love sonnet
Fourteen passionate lines
A love sonnet is a fourteen-line poem in formal meter expressing romantic devotion or desire.
The form flourished during the Renaissance, when poets like Petrarch and Shakespeare wrote sequences addressed to idealized beloveds.
The constraints of the sonnet—its strict rhyme scheme and volta (turn)—compress intense emotion into disciplined form: He wrote her a love sonnet for their anniversary.
- rhyme schemeSound-matching arrangement in poetry
- fourteen linesSonnet's defining measure
- poetic formVerse's structural template
- romanceLove and its excitement
- English RenaissanceTudor-Stuart cultural flourishing
volta · metaphor · iambic pentameter · sestet · longing · Elizabethan era · simile · octave · quatrain · blazon · admiration · Petrarch · fair youth · dark lady · couplet · imagery · devotion · alliteration
- love poemsaubade, serenade, wedding poem, heartbreak poem, erotic poetry
- love poetrymadrigal, canzone, Petrarch, Dante, Beatrice
- sonnetsoctave, sestet, fourteen lines, volta, quatrain
- Italian poetryDante, Petrarch, ottava rima, madrigal, Inferno
- Pleiade PoetryOlive, Helene
- Renaissance poetrySpenser, Sidney, Marlowe, Elizabethan literature, iambic pentameter
love sonnetfree verse
Poetry without fixed structure
prose poem · stream of consciousness · epic poem · experimental poetry · blank verse
love, sonnet, loves, loved, loving, lover, lovers, lovable, lovely