Give It A Whirl Week 1 (Poetry), Day 6!
WEEKLY THEME: POETRY
DAY 6: SONNET
Definition:
A poem of fourteen lines using any of a number of formal rhyme schemes, typically having ten syllables per line. Traditionally, the fourteen lines of a sonnet consist of an octave (or two quatrains making up a stanza of 8 lines) and a sestet (a stanza of six lines).
Example 1:
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 ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Example 2:
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,
And the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.
Extra weekly challenge:
Pick an overarching theme and use that theme for all your poems we'll be writing this week!
You can write and submit your sonnet any time before the end of the challenge! Please post or link them in the comments!
Links
Introduction to Give It A Whirl
Poetry Day 1: Haiku | Poetry Day 2: Acrostic | Poetry Day 3: Couplet | Poetry Day 4: Limerick | Poetry Day 5: Clerihew