What are you feeling? Use your five senses and a sprinkle of imagination. Now, whatever your topic is, imagine it is real.

“Sunrise on the Bay of Fundy” by William Bradford (1823-1892) Here’s a painting that I had as my desktop background for a while: Can’t find a topic? Just look for a picture or poster you like. A person, a painting, a book, a character, an event, a place, a relationship between two things, and so on. To write a quick sonnet, we need something specific to focus on. The genius of poetry is partially in the ability to convey a lot in a few words and make those few word catchy and attractive to your audience. But, it can also be humorous, unimportant, and topical. Poetry, at its best, is about those great lofty and universal themes like beauty, the meaning of life, and compassion for our fellow human beings.

I’ll take you through a simple guide that can lead to a basic sonnet in 10 minutes at the easy level to one that demonstrates literary mastery at the difficult level. You might write one for any number of reasons: a class assignment, a birthday present, or visions of poetic paradise and posterity. Submit your sonnet for publication to In-Depth Sonnet Guide. The Society of Classical Poets also regularly publishes traditional sonnets by leading poets (and sometimes high school students too). In Shakespeare’s famous “Sonnet 18” someone’s beauty is compared to a summer’s day in the first eight lines and then in the next six lines the poem shifts to the immortality granted to beauty by the power of poetry.įor more examples you may also explore 31 Sonnets: Renaissance to New Millennial, which includes sonnets from long ago to the present. Most commonly a sonnet will have a focused subject that is explored in the first eight lines, then in the next six lines there will be a shift or turn (“volta”) in the poem that sheds new light on the subject or shifts perspective in some fashion.

Real iambic pentameter means five unstressed-stressed units (dah DUM dah DUM dah DUM dah DUM dah DUM): “shall I comPARE thee TO a SUMmer’s DAY?” Each unit may be two syllables, but not always, (“it BRILliantly SOARED” could be counted as two iambs). Beginners may count out 10 syllables per line. The more difficult Petrarchan sonnet rhyme scheme is ABBA ABBA CDE CDE, though there are many varieties of how to organize the scheme in those last six lines. These 14 letters represent the sonnet’s 14 lines and the same letter means those lines rhyme with each other. The most common is the Shakespearean rhyme scheme: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.

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