

… The name is taken from the Italian sonetto, which means ‘a little sound or song.'” Poets like those below have been experimenting with the form for hundreds of years. Definitions and examples of 136 literary. Iambic pentameter is a line of verse with five groups of syllables. A couplet is two rhyming lines in a poem. A quatrain is four lines of verse with an A-B-A-B rhyme scheme.

Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. What are Funny Sonnet Poems Simply put, a sonnet is a poem (funny or otherwise) made up of three quatrains (in iambic pentameter) followed by a concluding couplet. The English or Shakespearean sonnet came later, and it is made of three quatrains rhyming abab cdcd efef and a closing rhymed heroic couplet. Today, the 14 lines of sonnets still convey powerful messages. The original form is the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, in which the 14 lines are arranged in an octet (8 lines) rhyming abba abba and a sestet (6 lines) rhyming either cdecde or cdcdcd. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. Often, when we think of a sonnet, we think of love poems.

Read every line of Shakespeare’s original text alongside a modern English translation. The Academy of American Poets defines a sonnet as: “a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter, employing one of several rhyme schemes, and adhering to a tightly structured thematic organization. Actually understand Shakespeares Sonnets Sonnet 14. Other than the last line, the curtal sonnet is still written in iambic pentameter. Sonnets may well be the most studied and practiced poetic forms in the English language. Though it appears to be 11 lines, which is a little more than 3/4 of the normal 14-line Petrarchan sonnet, it is actually 10.5 lines this is because the final line of the curtal sonnet is half a line of iambic pentameter sometimes even less.
