Three Reasons to Write a Sonnet
Why This Poetry Form May be the Structure Your Draft Writing Needs
Mar 22, 2008
Perhaps you have been experimenting with more formal poetry for a while, or perhaps you are a free verse specialist persuaded (for example, by Catherine Owen’s article on Suite 101) to try writing in poetic forms.
Why should you choose to express your ideas in a sonnet? Here are some possible reasons.
1. Sonnets are versatile. A sonnet requires fourteen lines (although there are longer and shorter versions, such as Gerard Manley Hopkins’ curtal sonnet). Ideally it should have some kind of “change” in it: an argument and response, an answer to the question, or a shift in mood. J. Jerome in the 1980 Poet’s Handbook (Cincinnati: Writer’sDigest) observed that sonnets have a kind of “layering…a tension between forms reflecting tensions in thought or feeling”. Aside from these characteristics, other sonnet-writing rules are flexible.
It is helpful to know the rules so that you understand what you are building on. Traditional sonnet forms are the Petrarchan, with an octave of eight lines and a sestet of six; and the Shakespearean sonnet, often with three four-line quatrains finished with a resounding couplet. Traditional sonnets are in the iambic metre (made up of pairs of unstressed and stressed syllables) and have specific rhyme schemes. Fuller, in his 1972 work The Sonnet(London: Methuen and Co. Ltd.) describes the Petrarchan or Italian sonnet as the “legitimate form”, the Shakespearean or English sonnet as “not quite as interesting or as subtle”, and certain less traditional interpretations as “freak varieties” or “perversions”.
Generations of poets, however, have held a different view. The sonnet is perhaps one of the most experimented with forms. Great sonnets have been written in couplets, as a single poem, or emphasising a visual effect through placement of lines on the page. Sonnets can use any combination of end-line and internal rhyme. You can still write a powerful sonnet without being bound by the Petrarchan or Shakespearean conventions.
2. Sonnets are short, but not too short. Their length makes them ideal for reflecting on intense, brief moments. Religious devotion, romantic love, and celebration of the natural world are traditional themes (although sonnets have been written on almost any theme you can imagine). Writing about Archibald Lampman’s nature poetry, Anne Compton observed that the short lyric and the sonnet “were well suited to the paradox of impressionism—the arrest of the fleeting moment.”
Stories and historical reflections can also be accommodated within the sonnet form, but more commonly as sonnet sequences.
3. Sonnets “grow” out of particular environments.This is the notion of “fit”, that certain environmental or social conditions support the use of particular literary forms. D.M.R. Bentley argues that the Petrarchan sonnet, in its pieces of eight and six lines, was “ecologically suited” to the “patchwork” rural environment of Canadian poets of the Confederating period. The fact that, as Fuller relates, “the Elizabethans used the sonnet to exhaustion” may also have reflected a fit between the form and the environment.
The fruit of your imagination, your raw poetry, may or may not suit the sonnet form. If you listen to your work, hear powerful impressions that can be briefly related, the poem may be trying to tell you something. Make an effort to try and write it as a sonnet, and see what happens. It may be the perfect choice.
