I went to the first of three nights of “conversation” about sonnets at the East Greenbush Library. Sounded like a good time – you may remember that I attempted to do a daily sonnet during last year’s National Poetry Writing Month. It wasn’t easy or always possible.
A sonnet of fourteen lines is four plus haiku which, when you think about it, wouldn’t be all that hard to come up with, although sonnets traditionally have more syllables or meters in them. Sonnets may also have rhyming schemes and have a history of having a first idea in the beginning eight lines, and then a resolution in the remaining six, often with a dollop of summary or zinger in the last two lines.
In any case, three nights about sonnets.
The teacher, an esteemed retired high school teacher begins with:
Humans are at their best when working within a restraint.
Quickly, I wrote that down.
We began listening to sonnets by Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins and Petrarch and Wordsworth and others. These fourteen line gems of description and feeling and ideas, with rhymes, often with impeccable meter. I am usually impressed with the ease of reading Shakespeare aloud and it was true for most of the poems we looked at.
What Petrarch had started in the 14th century, others had seized as a form to shape their own ideas and words.
Wordsworth wrote:
Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room;
And hermit are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Ait blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth the prison, into which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, ‘t was pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.
So the next time someone sniffs at my squares or whatever I’m doing in fabric or haiku or anything else I’m doing, I think I’ll just look them in the eye and quote them a fair bit of sonnet…
