A New Sonnet

So I want to kick it old school for a bit and go into a brief history and culture lesson. Many of you are aspiring English teachers and I feel we spend some time discussing something tried and true, the sonnet. Now if some of you despise the sonnet, now is the time to embrace it truly.

The facts:
The sonnet began in Italy
There are several types of sonnets (we won't go over them all)
What remains similar among them all is:
14 lines
Traditionally Iambic pentameter


So any other rules you have learned, like rhyming couplets or an octave into a sestet, is not standard among all sonnets

There are petrarch sonnets
Donte invented a type of sonnet
Shakespeare helped create the Elizabethan sonnet.

They all have different rhyme schemes. Italians were less addicted to iambic pentameter. Some thought you lumped eight lines together (octave) and then six (sestet). Some thought you lumped 12 together and then had an ending couplet. Some thought the whole thing was couplets.

Sonnets are complicated. However, I hope to break it down for you.

I want to focus us on the fourteen lines. Convention dictates that the sonnet has two parts. In one part (that is either 8 lines or 12 lines) the situation is put before the reader as a problem. Normally it is an issue of love. The second part (either the ending couplet or the sestet at the end) is full of resolution to this problem. It puts a bow on the poem.

Here is a very user friendly sonnet that will allow me to give you an example. Remember Feel First always. The goal is to enjoy the poem more than it is to understand the poem:

Sonnet
Billy Collins

All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,
and after this one just a dozen
to launch a little ship on love's storm-tossed seas,
then only ten more left like rows of beans.
How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan
and insist the iambic bongos must be played
and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,
one for every station of the cross.

But hang on here wile we make the turn
into the final six where all will be resolved,
where longing and heartache will find an end,
where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,
take off those crazy medieval tights,
blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.

A sonnet about sonnets! In contemporary tongue! English teachers, I seriously recommend Billy in your classrooms. He helps a lot.

So let us break it down. The first 8 lines (I broke it into two stanzas so you could see it, it normally is all together) set forward the issue, we are talking about sonnets. However, the final six give us the turn in which the author tells Petrarch (a founding father of sonnets) to stop writing love poems and go be in love with Laura, his crush.

A fun poem, but this is just the beginning. We have surface level analysis here. Next week we revisit sonnets and look at metrical feet!

TLDR: Sonnets have lots of forms, rhyme schemes, and metrical preferences. They all have 14 lines, in which they lay out a problem in the first 8 or 12 lines and then resolve the problem in the final 6 or 2 lines.