Sonnet：

A fourteen-line lyric poem, usually written in rhymed iambic pentameter. A sonnet generally expressed a scheme, but are generally of two types: the Petrarchan or Italian sonnet and the Elizabethan or Shakespearian or English sonnet. The Italian sonnet is a form that originated in Italy in the thirteenth century. The Italian sonnet has two parts, an octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines). Its rhyme scheme is usually abbaabba, cde cde. The two parts of the Italian sonnet play off each other in a variety of ways. Sometimes the octave raises a question that the sestet answers. Sometimes the sestet opposes what the octave says, or extends it. The Italian sonnet is often called the Petrarchan sonnet, because the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch used it so extensively. He dedicated more than three hundred sonnets to a woman named Laura. Petrarch inspired the vogue of sonnet writing in Elizabethan England. It became conventional for English poets to address sonnets to a beautiful but cruel mistress whose eyes were stars, whose lips were cherries, and whose cheeks roses. Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130” has been called anti-Petrarchan because he inverts the conventions, describing his mistress in realistic terms. The Shakespearian sonnet consists of three quatrains and a concluding couplet, with the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg. A less important sonnet form is Spenserian sonnet. Its rhyme scheme is ababbcbccdcdee.