This is a short guide to writing a sonnet, by me, Sulkdodds!
The sonnet is probably one of the most popular poetic forms in the English language, and its use for love poetry and devotional poetry is almost a cliché. There are various types of it, which I'll mention later, but for now we're concerned with the English or 'Shakespearian' sonnet. This article is constructed so the most relevant information is at the top, and the least relevant at the bottom, so stop reading whenever you like. If you're a pansy.
Basic Structure
The English sonnet consists of three four-line stanzas (called quatrains) that rhyme in an alternating pattern, and then final rhyming couplet. The rhyme scheme is ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, GG - where each letter is a sound in the last word of the line. A rhymes with A and B with B.
Each line is composed in a meter (rhythmic scheme) called iambic pentameter, which means five iambs. An ‘iamb’ is a pair of syllables of which the first is unstressed and the second stressed, like “prefer” or “today” or “before” (as opposed to “tanker”, “trample,” or “nipple”). So in total each line has ten syllables and they follow a regular pattern of unstress, stress, unstress, stress.
Here's Shakespeare's Sonnet 130, which is basically about how his wife is ugly but he loves her anyway. Okay, okay, so it's more complicated than that. What-ever.
Tricks With Rhythm
But what if they weren't? If we rearranged the word order, we could, for example, write: "Eyes that are nothing like the sun has she." Not wonderful wording, but look at the first two syllables. The meter ordains that the stress should fall on “that”. But this sounds unnatural to English speakers (I mean, try saying it out loud: “eyes that”). So when you read it you instinctively place the stress on “Eyes”, and the deviance from the meter heightens the declarative effect of the word, which becomes a powerful opening salvo. EYES!
Another good example comes from Milton’s Paradise Lost (book II, line 159). Exiled demons sit on a hill in hell and puzzle fruitlessly over “fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute.” "Fixed fate" is a spondee, ie, a pair of stressed syllables - it sounds wrong to emphasise one over the other. So you have to say them both, and this clogs up and slows down the meter, just as the demons are unable to reason their way past the difficult arguments they face. Apart from clever wording, evocative imagery and well-chosen rhymes, deviance from the meter is one excellent technique for shaping your verse.
Other Types of Sonnet
Untrustworthy foreign types, that is. The most prominent is the Petrarchan sonnet, which is actually very appropriate for the subject - Petrarch was an Italian noble in the 14th century who saw a woman once in the church and spent the rest of his life writing poems about her without, as far as we know, ever speaking to her. So much for him.
He also used fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, but his rhyme scheme was different: ABBA, ABBA, CDE, CDE. The first two stanzas, named after a famous Swedish band of which Petrarch was a fan, constitute the 'octave', eight lines long and used to present an argument or idea. THe latter part is called the 'sestet' and is a bit more variable (its rhyme scheme could be CDCDCD); it gives a reason or a conclusion or a counter-argument to whatever was in the octave. For example, the octave could be all about how the spitter is ugly and then the sestet could be about how you love her anyway because she's a beast in bed.
Interestingly it was Petrarch who invented the tradition of the 'blazon', where a woman's beauty is broken down and atomised in all its different parts; her eyes are like this and her lips are like that and her ears are beautiful too. That's what Shakespeare is mocking in 'Sonnet 130' above - and what he parodies even more severely in his play Twelfth Night, where Olivia says her beauty "shall be inventoried...as, item, two lips indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one shin, and so forth."
There is also the Spenserian sonnet - essentially the same as the English one, but with the rhyme scheme ABAB, BCBC, CDCD, EE.
Oh yeah - when I was looking around the internet for concise but useful explanations of the sonnet form (as you can see I ended up writing my own), I found the webpage of someone named Suzie. Suzie is a woman from Australia who happens to have written example poems in various different rhyme schemes and meters. Some of them are interesting and some of them are risible, but in any case if you're looking for ideas of how to arrange your poem and you don't want to use a sonnet, check out that link and have a click around. Isn't the internet great? Thanks Suzie!
Good Luck!
This was only intended to be an explanation of one useful type of poetic form. You're welcome to try anything you like, and indeed in the last 150 years poets have started moving outside rigid meters and schemes. But what remains common to them is an adherence to forms of constraint that are different from, or artificial to, ordinary grammar. Poetry is most often defined by form, and being constrained and constricted only gives it more power by putting it in a framework. So take your beautiful bounteous love for the Spitter and her white trash heels and weaponise it into a powerful expression of formal beauty. Then we'll give you free stuff. Good luck!
The sonnet is probably one of the most popular poetic forms in the English language, and its use for love poetry and devotional poetry is almost a cliché. There are various types of it, which I'll mention later, but for now we're concerned with the English or 'Shakespearian' sonnet. This article is constructed so the most relevant information is at the top, and the least relevant at the bottom, so stop reading whenever you like. If you're a pansy.
Basic Structure
The English sonnet consists of three four-line stanzas (called quatrains) that rhyme in an alternating pattern, and then final rhyming couplet. The rhyme scheme is ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, GG - where each letter is a sound in the last word of the line. A rhymes with A and B with B.
Each line is composed in a meter (rhythmic scheme) called iambic pentameter, which means five iambs. An ‘iamb’ is a pair of syllables of which the first is unstressed and the second stressed, like “prefer” or “today” or “before” (as opposed to “tanker”, “trample,” or “nipple”). So in total each line has ten syllables and they follow a regular pattern of unstress, stress, unstress, stress.
Here's Shakespeare's Sonnet 130, which is basically about how his wife is ugly but he loves her anyway. Okay, okay, so it's more complicated than that. What-ever.
You can see the ABAB CDCD etc rhyme scheme in operation here across the four stanzas, and you can also mark the meter: if italics = stressed and plain text = unstressed, the first line comes out as "my mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun". The emphases are in the places you would expect from natural English speech.My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
Tricks With Rhythm
But what if they weren't? If we rearranged the word order, we could, for example, write: "Eyes that are nothing like the sun has she." Not wonderful wording, but look at the first two syllables. The meter ordains that the stress should fall on “that”. But this sounds unnatural to English speakers (I mean, try saying it out loud: “eyes that”). So when you read it you instinctively place the stress on “Eyes”, and the deviance from the meter heightens the declarative effect of the word, which becomes a powerful opening salvo. EYES!
Another good example comes from Milton’s Paradise Lost (book II, line 159). Exiled demons sit on a hill in hell and puzzle fruitlessly over “fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute.” "Fixed fate" is a spondee, ie, a pair of stressed syllables - it sounds wrong to emphasise one over the other. So you have to say them both, and this clogs up and slows down the meter, just as the demons are unable to reason their way past the difficult arguments they face. Apart from clever wording, evocative imagery and well-chosen rhymes, deviance from the meter is one excellent technique for shaping your verse.
Remember that each individual line
need not quite be a sentence self-contained,
But can continue over line divides
'Enjambement" is what the critics call
This method, and it's well smart so it is.
Other Types of Sonnet
Untrustworthy foreign types, that is. The most prominent is the Petrarchan sonnet, which is actually very appropriate for the subject - Petrarch was an Italian noble in the 14th century who saw a woman once in the church and spent the rest of his life writing poems about her without, as far as we know, ever speaking to her. So much for him.
He also used fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, but his rhyme scheme was different: ABBA, ABBA, CDE, CDE. The first two stanzas, named after a famous Swedish band of which Petrarch was a fan, constitute the 'octave', eight lines long and used to present an argument or idea. THe latter part is called the 'sestet' and is a bit more variable (its rhyme scheme could be CDCDCD); it gives a reason or a conclusion or a counter-argument to whatever was in the octave. For example, the octave could be all about how the spitter is ugly and then the sestet could be about how you love her anyway because she's a beast in bed.
Interestingly it was Petrarch who invented the tradition of the 'blazon', where a woman's beauty is broken down and atomised in all its different parts; her eyes are like this and her lips are like that and her ears are beautiful too. That's what Shakespeare is mocking in 'Sonnet 130' above - and what he parodies even more severely in his play Twelfth Night, where Olivia says her beauty "shall be inventoried...as, item, two lips indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one shin, and so forth."
There is also the Spenserian sonnet - essentially the same as the English one, but with the rhyme scheme ABAB, BCBC, CDCD, EE.
Oh yeah - when I was looking around the internet for concise but useful explanations of the sonnet form (as you can see I ended up writing my own), I found the webpage of someone named Suzie. Suzie is a woman from Australia who happens to have written example poems in various different rhyme schemes and meters. Some of them are interesting and some of them are risible, but in any case if you're looking for ideas of how to arrange your poem and you don't want to use a sonnet, check out that link and have a click around. Isn't the internet great? Thanks Suzie!
Good Luck!
This was only intended to be an explanation of one useful type of poetic form. You're welcome to try anything you like, and indeed in the last 150 years poets have started moving outside rigid meters and schemes. But what remains common to them is an adherence to forms of constraint that are different from, or artificial to, ordinary grammar. Poetry is most often defined by form, and being constrained and constricted only gives it more power by putting it in a framework. So take your beautiful bounteous love for the Spitter and her white trash heels and weaponise it into a powerful expression of formal beauty. Then we'll give you free stuff. Good luck!
