Week 24 Blog 2B: Writing Sonnets

This week you're going to write your third poem for your project, which will be a rough draft of a sonnet.  Here's what you need to know about sonnets:

•What is a sonnet?

  = 14 line poem

  = “little song” in Italian; originated in Italy

  = subject is often ROMANTIC LOVE

•What is an English/Shakespearean sonnet?

  =Fixed structure (three quatrains – abab, cdcd, efef; followed by one couplet – gg

TASK: Write a sonnet about the subject of love. It needs to be 14 lines and should use the rhyme scheme above that we talked about in class. Use the poems we read in class as your models to follow when you write your own. Remember, this is a "write-like" poem, so you should try to write like the authors of the poems below. Your poem should pose a question/situation/problem, a turning point, and a resolution - just like the sonnets did that we read in class. Post your poem in the comment section below, and send to Mr. Sabath via email (peter.sabath@pgcps.org):

Sonnet 18

Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? 


Thou art more lovely and more temperate:


Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
 

And summer's lease hath all too short a date: 


Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,


And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; 


And every fair from fair sometime declines,


By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;


But thy eternal summer shall not fade


Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;


Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,


When in eternal lines to time thou growest: 


So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,


So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

Sonnet 30

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink

Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;

Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink

And rise and sink and rise and sink again;

Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,

Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;

Yet many a man is making friends with death

Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It well may be that in a difficult hour,

Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,

Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,

I might be driven to sell your love for peace,

Or trade the memory of this night for food.

It well may be. But I do not think I would.