since then almost every major poet in the language has tried it at least once.
Poets keep returning to the sonnet because its size forces decisions. Fourteen lines is long enough to build an argument and short enough that nothing lazy survives. The form also carries a built-in drama: the volta, or turn, where the poem changes direction. Readers meet sonnets everywhere, from Shakespeare's sequence to modern loose versions that keep only the ghost of the shape.
How It Works
Every sonnet balances two movements: a setup and a turn. In the Italian pattern the setup takes eight lines (the octave) and the turn arrives in the final six (the sestet). In the English pattern three quatrains build the case and a closing couplet delivers the verdict. The metre is usually iambic pentameter, ten syllables alternating unstressed and stressed, though poets bend this constantly.
Here is an invented pair of lines to show the pentameter pulse: 'The kettle hums its small domestic hymn, / and steam writes brief cursive on the glass.' Say them aloud and you can feel the five-beat line the sonnet is built on.
Where You Will See It
Shakespeare's 154 sonnets are the most famous group in English, but the form's range is wider than love poetry. Milton used it for political anger, Wordsworth for quiet awe, Gerard Manley Hopkins for religious crisis, and Gwendolyn Brooks for street-level portraits in her sequence about a Chicago neighbourhood. Contemporary poets such as Terrance Hayes have reinvented it again, proving the shape still has room in it.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Start with the turn, not the rhymes. Decide what changes at line nine or line thirteen: a concession, a reversal, a widening of the lens. Then draft freely to fourteen lines and tune the metre afterwards. Slant rhyme is fine; a stiff perfect rhyme that warps your syntax is worse than a soft one that keeps the sentence natural.
If you want a testing ground, a fourteen-line entry does well in judged contests because structure is scored on its own; Writory's monthly readers, for instance, mark structure and language as separate criteria, so a controlled sonnet earns its keep twice.
What poets can take from this
- Write the sentence first and the line second; a sonnet should read as fluent speech laid over a grid.
- Place your strongest image just after the volta, where the reader's attention resets.
- Allow yourself slant rhymes such as stone and rain rather than forcing exact ones.
- Read your draft aloud and tap the five beats; any line where you stumble needs work.
- Study one Shakespeare sonnet and one Milton sonnet side by side to hear how different the same form can sound.
Try it yourself
Write a sonnet about an object you have owned for more than ten years. Spend the octave describing it honestly, then turn at line nine to what it knows about you.
Questions
Does a sonnet have to rhyme?
Traditionally yes, following either the Italian or English scheme. Many modern sonnets drop or loosen the rhymes while keeping fourteen lines and a turn, and most editors still call these sonnets.
What is the volta in a sonnet?
The volta is the turn of thought, the moment the poem shifts direction. It usually falls at line nine in Italian sonnets and at the closing couplet in English ones.
How many types of sonnet are there?
The three classic types are the Petrarchan, the Shakespearean, and the Spenserian, but variants abound, including the curtal sonnet, the quatorzain, and entirely unrhymed modern versions.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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