Of course, it would be pretty boring to have every single line of your poem follow the same rhythm. So areВ you toВ my thoughts as food to life. To see this rhythm in action, let's take a sentence we know. As for the 'penta-' part, that just comes from the Greek word for 'five.' So a 'pentameter' is a line that is divided into five sections or 'measures.' (Just so you know, these metrical units are normally called ' feet.' Go figure.)ДЄs for 'iambic,' that just means that each of those measures, or 'feet,' is going to follow a certain rhythm, known as an ' iamb.' An iamb is made up of two syllables: the first syllable is lightly accented and the second syllable is strongly accented, giving the rhythm 'da DUM.' Thus, a complete poetic line of five iambs sounds like this: Let's start with the word 'pentameter.' The '-meter' part is easy: that just means some way of dividing up or measuring (in the sense of a 'measure' in music) the words in the poetic line. This term is definitely a mouthful, but it's not so hard once we break it down. But what about its meter? The meter of Shakespeare's sonnets (and his plays) is the single most common poetic meter in English: the iambic pentameter. In these ways, Sonnet 75 marks a significant, though subtle departure from Shakespeare's standard operating procedure. Lines 13 and 14, the concluding couplet, more or less summarize the same ideas as the miser imagery, only this time they transform the imagery to one of 'gluttony' instead. In fact, this idea dominates the following section of the poem all the way down to line 12. In this case, we get one basic idea in the first 2 (and arguably 3) lines, as the speaker compares his relationship with his beloved to the friendly interactions between 'food' and 'life' and 'sweet seasoned show'rs' and the 'ground.' That said, once he introduces the 'miser' imagery in line 4 (though it looks like he's already laying the groundwork for it in line 3), he simply can't give it up. As it turns out, Sonnet 75 is one of the poems where the old Shake-meister shows how he got his name-by totally shaking things up. But isn't there something about mastering a set of rules that makes you want to break it? Shakespeare sure seems to have thought so.

Many (if not most) of Shakespeare's sonnets follow exactly this pattern. Even though Shakespeare didn't invent this type of sonnet, though, he was so good at it that the form is now named after him.ДЄs you can see from the rhyme scheme we just laid out, the Shakespearean sonnet lends itself most naturally to the poet working out a different idea in each of the three quatrains, and then summing everything up in the couplet. (When the Bard took his turn with the form, the aristocratic poet Sir Philip Sidney had already made it famous with his sequence Astrophel and Stella). Shakespeare wasn't the first to use this type of sonnet. The first three sections are known as quatrains (1-30, and the last section is known as the couplet. His brand of sonnet falls into four major sections, with a rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. William Shakespeare wrote a type of sonnet with a different rhyme scheme. Check out John Donne's 'Holy Sonnet 7', William Wordsworth's 'London, 1802', and John Milton's sonnet 'On His Blindness' for some top-notch explorations of this type of sonnet.) (The rhyme scheme looks like this: ABBAABBA CDCDCD, with some room for innovation in the second half. Many poems featured on Shmoop showcase the popular 'Italian' or 'Petrarchan' variety of sonnet, which falls into two main halves rhyming. Because all sonnets have 14 lines (aside from some super-rare varieties), these different forms are defined by their different rhyme schemes. These patterns usually correspond to a particular form of the sonnet. In response to these challenges, poets over the centuries have developed some traditional ways of organizing the thought-patterns within sonnets. 14 lines is too short to talk about a vast range of topics, but it's long enough to talk about one or two ideas in a fair amount of detail. When you think about it, this is a pretty interesting length for a poem.

Let's start with the meaning of the word 'sonnet.' The most basic thing you need to know about the sonnet form is that it refers to a poem in 14 lines. A Sonnet So Good, They Named it After Him

Shakespearean sonnet form