Sonnet. A lyric poem consisting of a single stanza of fourteen iambic pentameter

lines linked by an intricate rhyme scheme. There are two major patterns

of rhyme in sonnets written in the English language:

 

(1) The Italian or Petrarchan sonnet (named after the fourteenthcentury

Italian poet Petrarch) falls into two main parts: an octave

(eight lines) rhyming abbaabba followed by a sestet (six lines)

rhyming cdecde or some variant, such as cdccd

 

(2)The Earl of Surrey and other English experimenters in the sixteenth

century also developed a stanza form called the English sonnet, or

else the Shakespearean sonnet, after its greatest practitioner. This

sonnet falls into three quatrains and a concluding couplet: abab cdcd

efef gg. There was one notable variant, the Spenserian sonnet, in

which Spenser linked each quatrain to the next by a continuing

rhyme: abab bebe cdcd