Sonnets are usually but not always about love.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. To be a sonnet, a poem should be written in iambic pentameter and follow one of several common rhyme schemes. Cavanagh (Eds.), The Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics (4th ed.). sonnets that 60% used the abbaabba pattern for the octaves and 22% ababcdcd. Weeks showed in a sample of just under 6,000 Eng. or Petrarchan (octave: abbaabba sestet: cdecde or cdcdcd or a similar combination that avoids the closing couplet), the Spenserian (ababbcbc cdcdee), and the Eng.
The three most widely recognized versions of the sonnet, with their traditional rhyme schemes, are the It. A 14-line line poem normally in hendecasyllables (It.), iambic pentameter (Eng.), or alexandrines (Fr.), whose rhyme scheme varies despite the assumption that the sonnet form is fixed. From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
