The Sonnet Workshop

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The Sonnet Workshop
How a sonnet is built, with a walk through Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, four of my own, and a task for you.
Leonard Ashby, Professor Emeritus of English

I taught English literature for forty-one years, the last thirty at a small college where I had the great luck to teach a seminar on the sonnet every spring. I retired in May. My daughter, who thinks I should have a hobby, gave me a modem. So here is the seminar, more or less, for whoever wants it. Pull up a chair. There is no reading list and no exam, though there is homework, and I would be glad to see it.

A sonnet is fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhymed according to one of a few patterns, with a turn of thought somewhere past the middle. That is the whole definition and you may now stop reading. But if you would like to know what those words mean and why the form has lasted seven hundred years, read on. I will try not to lecture. I will fail.

I. The two great forms

The sonnet came out of Italy in the thirteenth century and was perfected there by Petrarch in the fourteenth; it arrived in England in the 1530s and the English promptly altered it to suit their language, which has fewer rhymes than Italian. So there are two main patterns, and you should know both.

The Petrarchan (Italian) sonnet

The Shakespearean (English) sonnet

An octave (eight lines) rhymed ABBAABBA,
then a sestet (six lines) rhymed CDECDE or CDCDCD
(other arrangements are permitted; a final couplet is frowned on).

Only four or five rhyme sounds in all, and the A and B sounds must each be found four times. Easy in Italian. Hard in English.

The turn comes between the octave and the sestet: the octave sets out a problem, a picture, a question; the sestet answers, resolves, or turns it over.

Three quatrains (four lines each) rhymed ABAB CDCD EFEF,
then a couplet rhymed GG.

Seven rhyme sounds, each used only twice. Much kinder to English.

The turn may come at line 9, as in the Italian, or be held back until the couplet, which then lands like a verdict. Shakespeare does both, sometimes in the same poem: a quiet turn at 9 and a snap at 13.

There is also the Spenserian sonnet (ABAB BCBC CDCD EE, linking the quatrains), and there are a great many irregular sonnets by good poets who knew the rules and broke them for a reason. Learn the two above first. Break them later, and know why.

II. Iambic pentameter

An iamb is a two-syllable unit, unstressed then stressed: da-DUM. a-WAY, be-CAUSE, the SUN. Pentameter means five of them to the line. So the line is ten syllables long and goes

da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM

Shall I com-PARE thee TO a SUM-mer's DAY?

Say it aloud and tap the table. You will feel it. It is very close to the natural rhythm of English speech, which is why it has been the main line of English poetry from Chaucer to now, and why a well-made pentameter line sounds like someone talking rather than someone reciting.

Two things students always ask:

Must every foot be an iamb? No, and a poem in which every foot is an iamb sounds like a metronome. The rule is that the line must be felt as iambic pentameter. The commonest liberties: a trochee (DUM-da) in the first foot (ROUGH winds do SHAKE); an extra unstressed syllable at the end, called a feminine ending (to BE or NOT to BE, that IS the QUES-tion); a spondee (DUM-DUM) for weight. Use these as a cook uses salt.

How do I know where the stress falls? You already know. You are a native speaker of English, or a fluent one, and you never say COM-pare or sum-MER. Read the line aloud as if it were prose; the stresses are where they always were. The craft lies in choosing words whose natural stresses fall where the meter wants them, so that the line does not have to be forced.

III. The volta

Volta is Italian for "turn," and it is the sonnet's secret engine. A sonnet is not a description. It is an argument, or a change of mind, or a question and its answer, and the volta is the hinge on which it swings. In the Petrarchan form it comes at line 9, and the poet often announces it with a word: But, Yet, And yet, Then. In the Shakespearean it may come at 9, or at the couplet, or both.

If you remember nothing else from this page, remember this: a sonnet without a turn is fourteen lines of rhymed verse. It may be very pretty. It is not a sonnet. When you write one, ask yourself where it turns, and if it doesn't, find the place where your own mind changed while you were writing, and put the turn there.

IV. A close reading of Sonnet 18

Here is the whole poem. It was printed in 1609 and it has been in the public domain for a very long time. Read it aloud before you read my remarks, and read it aloud again after.

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.

The first quatrain (lines 1-4). The poem opens with a question and answers it at once: shall I compare you to a summer's day? Well, you're better. Note how fast that is; by line 2 the comparison is already found wanting. Lines 3 and 4 give the reasons: summer is rough (the winds), and summer is short (the "lease," a legal word, as though summer had only rented the year and the term is nearly up). Notice too that "temperate" and "date" rhyme; in Shakespeare's day the last syllable of "temperate" was pronounced with a long a, and the rhyme was true. Language moves, and the poem stays where it was.

The second quatrain (lines 5-8). More complaints about summer, but now they widen. The sun ("the eye of heaven") is sometimes too hot and sometimes clouded over: summer cannot even keep its own weather. And then line 7 opens the door on the real subject: every fair from fair sometime declines. Everything beautiful loses its beauty, whether by accident ("chance") or simply by the passing of time ("nature's changing course"). "Untrimm'd" means stripped of ornament, like a ship with its sails taken in. We have come a long way from a pleasant summer's day; we are now talking about mortality.

The volta (line 9). But. There it is. Eight lines of what summer cannot do, and then the turn: thy summer is eternal. The beloved will not fade, will not lose the beauty he or she owns ("owest" is "ownest"), and Death will not get to boast of having taken them. Why not? Line 12 answers: when in eternal lines to time thou growest. "Lines" are lines of verse, this very poem; the beloved is being grafted onto the poem, and will grow as long as the poem is read. (A second meaning of "lines" as lineage, descent, is there too; Shakespeare rarely used a word once when he could use it twice.)

The couplet (lines 13-14). And then the final turn, which is the poem stepping back and pointing at itself. So long as anyone is alive to read, this lives, and this keeps thee alive. Note the audacity. The poet began by offering to compare the beloved to a summer's day, and ends by claiming that the poem, not the summer and not even the beloved, is the thing that lasts. It is a love poem that turns out to be about poetry. Every time you read it, it does what it says: you are the "eyes" of line 13, and you have just given the beloved another minute of life.

The meter. Almost entirely regular, which is unusual for Shakespeare, and which gives the poem its calm. The one strong exception is the first foot of line 3, ROUGH winds, a trochee (or a spondee, if you lean on "winds") that jolts the line exactly where the rough wind arrives. That is not an accident. That is a man who knew where the stresses were and put a gust in the sail.

I have taught this poem perhaps sixty times. I have never once got to the end of the couplet without a small catch in the voice, and I have stopped apologizing for it.

V. Four of my own

A teacher who only teaches the form and never risks it is a swimming coach who stays on the deck. These are mine, written this summer since the modem arrived. I have marked the form of each. They are not Sonnet 18. Nothing is. But they scan, they rhyme, and each one turns, and I offer them to show that the machine still runs.

1. September, from the Porch (Shakespearean; the turn is at line 9 and again at the couplet)

The maples have begun to think of red,
And every morning wears a thinner coat;
The garden, which all summer overfed
On light, now spends the little left afloat.
I sit and watch the light go slant and long
Across the yard I no more have to mow,
And hear, beyond the fence, the school bell's song
That used to call me in. It lets me go.
I taught for forty years the way the sun
Teaches the leaf: by shining, not by speech;
And if a hundred learned, or only one,
What light I had I gave to what I'd reach.
So let the year turn gold, and let me stay
To see how well the maples learned their day.

2. On Being Asked What I Miss (Petrarchan: octave ABBAABBA, sestet CDECDE; the turn at "What then?")

Not chalk, though chalk I miss; nor yet the bell,
Nor Monday's stack of essays on the chair,
Nor corridors of floor wax, nor the air
Of rooms where thirty faces rose and fell
With every point I labored to compel.
I do not miss the meetings. Nor the glare
Of tube light, nor of being asked to bear
The burden of the budget. All is well.
What then? The moment, twice or thrice a year,
When someone in the back, a stubborn boy
Who'd slouched through Milton like a man in chains,
Would sit up, sudden, as a thought came clear,
And I would see him, wordless, take the joy
That no one gave to him, and that remains.

3. Sonnet Written on a Computer (Shakespearean; the turn is at line 9)

My father wrote with ink; his father, quill.
I learned on a machine that struck the page
With little hammers; I can hear it still,
The bell that rang inside its metal cage.
And now, past seventy, I sit and stare
At letters made of light, that never dry,
And send them out into an unseen air
Where, I am told, they wait for passers-by.
This is not paper. It is not the pen.
Yet here the line still breaks at ten; the rhyme
Still comes, or fails to come, and comes again,
And iambs walk their old road one more time.
The instrument is new; the craft is old.
The line is still the line. It still must hold.

4. Margaret, Sweeping (Shakespearean; the turn is at line 9, "But")

She sweeps the porch each morning, though the leaves
Will fall again before the morning's through;
She knows this, and she sweeps, and she believes
In nothing grander than the work to do.
I used to think that poems had to strain
Toward something past the reach of common days,
That meaning was a mountain, not a plain,
And love a summit, not a set of ways.
But forty-seven years of watching her
Have taught me what the sonnets never said:
That constancy is what the mornings were,
And grace is in the porch, and in the bread.
She sweeps. The leaves come down. She sweeps once more.
I have not found a truer metaphor.

Margaret has read the fourth one and says it is "very nice, but the leaves are your job." She is correct, and I have gone out to do them.

VI. Your turn: an exercise

Write a Shakespearean sonnet about an ordinary object in your house. A kettle. A doorstop. The chair nobody sits in. Not love, not death, not the sea; those will get into it anyway if you let the object lead you, and they will get in more honestly than if you aimed at them.

The rules:

Fourteen lines. Ten syllables each, felt as iambic pentameter. Tap the table.
Rhyme ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. True rhymes where you can; a near rhyme is permitted once, and you must be able to say why.
The first eight lines look at the object. Really look. What is it made of, where did it come from, what has it seen?
Line 9 turns. Begin it, if you like, with But or Yet. The last six lines say what the object has made you think, and the couplet says it in one sentence.
Read it aloud to someone. If they laugh in the wrong place, revise.

Send it to me. I will read it with the same care I gave my students for forty-one years, which is to say I will be honest and I will be kind, and if you say so I will post the best of them here, with your first name or none, as you prefer. I have no way to give you a grade any more, and I find I don't miss that at all.

Further reading, on this site: Poems from the Attic · Love Letters from the War (prose, but it has more turns in it than most sonnets) · Women in Science: A Reading List · The Book Club That Actually Reads the Book · Poetry Slam Tuesdays at the Blue Door (a different tradition and a good one) · Latin Lives!

Planned for the winter: a page on Milton's sonnets, and one on Petrarch in the original with a crib, if my Italian holds up.

Readers since July 1999:

(More than ever took the seminar. Make of that what you will.)

[email protected]

Last updated September 22, 1999.
© 1999 Leonard Ashby. The four sonnets in section V are mine; please ask before reprinting them. Sonnet 18 belongs to everyone.