Sonnet

The sonnet has gone though so much change during its time as a poetry form. Although the form gives the writer so much freedom in its fourteen lines, most younger students look at the form and day it is difficult and constricting. That seems to change as they develop a more literary understanding mind where they understand the form actually invites “close engagement, and that engagement often becomes a kind of dialogue with its past and present uses and contradictions” (Hacker 297) . The form has been around for about 500 years, although it didn’t come to America until the end of the eighteenth century. During all this time the form went through many faces to get to the point it is known for today. It was in early thirteenth century Italy where the fourteen line model originated, the poem was actually meant to be sung. During this time the sonnet was also written using hendecasyllabic verse which is lines with 11 syllables. The rhyme is not as regularly stressed as in the more modern form where they use iambic pentameter. The rhyme used makes the poem look like a conversation or argument, the rhyme divides the poem into two parts. The first eight lines being a premise set out in the octave and the rest contradicting or giving proof — it also using the “if . . . then” structure (Hacker 299). You can see this in William Wordsworth’s sonnet. In the first eight lines he is describing the scene, in the rest of the poem he is giving proof of the tone he established the scene to have. You see this shift from description to the narrator’s personal thoughts in the ninth line where he states “no prison is:and hence for me,” and the poem ends with “should find brief solace there, as I have found” (Hacker 304). The form creates an interesting conversation, even if it is with a narrator with themselves. In this sonnet the scene is described in the first half of this prison and how it may look to an outsider, but in the second half the narrator contradicts that and gives proof for how the prison has impacted him. This allows the writer freedom to set up a scene and explain it in a more structured way which can help the reader understand a more complicated theme.

Hacker, Marylin. “The Sonnet.” An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art. Eds. Anne Finch and Kathrine Varnes. Ann Arbor: U. of Michigan Press, 2002.