Home › Glossary › Letter C

Color sonnet

Form
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A fourteen-line poetic form focused around imagery of color or hue

Detailed Definition
A Color sonnet is a fourteen-line poem organized around a specific color scheme or chromatic progression, where each quatrain or tercet explores a different hue’s emotional or symbolic resonance; it merges formal constraint with synesthetic exploration, using color as both structural and thematic backbone.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Terrance Hayes’ “Golden Shovel” sonnets, each line ends with a word from Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool,” assigning colors like “jazz June” to emotional tones; In Tracy K. Smith’s “Color Sonnet,” hues map grief: “indigo for the hour after death”; In Natasha Trethewey’s “Color Sonnet,” skin tones become sites of historical reckoning within strict form; In Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s “Color Sonnet,” coral reefs and monsoons paint ecological love; In Jericho Brown’s “Color Sonnet,” blood and ash render racial violence through chromatic metaphor.
Additional Notes
Color sonnet|A sonnet (14-line poem) that uses color imagery as its central unifying device, often with a different color dominating each section or an established color pattern.
Also Known As
chromatic sonnet painted sonnet hue-based fourteen-liner
Skip to main content