Introduction to the Sonnet II: Meter

Sonnets are all written in some distinctive meter; this means that every line has (roughly) the same number of stressed and unstressed syllables in (roughly) the same order. To be more specific, each line has, or is expected to have, the same number of the same feet in the same order as every other line.

A line of poetic verse is divided into feet, patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables in a specific order. The most common feet are iambic (unstressed stressed: perhaps), trochaic (stressed unstressed: maybe), dactylic (stressed unstressed unstressed: carefully), anapestic (unstressed unstressed stressed: understand), and spondaic (stressed stressed: baseball). These feet can stretch over multiple words, and the division between feet can come in the middle of a word: Shakespeare's famous line "But soft what light through yonder window breaks" is iambic and it scans (breaks down into feet) as follows:

But soft/what light/through yon/der win/dow breaks.

In this case, both yonder and window are divided over two feet, and every foot has more than one word in it.

Meters do not have to consist of only one foot; the Greeks and Romans were very fond of meters that mixed dactylic and spondaic feet for instance. English verse tends to use meters that do not mix feet, but that is by no means a hard and fast rule. When you do use single-foot meters, however, they are properly named by the type of foot (say, iambic) and the number of those feet in the line, expressed with a Latin prefix to the word meter (say, pentameter for a five-foot line). So the line of Shakespeare we scanned above was iambic pentameter, since it had ten syllables, making five iambic feet.

Most English sonnets are and have been written in iambic pentameter. Of course, a lot of English poetry over the ages has been written in iambic pentameter, so this is hardly surprising. But sonnets do not have to be in iambic pentameter; they can be written in any meter. I am not particularly familiar with any that have been written in non-iambic meter, but here is an example of one of Shakespeare's sonnets, Sonnet 145, written in iambic tetrameter instead of pentameter:

Those lips that love's own hand did make

Breathed forth the sound that said "I hate"

To me that languished for her sake.

But when she saw my woeful state

Straight in her heart did mercy come,

Chiding that tongue that ever sweet

Was used in giving gentle doom,

And taught it thus anew to greet:

"I hate" she altered with an end

That followed it as gentle day

Doth follow night, who like a fiend

From heaven to hell is flown away.

"I hate" from hate away she threw

And saved my life, saying "not you."