Task 5: Your First SONNET

So many of you have either cracked this now, or, if you haven't then you have ALMOST done so.

I am REALLY very impressed. Best of all, some of you are managing to do so without sacrificing the power of your poetry itself.

This is the real challenge: a synthesis of CONTENT (choice of language and what it is about) and FORM (rhyme, rhythm etc.). In fact, you can look at it mathematically:

powerful CONTENT + disciplined FORM = effective POETRY

Please check the podcasts for an analysis of your efforts this week.


Now for this week's task - and it's a DIFFICULT one.

These are the rules of the English (or Shakespearean) SONNET:

1. It must be written in IAMBIC PENTAMETER (i.e. x5 dee-DUMs)
2. It will be 14 lines long, and consist of x3 quatrains and x1 final couplet
3. It will have a strict rhyme scheme (abab cdcd efef gg)

You should, by now, be familiar with the rules of IAMBIC PENTAMETER.

As for writing in three quatrains, well you have all written ONE quatrain (in both Task 3 and Task 4), so it is just a question of writing three different ones of these, which link together in subject matter to form ONE poem - a poem which is concluded by a couplet (i.e. two, rhyming lines).

And as for the RHYME scheme, I am sure you will be fine with this.

The challenge is putting all these things TOGETHER! (Click HERE if you want to find out some more tips on the building blocks of sonnets.)

And what should your sonnet be about? Well...

You have now seen The Glass Menagerie. You should choose ONE character from the play, and write a monologue/soliloquy of their thoughts. In other words, speaking as if you ARE your chosen character, you write a sonnet (in the 1st person) expressing your thoughts and feelings at the end of the play.

Simply call your poem Jim OR Tom OR Laura OR Amanda.

Here is my attempt:

Tom

She worked me like a puppet, string by string.
(A mother should not seize this much control.)
My inclinations did not mean a thing -
The Perfect Son, my mandatory role.
A tyrant in a dress, she tore apart
The family she claimed to hold so dear;
Her autocratic, suffocating heart
Left son and daughter helpless in their fear.
But daughter crumbles, crushed within her grip,
Incapable of any sort of fight,
While Shakespeare imitates his father's trip,
Pursues the distant moon and says goodnight.
I wish I could go back, but time is dead,
Just like the family within my head.