informal talk about forms: the shakespearean sonnet

by Christine Swint

Sonnet LIV
by William Shakespeare

O! HOW much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!
The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odour which doth in it live.
The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumed tincture of the roses,
Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly
When summer’s breath their masked buds discloses:
But, for their virtue only is their show,
They live unwoo’d, and unrespected fade;
Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;
Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made:
And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,
When that shall vade, by verse distils your truth.

This is the sonnet I memorized for my ninth-grade literature class in high school. I understood back then that the poem advised me not to count on mere outward appearances, but returning to the verses as a mature woman, I appreciate even more the message of the rose’s lingering perfume after beauty fades.

The Shakespearean sonnet consists of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter verse, with the following rhyme scheme: abab/cdcd/efef/gg. In other words, there are three quatrains, and a final couplet. Each line has ten syllables, with the stress placed on every other syllable.

In addition to the outward form, within a traditional sonnet the ideas flow in a pattern prescribed by the rhyme. The first three quatrains develop the idea, while the couplet seals the poem with a conclusion.

Shakespeare, like many writers, probably learned about composing a sonnet in school. Before his time, most sonnets were of the Italian variety, known as the Petrarchan sonnet.

Like the original thinker he was, Shakespeare changed the rules to write what suited him and the particular music of the English language (English has fewer rhymes than Romance languages, making the Italian sonnet more restrictive for Anglophones).

After the Bard, other poets took license with the sonnet, John Milton and Edmund Spenser being the most well-known 17th-century poets to make their mark on this famous form.

Although Shakespeare would not be able to recognize today’s sonnets, I think he would approve of the path modern poets have taken with the form. Just as he broke with his Italian predecessors, today’s poets are arranging the fourteen lines in ways to suit our current speech patterns. A fine example is “American Sonnet (10)” by Wanda Coleman.

Coleman varies the line lengths and uses internal rhyme rather than end rhymes. The form of the sonnet is recognizable in the flow of ideas and images, and in the final two lines that seal the poem.

A fun writing exercise for me has been my exploration of bout-rimé sonnets. This is a writing game, started in France as a joke in the seventeenth century, and popularized in England during the Victorian era.

The game is a collaboration between poets. One poet chooses the end words for the sonnet, and everyone writes a sonnet using those words. I’m including two sets of end words for you, a rhyming set and a non-rhyming set for those who eschew rhyme.

The caveat is to use each word in the same order, as an end word, and to only write fourteen lines. Those are the rules of the game!

Rhyming end words: visible, stage, scribble, old age, touching, fingers, fetching, tigers, buzzkill, joy ride, downhill, high tide, harpoon, high noon.

Non-rhyming end words (from Read Write Poem’s random word prompt!): seize, prairie, fade, cartilage, globule, pardon, dollop, collapse, carte blanche, wheeze, ululate, value, tea, -zing!

Two Victorian-era writers of bout-rimé sonnets are Christina Rosetti and Dante Gabriel Rosetti, members of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

Michelle Johnson introduced me to the bout-rimé sonnet. If you’d like to read some of the poems we wrote with her end-line words, check out her post at Poefusion.

Another interesting tidbit about bouts-rimés is a chapbook written by Stephen Cushman. Fashioned Pleasures (Parallel Press) is a collection of bout-rimé sonnets based on the rhyme scheme of Shakespeare’s sonnet number 20. To read about Cushman’s interesting inspiration for the collection, read the article by Kristin Knipschild at the University of Wisconson website.