Sonnets: Exploring Student Creativity and Poetic Forms
Sonnets, with their rich history and structured form, offer a unique avenue for students to express themselves creatively. Originating from the Italian word "sonetto," meaning "little song," sonnets are fourteen-line poems that adhere to specific rhyme schemes and structures. While intimidating at first glance, the sonnet form can be a powerful tool for exploring complex emotions, ideas, and perspectives.
Understanding the Sonnet Form
Before delving into student examples, it's essential to understand the basic sonnet types:
Italian (Petrarchan) Sonnet: This form typically consists of an octave (eight lines) that presents a problem or idea, followed by a volta (turn) and a sestet (six lines) that offers a resolution or reflection.
English (Shakespearean) Sonnet: This form is characterized by three quatrains (four-line stanzas) that develop a theme or argument, followed by a couplet (two-line stanza) that provides a conclusion or twist.
Spenserian Sonnet: Similar to the Shakespearean sonnet, the Spenserian sonnet also has three quatrains and a couplet, but it employs a different rhyme scheme that links the quatrains together.
Read also: Examples of Ethical Dilemmas
Student Sonnets: A Glimpse into Diverse Perspectives
One assignment tasked students with writing sonnets "from a perspective"-animal, object, or a point in time. The results were diverse and imaginative, showcasing the students' ability to embody different viewpoints through the sonnet form.
Some students embraced the animal perspective, crafting adorable sonnets that captured the essence of their chosen creatures. Others focused on objects, imbuing inanimate items with personality and voice. A particularly insightful set of sonnets explored the students' evolving perspectives, contrasting their past beliefs with their present understanding. These sonnets demonstrate the power of poetry to facilitate self-reflection and personal growth.
Shakespearean Insults: A Creative Challenge
Another interesting assignment involves crafting an original sonnet aimed at insulting a chosen target, utilizing language reminiscent of Shakespearean times. This exercise encourages students to delve into the rich vocabulary of the Elizabethan era, employing insults crafted from Shakespearean Insult Kits and incorporating words coined by the Bard himself. This activity not only enhances language skills but also fosters creativity and humor within the constraints of the sonnet form. It is important to introduce the nature of the conflict, gripe, problem, situation in the first four lines. Develop this conflict, gripe, problem, situation etc. using at least 4 insults created from the Shakespearean Insult Kit. Include a minimum of 5 words that Shakespeare “coined” or invented, which we still use today.
Analyzing Shakespeare's Sonnets: A Deeper Dive
To further understand the sonnet form, it's helpful to analyze examples from the master himself, William Shakespeare. While numerous lists of "Top Ten" Shakespearean sonnets exist, there is often consensus on numbers 18, 116, and 130, with number 29 frequently included as well.
Sonnet 18: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
This sonnet takes a more traditional approach to comparing "thee"-likely the poet's love interest-to the pleasant aspects of nature. This time, the poet's love interest is even more lovely than a summer's day! But the poet is talking about more here than simply his love interest's looks: he's talking about her youth. Here's how we know that: the poet mentions how summer is too short, how nature changes course, and how that which is "fair" declines as time passes. The poet is talking about how, as time passes, we grow old! If you want to think about youth and age in terms of seasons like the poet does, you could associate youth with summer, and aging with the transition into fall and winter as the earth grows cold and the leaves fall from the trees. But! At the beginning of the third quatrain, the poet makes use of a volta: "But thy eternal summer shall not fade." In the second section of the sonnet, the poet associates his love interest's youthfulness with more than just age and appearance. These things, the poet seems to say, can transcend the passing of time because they are a way of being, rather than a way of looking.
Read also: Improving Student Dialogue
Sonnet 116: "Let me not to the marriage of true minds"
This sonnet forthrightly celebrates love's perseverance in the face of adversity. Sonnet 116 represents Shakespeare in his prime and at his best. It celebrates love’s perseverance in the face of adversity.
Sonnet 130: "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun"
The poet isn't making these comparisons in a complementary way. In fact, he's claiming that his mistress's beauty is nothing like the bright sun, the red rose, and the white snow! But then the volta happens in the couplet. In a sonnet, a volta is the turn, or the moment where the poet shifts his topic. In the three quatrains, the poet sticks to that theme: his lady love's beauty pales in comparison to the natural beauties he observes around him. When we get to the couplet, however, the tone shifts abruptly with the use of the phrase, "And yet." Even though his mistress's eyes don't shine like the sun and her lips aren't as red as a rose, the poet still finds her rare and beautiful anyway.
Shakespeare's point in this sonnet isn't really about his mistress at all: it's a satire about the false, idealized image of feminine beauty often portrayed in sonnets during the Elizabethan Era. Shakespeare is basically making fun of this tendency to use the sonnet to laud an impossible and unattainable image of feminine beauty by painting a realistic picture of his mistress and emphasizing that he loves her the way that she is.
Analyzing Other Sonnets
Sonnet 29: In this poem, Shakespeare uses the octet to present the conflict.
Sonnet 55: Writing again to the Fair Youth, Shakespeare describes how written words-like those in this poem!-are far more effective at preserving things as time passes than physical, human-built monuments. And, what, exactly, is the specific “thing” that his poem is preserving? Shakespeare exaggerates his memory of the youth by juxtaposing it with descriptions of strong, durable human-made things that will crumble and decay over time. Marble, gilded monuments of princes, stone and statues, and the work of masonry will all fail to outlive the poet’s memory of the youth.
Read also: Crafting Your High School Resume Objective
Sonnet 97: The poem is written as if making a complaint to the sun for luring the poet outside without a cloak with the promise of a beautiful day only to disappear behind rainclouds and leaving him soaked to the bone. Note how in this poem Shakespeare exhausts all three quartets in presenting the problem while delaying resolution until the closing couplet.
Sonnets 61/62: These two sonnets were clearly intended to be read as one poem insofar that the first, taken by itself, is unresolved and ends in a most unsatisfying manner. The second poem, without the context of the first, is incomprehensible. The first sonnet introduces the observation that all things wear out and decay. Other examples of double (or closely-paired) sonnets are 27/28, 50/51, 57/58, 67/68, 69/70, 82/83, 88/89, & 135/136.
Sonnet 73: This poem has been interpreted in a variety of ways. The autumnal descriptions in the opening quartet are among the most vivid and poignant in all of Shakespeare's writings. The fourth line is particularly striking as it presents the double image of "ruined choirs" as both the leafless boughs in which the birds once sang and as the once-consecrated spaces ("choirs") of ruined churches and abbeys wherein human voices once sang hymns of praise.
Sonnet 41: Shakespeare struggles to articulate worthy praise of the youth because the praise he would give to the youth has already been written in the past about others from history.
Sonnet 40: The poet, in the outrageous, twisted logic of this sonnet, comes to the conclusion that when the one he loves turns on him and berates and belittles him for his many faults, true love requires him to take his lover's part and argue on behalf of the prosecution by giving self-incriminating testimony including revealing faults previously known only to himself!
Sonnet 61: The poet, separated from the one he loves, finds the normal cycle of life reversed as daylight, with its laborious distractions, forces him to look at things he has no interest in. It is only at night, lying in the darkness with his eyes closed, that he is able to clearly see his love in his mind's eye.
Beyond Shakespeare: Exploring Other Sonnet Masters
While Shakespeare is undoubtedly the most famous sonneteer, other poets have also made significant contributions to the form. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "How Do I Love Thee?" offers a woman's perspective on love, exploring the depths and extremes of her affection. Edmund Spenser's Spenserian sonnets, such as those from Amoretti, delve into themes of love, beauty, and immortality. John Milton's "On His Blindness" is a poignant reflection on faith, service, and acceptance in the face of adversity. Edna St. Vincent Millay's "What My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why" takes a more modern approach, musing on lost loves and the fleeting nature of memory. And Billy Collins's "Sonnet" offers a contemporary and accessible take on the traditional form.
Resources for Further Exploration
For those interested in delving deeper into the world of sonnets, several resources are available:
The Poetry Foundation: This website offers a wealth of information on poetry, including sonnets, with free access to poems, articles, and biographies.
Shakespeare's Sonnets: This online resource provides the full text of Shakespeare's sonnets with descriptive commentary, offering a comprehensive analysis of each poem.
The Norton Anthology of Poetry: This anthology traces the history of sonnets across five hundred years, analyzing the major figures and events that have shaped the form.
Pop Sonnets by Harry Benedict: This book reimagines classic pop songs as Shakespearean sonnets, offering a humorous and accessible entry point to the form.
Shakespeare's Sonnets, Retold by Ryan Tressel: This book rewrites Shakespeare's sonnets using modern language while maintaining the original rhythm and rhyme schemes, making them more relatable for contemporary readers.
tags: #examples #of #student #written #sonnets
