John Donne wrote a series of love sonnets about his failed marriage. Many of his sonnets are written about the frustration of his rejected love. The great English poet Richard Lovelace wrote hundreds of poems about his lover, making particular use of the sonnet form. The best ideas for sonnets come when an author is trying to relate an experience to their subject matter. Then you can revise it as needed, before putting it back to bed. You may want your sonnet on paper in order to refer to it for a line or two, but initially you can jot it down on your phone, or email it to yourself. On the other hand, a lot of poets find that writing this whole sonnet out before revising it can stifle their creativity.
If you’re having trouble, and feel like the sonnet is lagging, for example, finish up one debate in the sonnet - you may notice in retrospect that you’ve successfully led your readers to one point of view or another, and only need to release the reason why. Release the sonnet in stagesĭelivering out an idea in stages sounds a lot easier than it is, but the biggest mistake a poet can make is to leave five blank pages under the title “Untitled”. If you’re going to write more than one argument in a sonnet, consider making each statement independent - ideally one of the thematic turns you’re taking will more or less stand alone.
This will give you a good outline of what you’re going to need to say, with each idea making its own small, permanent statement. Instead, consider what form you’re going to take, and how you’re going to arrange your ideas into the sonnet. Once the argument is defined, it helps to put your message on the back burner. The argument of a sonnet is just an idea, or even a single phrase, and it’s at the heart of every meaningful sonnet. When you’ve identified it, you will always have something real, small, and manageable in mind as you craft your most important lines - the ones comprising your argument. What do you want to accomplish in the fourteen lines you’re given? You need to pick a single message - and make that your central argument. As a beginner, it’s almost impossible to write a sonnet addressing every subject you might want to. One of the most tricky parts of writing one is coloring in that complex canvas often with just one overwhelming idea. BCDD, for example, is a typical variation. However, what you can’t do is repeat it the way you did in the octave. This is when the poem does well-according to traditional rules, anyway-to get more advanced and interesting. Then, in the third quatrain, or sestet, called the sestet, you start to vary the rhyme scheme. You start out with an ABAB rhyme scheme, and if you’re writing in iambic pentameter, that means that each half line should have ten syllables and the first line of the next pair should have eight syllables. Change your approach gracefully in the quatrainsįor the first two quatrains (octave), it’s important that your format be consistent. Shakespearean sonnets traditionally have the volta at the ninth line, when the rhyme shifts, and then a couplet at the end, to finish the poem. A Shakespearean sonnet on the other hand, was created by the Italian poet Petrarch and has a ABBAABBA CDCDCD, with an 8 line stanza and a 6 line stanza. Start with a simple sonnet structureĪ Shakespearean or English sonnet uses a rhyme scheme ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. This is another way you can subvert or play with tropes - only a quatrain is limited to the concept of two turns. A poem can have any number of turns, depending on how many times you want to turn that idea. The two elements that a sonnet needs, however, are a “turn” (volta) and a “resolution.” You want to organize your idea into one of these two categories, so that you end up with a line that is either pivoting from something, or resolving from something.
With that in mind, it’s time to analyze how to write a sonnet.
These turns are both essential to the narrative experience of the poem. A sonnet should generally also have two “turns” or “twists,” in the sense that the poem should quickly establish a meaning while also undermining that meaning. These three parts can go in any order, regardless of which of the three lines they end on. After that, a sonnet should offer a “resolution,” which can cover the rest of the poem. The level to which this problem is resolved is called the “climax”. This problem can sometimes be metaphorical, but it must exist within the larger context of the world.