Rhymed: There are several different traditional rhyme schemes for sonnets. This is a fact that English teachers love to repeat, so it's a good one to know.
In fact, if you read a poem that's fourteen lines, the odds are that it's a sonnet. OK, now that we've explained that let's take this one feature at a time: Fourteen lines: Every sonnet has fourteen lines. That's one reason this poem feels very conventional, maybe even a little inhibited it's playing by all the rules that it can find. But before you even know what all that means, you can notice that this poem is highly structured – the number of lines, the number of syllables in each line, and the rhyme scheme are all prescribed by the literary tradition for sonnets. Whoa, sorry, we slipped into literary techno-babble there for a moment. It's a sonnet – a fourteen-line rhymed lyric poem written in iambic pentameter.
