The Sonnet

The SONNET is a strict literary form. It evolved from Petrarch, an Italian of the Renaissance who wrote these poems to his great love, Laura. Shakespeare, upon traveling to Italy, discovered the complex simplicity of these poems and transferred them to Elizabethan England. The Shakespearean sonnet uses a definite RHYME SCHEME to make its point.

Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets. The first 17 of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets have been traditionally believed to be addressed to a young and beautiful man of social status - the gender of the subject is clear from several of the sonnets in the series. They are all concerned with encouraging the subject to marry and have children to reproduce his beauty and they achieve this with various direct and metaphorical pleas. The next 109 sonnets (18-126) cover a wide variety of personal subjects and Petrarchan themes and include his very best examples. Sonnets 127-133 and 147-152 cover the subject of The Dark Lady – a beautiful negro woman by whom the author experiences wildly different emotions of lust and self-loathing. The remainder of the sonnets are a mixture of autobiography and poems about growing old and dying. As you can see, Shakespeare’s sonnets trace his life.

18

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 dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

How to Attack a Sonnet:

1.      Count the number of lines:___ Count the number of syllables per line:___

2.      Therefore, a SONNET has a total of ___ syllables.

3.      The “endmarks” determine a sonnet’s thoughts. What are they?

      __________  _________  __________  __________  __________

4.      A Shakespearean SONNET is introduced by the “hypothesis”, followed by the “thesis”, and concluded in the “resolution” in the couplet. What are three thoughts that explicate this poem?

      A)

 

      B)

 

      C)

 

5.      Now, let us observe the mechanics of a SONNET. As you read the first line softly to yourself, try to listen for the stressed and unstressed syllables. Stresses syllables are “accented” (    ) and unstressed are “unaccented” (    ). METER is determined by the pattern of accented and unaccented syllables. An IAMB is a pattern of one soft followed by one hard syllable. Thus, how many IAMBS make up each line in a Shakespearean SONNET? ___

6.      The RHYME SCHEME of the sonnet is ______   ______   ______   ___.

7.      Now, let us take apart the meaning of this SONNET:

      A) How does his love compare to a summer’s day?

 

      B) What does he mean by Summer’s lease? How does his love compare to it?

 

      C) What is the “eye of heaven”? What literary element  is he making use of? What other literary element is used in this thought?

 

      D) What is he trying to say about how his love compares to the “eye of heaven”?

 

      E) What is “nature’s changing course”? What statement is he making about it?

 

      F) “When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st” suggests what? How does it relate to the “conclusion”?

 

      G) In you own words, what is this poem about? What is its tone and theme?