zodiac6 Feb 2006

There are several typical rhyme-schemes for sonnets, including Shakespearean, Petrarchan and so on. None of them are given much thought these days. The outstanding feature of a sonnet is that it has 14 lines. Most sonnets, almost all of them, in fact, are written in iambic pentameter (10 syllables, bu-BUMP bu-BUMP bu-BUMP bu-BUMP bu-BUMP.) But even that sees a lot of variation nowadays. American poet Nikki Giovanni made a big splash writing "broken sonnets", for example, which used several rhythms and line-lengths. It's not even, as far as I know, currently expected by most people that sonnets rhyme. This one does, of course:

ABABCDdEdFGgFF