What Is Not A Sonnet

To reiterate what a sonnet is: a fourteen line poem in meter and rhyme.

So this is not a sonnet:
Now when the time of fruit and grain is come,
When apples hang above the orchard wall,
And from a tangle by the roadside stream
A scent of wild grapes fills the racy air,
Comes Autumn with her sun-burnt caravan,
Like a long gypsy train with trappings gay
And tattered colors of the Orient,
Moving slow-footed through the dreamy hills.
The woods of Wilton, at her coming, wear
Tints of Bokhara and of Samarcand;
The maples glow with their Pompeian red,
The hickories with burnt Etruscan gold;
And while the crickets fife along her march,
Behind her banners burns the crimson sun.
--"Autumn" by Bliss Carman (The Atlantic Monthly, 1916).

It looks like a sonnet, oh yes it does; it wants so badly to look like a sonnet. Iambic pentameter! Quatrains, in sense if not in rhyme! A couplet with a little turn at the end, even if without rhyme again! Fourteen lines! But this is not a sonnet. It is a fourteen line poem in iambic pentameter. It is a beautiful piece of poetry. But it is not a sonnet. It partakes somewhat of the nature of a sonnet, in that it puts one in mind of the sonnet form and so draws some power from the rejection of that form by the avoidance of what John Milton would have called "the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming," but by that very avoidance it carves out new genre territory for itself, and is not a sonnet. Sadly, not all beautiful poems are sonnets, even if they do have fourteen lines of iambic pentameter.