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Writing Poetry
Sonnet Workshop: A Taste of Tears
How to write a sonnet. Includes lesson, tips, assignment, and a chance to pick apart the teacher’s sonnet!
The Sonnet
What is a sonnet? A sonnet is a poem or stanza consisting of 14 lines of iambic (ta TUM) pentameter (5 feet):
ta TUM — ta TUM — ta TUM — ta TUM — ta TUM
There are several classical rhyme schemes associated with sonnets; thus you have the “Petrarchan Sonnet” (also known as the “Italian Sonnet”), the Shakespearian Sonnet, the Miltonian, Wordsworthian, Spenserian, and so on. Study hard, and perhaps one day you can invent your own!
We’re going to start this lesson with the popular and well-known Shakespearian Sonnet. It consists of three alternately rhymed quatrains (verses of four lines each), and a couplet (verse of two lines), rhymed ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Here’s an example (Shakespeare’s 116th Sonnet):
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no; it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken…
