Fourteen Lines and a Hinge
The sonnet is the most successful fixed form in European poetry, and its success rests on a single structural feature: it is long enough to state a position and short enough that the reader is still holding the beginning when the end arrives. Fourteen lines, and a turn.
Two arrangements dominate:
| Italian (Petrarchan) | English (Shakespearean) | |
|---|---|---|
| Division | Octave 8 + sestet 6 | 3 quatrains + couplet |
| Turn (volta) | At line 9 | At line 13 |
| Rhyme scheme | ABBAABBA CDECDE | ABAB CDCD EFEF GG |
| Distinct rhyme sounds | 4 or 5 | 7 |
That last row is the important one, and it is a fact about languages rather than about poets. Italian is rhyme-rich: its verbs and adjectives share endings, so four rhyme sounds across fourteen lines is comfortable. English is rhyme-poor, and asking a poet for four A-rhymes in an octave is asking for strain. The English sonnet's answer is to use seven rhyme sounds and never require more than two lines on any of them, a redesign forced by the language, which then changes the argument the form can make.
Because the Italian sonnet turns at line 9, it argues in two blocks: a problem, then a resolution. Because the English turns at line 13, it argues in three parallel movements and then a sharp reversal, the couplet can undercut everything above it, which is what Shakespeare's most famous sonnets do.
The Spanish Golden Age took the Italian form and split over how to write it. Luis de Góngora (1561–1627) practised culteranismo: Latinate vocabulary, violently displaced word order, dense mythological allusion, difficulty as an aesthetic. Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645) practised conceptismo: compressed conceits, wordplay, meanings folded into each other, difficulty of thought rather than of surface. They loathed each other and satirised each other savagely, and both were right that the other had located something real in the form.
Quevedo's Amor constante más allá de la muerte ends with a line that is a whole poetics in itself: polvo serán, mas polvo enamorado, they will be dust, but dust in love. Six words, one reversal, the conceit turning on a single conjunction.
Shakespeare's 154 sonnets (1609) exploit the English structure relentlessly. Sonnet 130, My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun, spends twelve lines demolishing Petrarchan compliment and two lines converting the demolition into a better compliment. The couplet does the work the octave-sestet split cannot.
Common pitfall: treating the volta as a change of subject. It is a change of relation to the subject — a reversal, a qualification, a widening — and a sonnet that simply changes topic at line nine has not turned, it has stopped.