Here’s the second – or is it the third? – in our occasional series on poetic forms, in which we invite you to look at and maybe have a go yourself. This time around, it’s the sonnet. Shakespeare is famously associated with the sonnet – after all, he wrote 154 of them, and a few more besides. Wordsworth composed 523, Keats 67, and Coleridge 48. In more recent times, contemporary poet Don Paterson is a big fan of them, too. The sonnet is a poem of 14 lines, usually of iambic pentameter – ie, 10 syllables. There are at least two different kinds, the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean. The Petrarchan is Italian in origin, has an octave of eight lines, with a rhyme scheme of ababcdcd, and a sestet with a rhyme scheme of cdecde. The rhyme scheme of the Shakesperaean sonnet is ababcdcdefefgg. There is no octave/sestet structure to it, but its final couplet is a defining feature.

With the earlier, Petrarchan sonnet, the idea is that a strong opening statement of eight lines is followed by a resolution to the emotional or intellectual question of the first part of the poem. The English (Shakespearean) version was developed by Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey, before being taken up by the Bard.   

Explaining why he chooses to write so many sonnets, Don Paterson told interviewer Rosanne McGlone in The Process of Poetry:

“The sonnet form is partly a default setting, as I know it from the inside, and it helps me shape my thoughts more clearly. It’s a bit like a twelve-bar blues; you can fill it with a million different things, but it both holds its shape and gives shape to your own thought … The symmetry also has a built-in fracture, what we call the ‘turn’ at around the eighth line. Indeed, it’s often the turn which helps me decide whether it’s going to be a sonnet.”

In truth, there are many different versions of the sonnet, far too many to list here. A crown of sonnets is composed of 15 sonnets that are linked by the repetition of the final line of one sonnet as the initial line of the next, and the final line of that sonnet as the initial line of the previous; the last sonnet consists of all the repeated lines of the previous 14 sonnets, in the same order in which they appeared.

Here are just a few well-known sonnets: Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? (Sonnet 18) ; Wordsworth’s ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’ ; Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 'Ozymandias’: John Keats’ ‘Bright Star’ ; and Edna St Vincent Millay’s ‘What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why’ .

The sonnet has never really gone out of fashion. Don Paterson’s devotion to the 14-line form is particularly evident in his 2016 collection 40 Sonnets; and Jaqueline Saphra’s 100 Lockdown Sonnets is exactly what it says on the cover.

We're hoping that some members of Write Out Loud will pen their own sonnets and post them here. Go on, have a go! Working to a set rhyme scheme may not be as difficult as you might think ... !

Background: Let’s hear it for the Shakespeare 400 Sonnetathon