Determining the nature of a monosyllabic is probably the trickiest part of writing in meter...we'll be getting to that in another thread.  Suffice it for now that, if you were guessing, your instincts were good.

Pass on the first try.

Not really that hard, was it?

Pass.   


(Now, since I still don't have the hang of these "Mod-Powers", would you mind stickying YOUR intro to the class back at the top of the page, above my intro to the meter?   

Thanks!  LOL)

According to Norm, I'm the best choice he could find to deal with that question for you.  (This is rather like being told she's the prettiest girl in town, then told "...but it was a small town"...but I take my ego strokes where I can get them, so if you're serious about learning the sonnet, have a seat.  I'll do my best.)

So what's a sonnet?


That is a wide open question, ranging from Italian definitions through the works of Petrarch, Spenser, Milton, EBBrowning, Shakespeare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, Norm Pollock and Eric Lee and into realms of imaginary forms of the work by self-proclaimed innovators that bear no resemblance to the original intent.

For the purposes of this discussion, we're going to narrow that down a bit.  I don't speak Italian, and believe Italian sonnets should be written in that language, so we'll leave that to the Italians.  Since Hopkins' 'Windhover' is written in what he called 'sprung rhythm' and actually approximates an attempt to write a sonnet in English by Italian rules, we'll let that wait...perhaps indefinitely.  

(One thing I wish to make clear...since against my normal rule, I've accepted the responsibilities of a moderator for this classroom, I have one totally arbitrary rule that will be enforced by deletion if necessary.  The works of the self-proclaimed innovator, "Rosencavalier", being written purely to create discord by calling a sonnet anything he could lay to paper that ventured as far from any accepted definition as possible (as well as some few being of questionable authorship) they will not again be mentioned...nor will that poet, ever again, under any name or screen-name.  

Not in this class.)

This still leaves a wide variety of styles to the form, so for the sake of this initial class, we'll define the sonnet by its simplest and most open definition, and discuss the variations in series as we go on...so for now, a sonnet is fourteen lines of iambic pentameter with a rhyme pattern, so we'll start with iambic pentameter and what it is and how it's used.  

When we discuss meter, the normal designation is to first state the metric foot being used, then the number of feet per line, so we have an iambic foot (which is made of two beats, one soft followed by one stressed...daDUM) and 'penta', or five such feet per line.  (To state the obvious, that means ten beats to a line, formed thusly...
daDUMdaDUMdaDUMdaDUM.

The trick to writing in a formal meter is two-fold.  One...you don't impose the meter on the words, you choose words that already meet the demands of the meter.  Two...you don't place these words to satisfy the demands of the meter.

Does that sound contradictory?  It isn't...not really.  What I mean is, you choose your words in such a way that the meter comes naturally from their placement, and in such a way that the result sounds like normal speech: no twisting of the word order to make the meter come out right and no pronouncing the words in an unnatural way in order to make the meter come out right.  Forced meter spoils a poem just as badly as forced rhyme.

So...how do you get that?  That seems to be the first and biggest question going.  My favorite technique is to keep ONE line of perfect iambic in my head, and compare every line I write to that line.  Most times, it's the first line of my favorite of Milton's sonnets...

"When I consider how my light is spent..."
daDUMdaDUMdaDUMdaDUM.

See how words that are not, any of them, iambs, line up to create an ianbic meter? 

when I conSIDer HOW my LIGHT is SPENT...

Every poem starts with one line.  I'm going to take a break, and when I come back I'll probably start another thread, but meanwhile, everyone who's interested in this, please leave one ONE LINE of iambic pentameter that is written in normal speech, nothing twisted or placed other than the way you would normally say the words.

Okay?

We'll go from there.


Welcome to the Sonnet, Y'all.  This is one of the most beautiful of the classic forms, and intensely satisfying to create and to read...when done well.