An Italian Sonnet by Cammie-Lai


There is a great wall between you and me/
Though it was not intended, I must say/
and neither the wall began yesterday/
Standing and smiling, very close to thee/
yet this the farthest we could ever be/
the cold wind blowing between us it may/
Finish with my trust in thee this very day/
The great, perilous wall between you and me./
Why are we like this, why not be open?/
Wish: honesty and pouring of the heart/
and see matters eye-to-eye would be very akin/
To shatter this block that keeps us apart/
So like the warm blanket placed over uncovered skin/
is to break this wall and connect heart-to-heart. 

To beginners in poetry, this is my own example of an Italian Sonnet, which consists of 14 lines, one octave (group of eight) and one sestet (group of six) and a rhyme scheme of ABBAABBA and the sestet being CDCDCD or CDECDE, in this poem CDCDCD. It is also written mostly in iambic pentameter, which means measuring of the number and kind of feet and line of poetry, in this case five feet (pentameter) ----->

eg. There IS/ a GREAT/ wall BET/ ween YOU/ and ME

Note that there are five feet, each made up of an iamb (unstressed syllable followed by stress) Occasionally there is a break in the meter structure just to emphasize how the poet (me) symbolically wants to break the wall

All this may sound like complicated, but once you study it a little more and also make your own to practice, it becomes easy!

If there is a brave and experimental poet out there, you can post here! You can also try the English Sonnet, the kinds William Shakepeare wrote in his day.


An English sonnet also consists of 14 lines, but is made of three quatrains (groups of four lines) and one couplet (two lines) The rhyme scheme of an English sonnet is as follows: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.

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Shakespeare's sonnet scheme is similar, but the 14 lines are separated in 3 couplets out of 4 lines and a last couplet of 2 lines. For the 3 couplets  the rhyme can be anything, but in the last couplet the two lines should rhyme.

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