Sonnets!!
I love the sonnets
we’ve been reading in class. I have yet to write a successful one. My favorite
has to be Sir Phillip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella. Sidney uses the normal
sonnet conventions of love and emotion to exemplify the love between the star
lover and his star.
The sonnet was once the most common poetic form written in
18 lines and usually in iambic pentameter. There’s usually a problem or
question (octave) and an answer or solution (sestet). There are many types of
sonnets the most important ones are Petrarch or Italian, and Shakespearean
Sonnets.
The Petrarch Sonnet usually follows one of these forms:
a-b-b-a
a-b-b-a c-d-e-c-d-e
a-b-b-a a-b-b-a c-d-c-c-d-c
This sonnet was invented in the 13th Century in
Italy and was developed by Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374).
The Shakespearean Sonnet, I believe, is the most popular and
widely used now. The form of these sonnets is usually:
a-b-a-b
c-d-c-d e-f-e-f g-g
Shakespeare was the best and no one could out do him so that
made the sonnets big. He was one of the best playwrights and sonnet poets.
Shakespeare’s sonnet collection includes 154 sonnets. Shakespeare also does not
follow conventions as closely as a lot of other poets. He never clearly follows
one pattern to a tee. Shakespeare also turns convention on its head when the
focus of his sonnets is sometimes a young man.
One of my favorite
sonnets is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 1:
From fairest
creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with
self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl, mak'st waste in niggarding:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.
In
this sonnet he speaks about that you create your own hell even when there
should not be one. He follows conventions here and form but it isn’t clearly
about love. One could argue it could be about a lot of people who are making
their own life harder.
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