Structure in “Sonnet” In his poem “Sonnet”, Billy Collins uses the Petrarchan method to carry his reader through the creation of a sonnet. He takes his reader line by line through all fourteen lines explaining metaphorically the complexity and conflicts that are contained in the octave. He also uses his octave to almost post mockery at the strictness of Elizabethan sonnets. He then finalizes with the resolving manner of the remaining six lines. He creates this poem ignoring the iambic rule associated with a typical sonnet. Collins’s use of literary devices, rhyme scheme, and imagination plays an important role in the structure of the poem, “Sonnet”. The author uses simile to describe the structure of the poem. He compares “…ten more [lines] left like rows of beans.” (Ln 4). A sonnet is fourteen lines and the poet already used up four lines and tells us that the remaining ten lines are like rows of beans. He starts off by saying all you need in a …show more content…
Most poems are identified by their rhyming scheme. For example, the octave of a Petrarchan sonnet has the rhyming scheme of a-b-b-a-a-b-b-a and the sestet is more flexible and can either be c-d-e-c-d-e or c-d-c-d-c-d. Elizabethan sonnets have different rhyming schemes from Petrarchan sonnets and that is how we are able to identify which sonnet is which. The author of the poem kind of takes us throughout the poem, making us believe it is a sonnet because it has the structure of a sonnet. Going through it again, you will realize that actually it is not a sonnet because the rhyming scheme doesn’t match any of the rhyming schemes of a sonnet. He makes us believe it is by saying “All we need is fourteen lines, well now thirteen/ and after this one, just a dozen.” (Ln 1-2). A sonnet has fourteen lines. After writing the first line, you have thirteen left. He uses a poem to describe how to write a sonnet, uses the structure of a sonnet but it really is not a