A way to form the question might be: what does a poem gain by being called a sonnet? We have sonnet preconceptions; a poem can meet those expectations or subvert them. I think Spence's poem is a sonnet. Aaron has pointed out its traditional placement of the volta and the rhyme pattern. A broken sonnet for a broken relationship. All categorization is to some extent arbitrary, but no more so than the language we use to uphold those categorizations.
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