How Many Lines in a Sonnet?
Quick answer: How many lines in a sonnet? Fourteen, in every traditional form. How Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnets divide those lines, plus the famous exceptions.
A sonnet has fourteen lines. That number holds across every traditional type: the Shakespearean sonnet arranges its fourteen as three quatrains and a closing couplet, while the Petrarchan sonnet divides them into an octave of eight and a sestet of six. Both classically use iambic pentameter, ten syllables to a line, though modern sonnets often loosen that.
Fourteen is not arbitrary; it is roughly the size of a single developed thought with room for one change of direction. The form has survived seven centuries because that shape, an argument and its answer, keeps matching how minds actually move.
The poem
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date;
William Shakespeare, 'Sonnet 18' (1609)
How the fourteen lines are divided
The two great templates split the poem differently, and the split changes the poem's behaviour. The Petrarchan octave sets up a situation and the sestet answers it, with the turn, the volta, at line nine. The Shakespearean form thinks in three four-line stages, then snaps shut with a couplet at lines thirteen and fourteen, which is why so many of Shakespeare's endings feel like a drawer closing. The Spenserian sonnet, a rarer third type, keeps fourteen lines but interlocks its rhymes across the quatrains.
The most famous fourteen in English
Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 shows the machinery working: a question, an argument, and a couplet that lands the point. Here is its opening quatrain.
The exceptions worth knowing
Poets have always tested the walls. Gerard Manley Hopkins invented the curtal sonnet, a compressed ten-and-a-half-line version, for poems like 'Pied Beauty'. George Meredith wrote his sequence 'Modern Love' in sixteen-line sonnets. Contemporary poets go further, keeping the sonnet's turn and pressure while dropping rhyme, metre or even the strict count; Terrance Hayes's American sonnets keep fourteen lines but treat every other rule as negotiable. The takeaway: fourteen lines is the definition, and everything else about the sonnet has proven flexible.
For contests and classes, write fourteen unless told otherwise. Judges scoring structure will notice a sonnet that earns its turn, and they will also notice one that is simply a poem of arbitrary length wearing the label.
What poets can take from this
- Count your lines: fourteen, no more, no fewer, for a traditional sonnet.
- Place a genuine turn at line nine (Petrarchan) or in the couplet (Shakespearean).
- Draft the argument in prose first: situation, complication, answer.
- Let pentameter be roughly right in drafts and exact only where it matters.
- Read your sonnet aloud; the form's music is the point of choosing it.
Try it yourself
Write a fourteen-line poem in which the first eight lines describe a promise someone made and the last six describe what actually happened.
Questions
Do sonnets have to rhyme?
Traditionally yes, following set schemes, but many modern sonnets drop rhyme entirely and keep only the fourteen lines and the turn. If you are writing for a form-specific prompt or exam, use the full scheme.
What rhyme scheme does a Shakespearean sonnet use?
ABAB CDCD EFEF GG: three alternating quatrains and a final rhymed couplet. The Petrarchan octave runs ABBAABBA, with a more variable sestet such as CDECDE.
Can a sonnet be about anything?
Yes. It began as a love form, but poets have used it for war, faith, politics and grief for centuries; the shape suits any subject that contains an argument or a reversal.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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