A Sonnet

A Sonnet is a form of poetry that Shakespeare used to create his famous poems: The Sonnets. A Sonnet is a fourteen line poem that follows a strict rhyme scheme and structure. The Sonnets consist of three four-line stanzas called quatrains, followed by a final couplet.

In a sonnet, each line is written in iambic pentameter. An iamb consists of one unstressed and one stressed syllable. If a line is written in iambic pentameter, that means that there are five iambs in the line.

A stanza is a unit within a larger poem.

A Quatrain is a poem, or a stanza in a poem, that follows a specific rhyme scheme. In a sonnet, the quatrain follows the rhyme scheme, abab, which means that every other line in the quatrain rhymes.

A couplet is a pair of lines that usually rhyme.

If a sonnet is written in iambic pentameter, has three quatrains, and one couplet; it will look like this:

Sonnet 18
(a)Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
(b)Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
(a)Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
(b)And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
(c)Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
(d)And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
(c)And every fair from fair sometime declines,
(d)By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
(e)But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
(f)Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
(e)Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
(f)When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
(g)So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
(g)So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.