In 2012, Jim told us, “A sonnet is all about turns.”
Then I realized—late in 2012 and early in 2013—that I
didn’t quite understand what constitutes a turn in a sonnet, so I asked Jim
this summer, and so he showed me his copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets. That book had obviously seen a lot of use J Among other things, Jim had gone
through all 154, marking the places that he might call turns.
So I thought I’d do that this year, marking the turns,
taking note of the prosody (since iambic pentameter is also something I’m
trying to learn), and generally paying attention to what exactly can be done in
a sonnet (and how).
There are 154 sonnets, and there are 159 days left before
poems for next summer are due, so I think I’ll start now J Here’s the first one:
________________________________________
I
From fairest
creatures we desire increase,
That thereby
beauty's rose might never die,
But as the
riper should by time decease,
His tender
heir might bear his memory:
But thou
contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy
light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a
famine where abundance lies,
Thy self thy
foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art
now the world's fresh ornament,
And only
herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine
own bud buriest thy content,
And tender
churl mak'st waste in niggarding:
Pity the
world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the
world's due, by the grave and thee.
_____________________________________
Okay, so first a quatrain in indicative that’s
indicating what the “we” desires (and why), then another quatrain in indicative
saying what the “thou” does (which is in conflict with what the “we” desires),
then a third quatrain—in vocative!—that’s pretty much repeating the second
quatrain with a different set of metaphors, then a couplet in the imperative. The “or else” in line 13 would be the
volta.
A secondary (minor) feature that catches my eye: The “we” of the first line becomes the “world”
of the ending couplet, i.e. “We are
the world” J
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