Formal Friday: The Sonnet!

Oh man, this is going to take a while.

You write a sonnet in lines of iambic pentameter. Remember, an iamb is an unstressed syllable plus a stressed syllable, and pentameter means there's five iambs / ten syllables. Like this Anne Bradstreet line (stressed syllables highlighted.)

"If ever two were one, than surely we."

A sonnet has fourteen lines, and there are a few different ways the rhyme scheme can go. If you do the oldest kind of sonnet, the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet (named after Petrarca, who wrote lots of these), the first eight lines go like this: abba abba. There's a lot of different ways the last six lines can go: cddcdd, cdecde, cdcdcd, or even cddcee or cddccd.

Just in case you have no idea what those letters mean, I'll give you an example of a Petrachan sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, so you can see how the letters represent the rhyme scheme. The last six lines here are cdcdcd.

My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!

And yet they seem alive and quivering

Against my tremulous hands which loose the string

And let them drop down on my knee tonight.

This said—he wished to have me in his sight

Once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring

To come and touch my hand. . . a simple thing,

Yes I wept for it—this . . . the paper's light. . .

Said, Dear, I love thee; and I sank and quailed

As if God's future thundered on my past.

This said, I am thine—and so its ink has paled

With lying at my heart that beat too fast.

And this . . . 0 Love, thy words have ill availed

If, what this said, I dared repeat at last!

Petrarchan sonnets are hard because you have to come up with so many words with the same rhyme in the first eight lines. The English or Shakespearean sonnet is easier. It goes abab cdcd efef gg. 

I like these better, because the final two lines sounds so definitive. Here's my favorite sonnet of all time, Shakespeare's 73rd, and it wouldn't pack such a punch if it didn't end on a rhyming couplet.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by. 

This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

But wait, there's more! You can do a terza rima sonnet, that goes aba bcb cdc ded ee. This is going to give you a feeling of continuity all the way through. I posted an example by Robert Frost a couple of weeks ago (scroll down).

And there's the blues sonnet! So American! Write one of these when you've got something good to complain about. The capital letters mean the whole line actually repeats (maybe with a little variation), just like you'd expect in blues: AAa BBb CCc DDd EE.

(If you aren't familiar with a lot of blues songs, I bet you still know "Roadhouse Blues" by the Doors.

"Well, I woke up this morning, I got myself a beer 

Well, I woke up this morning, and I got myself a beer
The future's uncertain, and the end is always near.")

Oh, and Spenserian sonnets go like this: abab bcbc cdc dee. I didn't really like Edmund Spenser when I read him in college, but it was a long time ago. Maybe I should give it another go.

OK, so that's all about form. But here's what I didn't know when I first started trying to write sonnets. They're usually rhetorical, or making an argument for something. At some point, you get a big shift in thinking (called the volta.) Usually this is around line nine, but it varies.

This is a first draft of a sonnet I wrote yesterday. It's very rough--the meter's not even right yet! I'll take it down after a few days, because who knows, when it's shaped up I might want to publish it somewhere. Or I might want to throw it away, in which case, I'll also want it down. The volta or shift is really obvious at line nine.

(poem removed)

This next poem I wrote isn't really a sonnet like I first thought. In fact, it's only thirteen lines long, which I didn't even notice until after it was published in Antioch Review a few years ago (in their curiously named "All Fiction Issue.")

Just So You Know

The thing about the town was everyone

would walk around with these big name tags on.

Instead of names, they'd written info down...

like, I still can't believe my mom is gone,

or, Feel like crap since my mastectomy,

or, Picked last for the team in boys' P.E.

You didn't take rude comments personally

from Laid off after twelve years at G.E.

You saw somebody trip, you didn't smirk.

You didn't bitch about the bitch at work

or honk a guy for driving like a jerk.

You knew there was some kind of story there.

You always know some kind of story's there.


Form-wise, that's kind of a monstrosity: aaaa bbbb ccc dd. But I still like it OK. The form narrows down a little into a point. It would be crazy and cool (though hard) to write one that did that more deliberately and was 14 lines: aaaaa bbbb ccc dd. The "Donovan sonnet" or "funnel sonnet"! Feel free to use that.

Honestly, with form, you can do whatever you want as long as you're sort of consistent. And by the way, and if you write a poem that sort of argues something, and it's 14 lines long, you can probably get away with calling it a modern sonnet even if it doesn't meter or rhyme, if that's the kind of thing you're into.