The Sonnet

You can't have poetry month without Shakespeare. At least not with me, you can't. So before April slips away let's have a look at the sonnet. The word sonnet means "little song." It originated in Italy but became very popular among English poets, who slightly changed the form. Basically it is fourteen lines, traditionally written in iambic pentameter. The English or Shakespearean sonnet is composed of three quatrains and a final couplet. Its rhyming pattern goes like this: a,b,a,b c,d,c,d e,f,e,f g,g.

So much has been so beautifully said in those mere fourteen lines by great poets like Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley and, of course, Shakespeare. Shakespeare even used the sonnet in his plays. The first fourteen lines of conversation between Romeo and Juliet are a sonnet. I may be the only person in the world that finds that kind of cool.

I'll leave you with this, one of the most famous sonnets by 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:
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometimes 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.