How to Write a Sonnet
An Approach to Writing Your Poetry in a Traditional Form
Writing a sonnet-even an Italian or Shakespearean sonnet-- is achievable if you have a draft poem most suitably expressed that way.
There is some creative material that can be powerfully conveyed through the sonnet form. If you have thoughts or images that can be expressed succinctly, opposing ideas or a draft poem with a strong sense of closure, here is an approach to shaping your work into something resembling a sonnet.
1. Read a broad range of sonnets of different types. Most poets in the English-speaking world will have been introduced to Shakespeare’s sonnets, but read Keats and Milton for Petrarchan (Italian) sonnets, and link to sonnet websites for modern variations of the form. As an example, three New Zealand poets who have written sonnets of very different styles and subject matter are James K. Baxter, Ian Wedde and Bernadette Hall. Wide reading will give you a sense of what is possible with your own work. As Barbara Drake commented in Writing Poetry (Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1994), the idea is “to find the most freedom possible within the form.”
2. Decide where the “change” comes in your work, the shift in argument or mood that is the essence of the sonnet. This is sometimes known as the “volta” or turn. Are you raising questions that you will answer? Are you making an observation on which you will provide comment? Do you have a strong, definite closure in mind?
3. Thinking about the change should lead you to some conclusions about the shape of your sonnet. Will a Petrarchan form suit best, or the more free-flowing English (Shakespearean) sonnet with its end-punch? Are you happier with a less traditional approach?
4. Now you need to scan your emerging poem for its metre, and consider rhyme. Traditional sonnets are in rhyming iambic pentameter, and Italian and English varieties have different rhyme schemes. However, you can write longer or shorter lines (although very short lines are not common in sonnets) and you can use any type of rhyme that suits your material. Some writers new to using forms in poetry prefer slant rhyme (approximate rhyme, like “practice” and “ask us”) and internal rather than end-line rhyme.
5. When writing your sonnet, remember that you are first a poet! Don’t let the effort to write in a particular form inhibit the music in your language or your use of metaphor. Does the sonnet contain the images, the subtleties of thought and emotion, that was in your draft material?
6. As with other poems, revise. Test your sonnet against others, but don’t expect them to look the same. As J. Jerome observed in the 1980 Poet’s Handbook (Cincinatti: Writer’s Digest Books), sonnets “are not mathematical exercises but poems reaching for a certain…something just beyond grasp”.
The approach offered here may or may not suit your way of working. In his 1963 collection of essays The Educated Imagination (Toronto: CBC Publications), Northrop Frye observed, “it’s no use telling the poet that he ought to write in a different way so you can understand him better.”
But if you awaken to the possibilities of the sonnet, you may find that many of your poems turn out best in exactly that form.
