How to Write a Sonnet Poem

My favorite poetic form, the sonnet consists of fourteen lines and can have different stanza groupings and rhyming patterns, depending on the style preferred. Sonnets usually have a "turn", whereby a problem or scenario begins to be rectified or explained. I have written over thirty sonnets, including English, Spenserian and Italian styles.

Early in the sixteenth century, Thomas Wyatt introduced the English sonnet as translations of French and Italian work. The Earl of Surrey, in the same era, went a step further and developed the stanza and rhyming patterns in use today. A collection of 154 English sonnets by William Shakespeare was published in 1609. In more recent times, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay and E. E. Cummings all wrote sonnets regularly.

Though sometimes written in a single 14-line stanza, a classic English sonnet contains three quatrains (four line stanzas) and a couplet (two line stanza), is written in iambic tetrameter or pentameter (four or five feet of "dah-DUM," see "Poetic Meter"), and has the rhyming pattern "a-b-a-b ... c-d-c-d ... e-f-e-f ... g-g." In a rhyming pattern, lines ending in a sound designated by "a" only rhyme with other "a" lines, "b" lines only with other "b" lines, and so on.

Similar to the English sonnet, the Spenserian sonnet, named for poet Edmund Spenser (c.1552-1599), uses a classic meter and the rhyming scheme of "a-b-a-b ... b-c-b-c ... c-d-c-d ... e-e."

An Italian sonnet may vary widely in pattern, but usually consists of two quatrains, or an 8-line "octet," followed by a sestet (six line stanza), also in classic meter, and the rhyming pattern, "a-b-b-a ... a-b-b-a ... c-d-c-d-c-d."

Other meters may be used for sonnets, such as anapestic ("dah-dah-DUM") or even prose, which is unmetered and unrhymed. Consistency and flow is the key, leading to the turn or conclusion. I have a special affinity for sonnets because, like haiku, you can emphasize or drive home a point, but you get more than a line or two to do so.

The following is an English sonnet:

The World Is There

The drab and bleak existence set aside,
my corner of the neighborhood, secured,
to go beyond would fight the rising tide
of factions gathered, waiting for the lured.

I shuffle by on paths of comfort, eased,
to work assignments sheltered from the hoards,
and home again, without a moment seized
to recognize the richness life affords.

Sometimes our spirit shakes itself to find
that status quo and safety can't replace
enrichment of the soul, still intertwined
with nature and its awe-inspired grace.

The world is there for humans to behold
and interact as spectacles unfold.

Copyright © 2008 by Jack Huber-
All rights reserved.