the.com/sonnet
fourteen lines of engineering disguised as a feeling, a heart on a leash.
means A fourteen-line poem in a fixed rhyme scheme and meter, traditionally meditating on love or some single sustained idea.
from From the Italian sonetto, meaning 'little song,' a diminutive of suono, 'sound' — itself from the Latin sonus. So the word carries its modesty in its name: not a song but a small one, a sound shrunk to fit a frame. The form was perfected in 13th-century Italy and made famous by Petrarch, then carried into English by Renaissance poets who reshaped it into the rhyme scheme we now call Shakespearean.
- strict count
- always 14 lines, no negotiation
- name origin
- Italian for little song or little sound
- the turn
- a pivot called the volta flips the argument
- Shakespeare's haul
- he cranked out 154 of them
- final blow
- closing couplet often lands the killer twist
shakespeare's sonnet 18 — begins 'shall i compare thee to a summer's day' — most famous english sonnet ever written
petrarch's sonnets — 366 poems written 1327-1368 in italian, established the form that dominated european poetry
milton's sonnet 19 — 'when i consider how my light is spent' — 1655, on his blindness, one of the greatest in english