- Understand rhyme schemes and structure. A sonnet has 14 lines.
The last six are the sestet. The sestet holds the last two lines, which are a couplet; the last
word in each of the couplet's lines rhyme with each other. There is a rhyme scheme through
the entire poem. See Shakespeare's Sonnet #18 for example:
1. Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
2. Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
3. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
4. And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
5. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
6. And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
7. And every fair from fair sometime declines,
8. By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
9. But thy eternal summer shall not fade
10. Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
11. Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
12. When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
13. So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
14. So long lives this and this gives life to thee.