A term you'll meet in poetic form.
A sonnet is a fourteen-line poem, usually in iambic pentameter, built around a single thought that develops and then turns. Its discipline is the point: in fourteen lines a poet has to set up a problem and resolve it, which is why the form has lasted seven hundred years.
The older form, named after Petrarch, divides into an octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six), rhyming roughly abbaabba cdecde. The octave poses a question, situation, or tension; the sestet answers or resolves it. The hinge between them, around line nine, is the volta — the "turn."
Shakespeare worked in a form better suited to English, which has fewer rhymes: three quatrains and a closing couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. Each quatrain develops the idea a stage further, and the final couplet snaps it shut with a summary, twist, or epigram. Here the volta often falls at that couplet.
Whatever the rhyme scheme, what makes a poem a sonnet is the turn: the moment the argument shifts — from problem to solution, praise to doubt, description to meaning. Reading a sonnet well means finding the volta and asking what changes across it.
Poets keep returning to the sonnet precisely because it's hard. Wordsworth, Hopkins, Millay, and contemporary poets like Terrance Hayes have all bent the rules — loosening the rhyme, moving the turn, stretching the meter — while keeping the essential bargain: fourteen lines, one thought, one turn.
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