The Sonnet
This post is for my online friend Alan, aka Success Warrior. We met on The Blogging Network (now Blogit) and we both have moved on to our own, independent blogs. And to various life challenges. Alan is working on finishing his college degree. And his first assignment this semester is to write a sonnet. He asked, on his blog, for pointers, and I started to comment, realised it was gonna get lengthy, and told him he’d have to come visit my playground here to get the dirt. So, Alan, this is for you.
I am highly amused by the timing of his assignment, because I am actually working on a sonnet cycle at the moment and looked up the rules for Petrarchan, Shakespearean, and Spenserian sonnets last night!
There are three major types of sonnet: Italian (also called Petrarchan because the best-known writer of these was a guy called Petrarch), English (also called Shakespearean because the best-known writer of these was a guy called Shakespeare) and Spenserian (a variant of the English sonnet, called Spenserian because …. you get the idea). There’s also the Pushkin sonnet (guess why), which is completely different from the usual sonnet in both meter and rhyme scheme, so I’m not talking about it here.
All sonnets have fourteen lines (well, okay, except for caudate and curtal sonnets, and we’re not going into those here, either, because they are strange poetic beasts and may be confusing to the novice poet) in the meter called “iambic pentameter.”
An iamb, or iambic foot, is two syllables: the first unstressed, the second stressed. When you get five of them together, it’s called iambic pentameter. So, for a sonnet, each line consists of five iambs — a total of ten syllables, alternating between unstressed and stressed. So the rhythmic feel of the poem is ta-TUM ta-TUM ta-TUM ta-TUM ta-TUM. (It always makes me think of a trotting horse.)
Here’s the first and last lines from one of Milton’s sonnets (“On His Blindness”), so you can get the feel of the meter:
When I consider how my light is spent ….
They also serve who only stand and wait.
There’s one more requirement for a 14-line, iambic pentameter poem to be a sonnet. It has to rhyme. And it’s the rhyme scheme that differentiates the different kinds of sonnets. (Mostly.)
The Shakespearean sonnet rhymes this way: abab cdcd efef gg. You can see that it’s made up of three quatrains (groups of four rhyming lines) and a couplet (set of two rhyming lines). Here’s a pretty well-known one.
The Spenserian sonnet rhymes this way: abab bcbc cdcd ee. Again, three quatrains with a couplet, only this time the rhyme scheme interconnects between quatrains. Here are a few examples.
Now, Petrarch was obviously a complex guy, because the Petrarchan sonnet has two requirements: in addition to its special rhyme scheme, it has an outline — a specific layout, if you will. The Petrarchan sonnet has two sections. The first section of eight lines, called the octave, presents a problem and rhymes thus: abab abab OR abba abba. The second section of six lines, called the sestet, gives the solution to the problem, and rhymes thus: cde cde or cdc cdc. Here are some good examples.
So the basic rules for a sonnet are 14 lines, 10 syllables per line in an unstressed / stressed pattern, and a pre-set rhyme scheme based on which type of sonnet you are constructing.
Sonnets used to be very common and familiar poems, but with the advent of free verse, which threw off the restraints of classical poetry (things like formal structure, meter, and rhyme), the sonnet fell into disuse — it was too “old-fashioned” and “restrictive.”
And while it can be frustrating to write sonnets — you can get stuck on a rhyme, or the meter won’t come right — I have found that they are wonderful for distilling disordered thought into a concise, coherent statement. I will often cast problems into sonnet form, just to get to the meat of the problem and work out the best way to phrase a response.