How to Write a Sonnet in Iambic Pentameter

Fourteen lines, 140 syllables, one argument

A sonnet is a machine for changing your mind in fourteen lines. That is the whole form. The meter and the rhyme scheme exist to make the change feel inevitable rather than announced.

Start with the count, because it is checkable. Fourteen lines. Ten syllables per line. Five stressed beats per line, landing on the even-numbered syllables in the plainest reading. That is 140 syllables total.

Iambic pentameter is five iambs. An iamb is one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one: da-DUM. Five of those in a row:

the CURfew TOLLS the KNELL of PARTing DAY

That is the opening of Thomas Gray's Elegy, and it is as regular as English gets. Every foot is an iamb, and nothing is forced.

Scansion is not arithmetic

Now take Shakespeare:

shall I comPARE thee TO a SUMmer’s DAY

Ten syllables. Five stresses. But the first foot is SHALL I, which is a trochee — stressed then unstressed — and the third foot promotes thee into a beat it does not really deserve. Strictly speaking, the line is not perfectly iambic, and it is one of the most famous lines in the language.

Beginners write ten syllables, put a stress on every second one, and produce a line that sounds like a metronome with a head injury. Real iambic pentameter allows substitutions: a trochee at the start, a reversed foot at a moment of emphasis, an extra unstressed syllable at the end of a line. The meter is a norm, and the poem’s job is to push against it.

So scan for the expected pattern, then notice where the poem breaks it. The breaks are usually where the meaning is.

A practical method:

1. Write the line without thinking about meter.
2. Count the syllables. Cut or add until it is ten.
3. Read it aloud and tap your finger on what you think the beats are.
4. If a tap lands on a syllable that cannot take stress — the, of, and, to — the line needs rewriting, not explaining.

Read the line wrong on purpose, with the stress on the wrong syllables. If it sounds absurd but still intelligible, the meter is sound.

The turn is the point

Every sonnet turns. The turn is called the volta, and it is a change in the direction of the argument — not a change of subject, which is easy and unimpressive.

In the Petrarchan form, the poem is an octave and a sestet: eight lines, then six, rhyming ABBAABBA and then something like CDECDE. The volta lands at line nine. The octave sets up a problem, a description, or a proposition; the sestet answers, complicates, or refuses it.

In the Shakespearean form, the poem is three quatrains and a couplet: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. The turn usually arrives at line thirteen, and the couplet delivers a verdict on everything before it.

The practical question when drafting: what does the poem believe at line one, and what does it believe at line fourteen? If the answer is the same, you have written fourteen lines of description, not a sonnet.

Line 1–4: the claim. She is more beautiful than summer. Line 5–8: it fades, it is too hot, summer ends. Line 9–12: the swerve. But her summer does not end, because the poem keeps it. Line 13–14: the verdict. So long as people can read, she lives.

That is the structure of Sonnet 18 in plain English, and you can see the turn at line nine. The poem stops describing a person and starts talking about the poem itself. The subject does not change. The direction does.

Rhyme cannot be allowed to drive

The most common injury in amateur sonnets is a sentence bent backwards to reach a rhyme.

A truer love I never thought to find, nor one so constant in a world unkind.

Nobody speaks like that. The inversion — a truer love I never thought to find — exists only so that find lands at the end of the line. Multiply it by fourteen and the poem sounds like a Victorian greeting card with a head cold.

Three ways out:

Write the sentence in normal order, then find a rhyme that fits. If no rhyme fits, change the last word of the sentence before you change the sentence.

Use enjambment. Let the sentence run past the line break:

I cannot promise you a quiet house, but I can promise this: the door will hold.

The line ending on house with the sentence continuing is not a failure of the form. It is the form working, because the reader is pulled into the next line instead of pausing to admire the rhyme.

Use slant rhyme. Love and prove rhymed in Shakespeare’s English and do not in ours. Home and alone are close enough for a modern sonnet, and most editors will take a near rhyme over a mangled clause. What they will not take is moon / June.

A rhyme test: read only the rhyming words in order, out loud. If that list sounds like a coherent set of ideas, the rhymes are doing work. If it sounds like a word-association game, the poem is being pulled by its own tail.

Draft in reverse

Do not start at line one. Start at the volta.

1. Write the sentence at the turn. One sentence, plain prose, that states what the poem learns. The poem cannot make her live forever, but it can make her last as long as the words do.
2. Write the last line. It should be shorter in feeling than the rest — a verdict, not a summary.
3. Build the quatrains backwards. Each one should make the turn more surprising, which means each one should give the reader a reason to expect the opposite.
4. Fix the meter last. If you scan while you draft, you will write metrically correct nonsense.

The sonnet generator can supply a rhyme scheme and a plausible rhythm when you are stuck. It cannot supply the turn, because the turn is an argument, and arguments come from having one. If you want to see the other fixed forms the poem library keeps, read a ballad next — same narrative instinct, much looser meter.

Read the draft aloud once, then count the syllables in the lines that felt wrong.

A checklist before you call it done

• Fourteen lines, ten syllables each, five beats in the plain reading.
• No more than two or three obvious substitutions, and each one at a moment of emphasis.
• A turn you can point to by line number.
• No sentence whose word order exists only for the rhyme.
• The last line does something the first line could not have predicted.
• Read aloud, it does not sound like a person reciting a rule.

If a line resists all of that, cut it and write a worse line that means something. The same goes for shorter forms: the haiku teaches compression, and this form teaches architecture. A poem that has both is rare and worth keeping.