Sonnet

The sonnet is a traditional poem composed of three quatrains, 4-line units, followed by a couplet, a 2-line unit. Sonnets are classified according to their rhyming style as either Italian? or English?.

Along with his wonderful plays, Shakespeare is well known for his many sonnets, such as Sonnet 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no, it is an ever fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand'ring barque,

Whose worth's unknown although his height be taken.

Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.