Copying the Bard

Over the years, I have had a number of sonnets published. Since my basic model has always been the classic “Shakespearean” sonnet, I thought it might be of interest to readers for me to dissect the form and make my own brief comments upon it.

Actually, I find that Shakespeare’s own sonnets don’t thrill me much anymore. Recently, I re-read his famous collection of 154 sonnets (pictured above) and found myself, frankly, underwhelmed. I find I can still read some of his plays with delight (which of course have a great sense of story to them, as well as being couched in stirring language). But his sonnets I find are often too idiosyncratic in theme to interest me now, and even the word order is often too convoluted to satisfy my twenty-first century ear.

But the form of the Shakespearean sonnet still enthralls me. And it was the form that was drummed into me (again and again!) as I re-read those 154 sonnets recently. Let me quote for you a typical example (Sonnet 71) and then I’ll briefly deconstruct it.

SONNET 71 (by William Shakespeare)

No longer mourn for me when I am dead

Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell

Give warning to the world that I am fled

From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell

Nay, if you read this line, remember not

The hand that writ it, for I love you so

That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot

If thinking on me then should make you woe.

O, if, I say, you look upon this verse,

When I, perhaps, compounded am with clay,

Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,

But let your love even with my life decay;

    Lest the wise world should look into your moan,

    And mock you with me after I am gone.

The first thing to notice is that it has exactly fourteen lines, as sonnets almost always do. But the structure is much more formalised than just the number of lines. Each line has ten syllables, and those ten syllables are generally arranged in five pairs of unstressed-stressed syllables, which means the lines are (formally) lines of Iambic pentameter. Actually, this stress pattern is not followed slavishly by Shakespeare, or by any other sonnet writer. He lets words and phrases have their own natural stresses so that the “unstressed-stressed” pattern quite often disappears for a moment and then returns.

There is also a subdivision of the whole sonnet into four distinct parts, as is typical in a Shakespearean sonnet. There are three four-line “quatrains” followed by a final two-line “couplet”. The three quatrains all feature alternating rhyming lines in the pattern A-B-A-B. The final couplet has two lines that rhyme with each other. You can also note that the couplet not only rounds out the theme of the whole sonnet, but adds its own new point while doing it, which again is typical of the Shakespearean sonnet form. They like to end with a bang.

But what thrills me about the form—and what has thrilled so many other poets over the past four hundred years—is that this fourteen-line structure is so incredibly versatile. It’s like a matrix capable of being infused with infinite variety, depending on the theme and word-choice of the poet. You can write a sonnet about just about anything! A few weeks ago I shared with you a poem of mine called “Kangaroo Sonnet”. In that blog I was more concerned with the way the topic (kangaroos) was already set up in the mind of a reader by past experiences. Let me now share that sonnet with you again. But this time notice the sonnet form: the fourteen lines; the ten syllables of every line; the three quatrains with the rhyming pattern A-B-A-B; the end rhyming couplet (with its final image). But most of all notice how a four-hundred-year-old form gave me a “matrix” I could work with in the 21^st century on the other side of the planet! That’s why I’m so thankful to Mr Shakespeare.

KANGAROO SONNET

They are—at first—unseen, just like statues

and as grey-brown as the eucalypt trunks.

But then they spring into action, these ’roos

rousing the forest with their thumps and thunks.

Most of their movement is flight; they barely

touch ground—instead they are bouncing, bounding

between trees, through blank intervals of air:

leaves fly—dust dances—amidst the pounding.

And then the action telescopes away

into the distance. The great disturbance

recedes like a train on a lazy day

and the bush unbends from its perturbance.

There is nothing left but some broken sticks

and some leaves, swinging, from those giant kicks.

“Kangaroo Sonnet”© Peter Friend. First published by the NSW Dept. of Educ. in The School Magazine (Touchdown, November 2010)