Sonnets

The introduction to sonnets offered in class has been the key I’ve been desperately hoping for from this class. In all honesty my prior knowledge of poetry was rather minimal. I’ve always been a poetry enthusiast, beginning in fourth grade with Shel Silverstein. And although in the past few years I have began to greatly enjoy formal and stylistic poetry, I had no direct knowledge of the rigor which is required in their creation. Recently I tested the waters by writing a ghosted pantoum. It was difficult, yet I found its structure provided a clearer flow to the poem overall. So when the idea of writing a sonnet was proposed in class, naturally I was all for it. But when I looked at the contents of a proper sonnet I was truly shocked. I had always thought Shakespeare’s writing was genius, yet I never appreciated how truly difficult the sonnet style of poetry is. Naturally when I decided to dive in to writing my own sonnet, its difficulty was astounding. It wasn’t the rhyme scheme which produced any problems; personally I’ve found it’s far easier for me to write in rhyme as opposed to not rhyming. The true test was the task of utilizing meter. The concept of meter seems simple, but when broken down, I was shocked how many words wouldn’t sound properly in iambic pentameter. For the most part I was forced into using single syllable words, because anything larger didn’t seem to work. In my final draft of the sonnet I completely gave up on meter, because I couldn’t produce the quality I desired. The next challenging task, although not nearly as bad as meter, was producing ten syllables a line. I found that a ten syllable line was just slightly longer than I am comfortable with, so for the most part I was producing only eight syllables. Then I would try to fill in words, and I would produce too many syllables. It was rather frustrating, yet the toil which this poem entailed has only proved to make it one of my most cherished poems. I feel that poetry which one labors over is far more rewarding then a poem just slapped together. Therefore I look forward to dabbling further in form.
Daniel Pilla