Poetic forms. A type of poem structure I chose to write about is a “sonnet” because my four years of high school we had a unit, a unit on one of Shakespeare’s books and well, I decided, why not do an investigation on something that bothered me so much? A sonnet means “little song”. The sonnet became a fixed poetic form used in Renaissance Italy and Elizabethen English (which are both eras), that consists of 14 lines. Sonnets follow a specific rhyming scheme and it goes “ a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g” the last two lines are a rhyming couplet.
A sonnet that is famous, that I kind of like is “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summers Day” aka sonnet 18, by William Shakespeare 1608:
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 dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
I like sonnets only because they are the most interesting part in a Shakespearean book, not that I’m “dissing” his books. I just find it to hold the most interest for me. The poem starts off adoring the person, and says that they are more lovely and more temperate than a summer’s day. The poet then lists things that are negative about summer like it being too short, that it shines too hot, but the beauty of the erson lasts forever unlike the best summer day. He puts his love’s beauty into the form of poetry, the poet is preserving it forever by the power of his written words. Poems like these come in handy when you’re self esteem is at an all-time low, on Valentines day or even when you’re in the mood to read a poem about love in the Elizabethan era.
