Writing a Sonnett   by Nick Cash

The first time I wrote a sonnet was in a Shakespeare class my senior year of high school. We read a few by Shakespeare and some from other people (I think one was Robert Frost, a great poet.) We then leaned the structure of sonnet. There are a few different ways you can do them, but they're all 14 lines long and in iambic pentameter--this means there are ten syllables in each line, one unstressed, the next stressed and so on. If you think that sounds hard, try writing an entire play in it; all of Shakespeare's plays were written in iambic pentameter. 

The rhyme scheme is the same for all as well: a-b-a-b, until the last two lines. They are a couplet, which means they rhyme with each other. The content is what differs from version to version. 

Here is the one we learned: First eight lines are about one idea, love, for instance, and the greatness of being in love. The next four lines are slightly contradictory, possible showing fear or hesitance toward the idea talked about in the first eight lines. Finally, my favorite part, the couplet. This goes back to the feeling you have in the first eight lines, and in my example, how great being in love is. This is the part that sums everything up, a resolution.

Like all forms of writing, sonnets can be funny or serious, happy or sad, about people or feelings. You should have heard some of my classmates poems, some of them were really funny. But I took my influence and even word choice straight from Shakespeare and it really gave it a classic feel to it. I've experimented with sonnets since I wrote that, but it is not the easiest form of poetry to write. It takes a lot of thought to come up with things to fit in a ten syllable line. But you can cheat, I assure you--Shakespeare did. Make up words, make up tenses, and make good use of that apostrophe to shorten words up.