How to Write a Sonnet: A Student Guide

Are you writing a sonnet -- maybe for a class, or just for fun? Here's a guide for you.

My name is Gideon Burton and I have written thousands of sonnets -- and helped untold numbers of students compose their own. I've taught the history of the sonnet form, and frankly, I just love this form of poetry. Some do not. Some people HATE sonnets. I get it. They are hard. They have rules. Bad ones are painful to read. Good ones can be tough to compose. Hopefully this will take the sting out if it just a bit and maybe get you on the road to something of which you can be proud.

I've divided this guide into four parts:

1. Know the Form
2. Read Model Sonnets
3. Imitate and Experiment
4. Select a Subject

Squeezed Muse

Squeezed Muse

by Gideon Burton

I've taxed her limit; this I will admit.

Each day I've wrung her robes for drops of light,

for music (when I wasn't feeling it),

for anger (when I didn't have the fight).

At times she has refused me, made me walk

in blind unrhythmed prose, inert, and blank.

At times the waters burst my writer's block,

then calmed their froth so I had strength to thank.

I've found that one can tame the flighty sprite,

can summon depths and heights that she had hidden.

If I am brave to fail in black and white,

she takes me up the paths that once she didn't.

     A year of writing sonnets, one each day,

     I've squeezed my muse until I've heard her pray.

Photo: flickr - WilWheaton

Untied

Untied
by Gideon Burton

as well as things already loosened, this
among the others, doesn't matter how
precise, how even, every word's a kiss
I've blown in tattered threads of here and now
and anyway so little time contained
(one hundred forty syllables, in fact)
and every one dissolving, unretained,
a sieve of slipping symbols, squared and racked
and raked into a sort of order, signs
and seasons, times and moody moods, complaints
and praise all knotted in the bones and spines
of stanzas, rhymes, and reasons-- so much paint
to gloss the larger rhythms out of sync,
the what and how of how and what I think...

Photo: flickr - mbgrigby

Sonneting

Sonneting
by Gideon Burton

To find a form sustaining me enough
to hold, to hold unweathered over time,
an instrument both sonorous and tough,
with sturdy words shaped smooth by ending rhymes.
Not every patterned art nor instrument
makes time both tow and flow in even turn,
So many words are brutish implements,
stutter-pulsed or bruising with their runes.
And there are books and symphonies whose length
is little argument, while most haiku
are pearls so tightly wound their strength
invisibles itself within their youth.
     I've found a form who forms me line by line;
     she's brief, yet most my thoughts she can refine.

Photo: flickr - jcarwil

Not Aloud

Not Aloud

by Gideon Burton

I'm just not going to say it -- not aloud.

You know how some stuff changes once in words,

how certain thoughts live only in the cloud

of demi-memory, in halves and thirds,

and verbalizing sets perimeters,

commits you to accept or to react.

Crude instruments! As though altimeters

suffice for pitch or yaw. The lens is cracked

that focuses as clearly as a word

defined. Unwind those denotations, blur

and smear the wash of colored music, stir

the safe obscurities: alive, absurd.

     The drums might rhythm smooth our wrinkling brains;

     to speak or write welds thinking into chains.

Photo: Flickr - Thomas Hawk

The Sonnet's Complaint

Well, those of you who follow my sonnet blog -- and I mean both of you -- you really need to come out of the woodwork and give me some suggestions for what to write about. It's not as though I have a dearth of subjects. But I'd like this blog to become a bit more interactive. So, have at it.  
I'm also wondering about whether I could do something narrative with my sonnets. A few people have tried doing this, most notably Vikram Seth, whose novel, The Golden Gate (1986) was written completely in sonnets. Well, was it? He wrote in iambs, but only four beats to a line: tetrameter. I think it would drive me crazy either to read or write at length poetry that came in even beats per line. Still, you have to hand it to him. Hmmm. Should I attempt a short story or longer piece, completely done in sonnets? I've tried my hand at writing some drama in blank verse (an aborted prequel to Hamlet, a high school love story set in metaphorical domain of cold war rhetoric, etc.). I don't know. Well, a starting place might be to write in the voice of a character. Here, I impersonate the sonnet itself. What would the sonnet say about my uses of the form?

The Sonnet's Complaint
by Gideon Burton

Abuse. You call it what you will, a test
of form, a witness to the stamina
of poetry compact and at its best.
But I've known your perverse contaminants:
whole stanzas thrown to subjects such as cheese,
those pithy final couplets cinched with puns
(and not the thoughtful witty ones to please
the mind; just clunky jests jest overdone).
And where is the Dark Lady, where is Laura?
Those distant muses driving poets crazy?
You've lost the sonnet's sweet and bitter aura;
Those poems on married bliss? You're getting lazy.
     Untrue to what a sonnet's voice must carry--
     what's next? A poem for Curly, Moe, and Larry?

Photo: flickr - Thomas Duchnicki :: Location Scout

Notepad Sonnet

Notepad Sonnet
by Gideon Burton

On certain days of jagged, rusting hope
when hours sour in the vinegar
of shredding expectations, and the scope
of grace withdraws before the predator
of freshened failures, snarling, heavy, thick
and viral, coughing mockeries of me--
On twilight noons when purposes lie sick
and halting, fetid in their own debris,
and those I have petitioned stay exempt
from all persuasion, struggle as I might--
This whisper-spell of words, this scrawled attempt,
this inky, bluish, bloody, scrabbling fight--
     A tiny room of dignity, released
     by rhythmed language to a stream of peace.

Unscrambling Chaos

Unscrambling Chaos
by Gideon Burton

However tightly I compose these lines
of verse, however densely sewn the meter–
though sealed hermetically, the thought confined–
the center stuff breaks free, its soul far fleeter
than I can compass with a sonnet's rope.
But still these rhythmed strands I weave again,
and yet, escaping well beyond my scope
of rhymes, clean past the fences of my pen
quite out of bounds, like water sunrayed free,
the sense defies the "water" "sun," and "ray."
The words I use I find are using me,
and nothing, like a breath, will pause or stay.
     Like iambs I will breathe with even stress,
     unscrambling chaos with this wordy mess.

Image: flickr - alles-schlumpf

Words to Slow

Words to Slow
by Gideon Burton


I need the words to slow me, slow me down;
if only they could regulate the flow
and flux, this rivering desire that drowns
the sense of senses till it's all I know
and see, this sphere of lava that I tongue
and swallow, swallow into fissured thought
where musing's fusions press, compress, till sprung
into this webbing mesh of fiery knots
reknotted onto moorings anchored where
but where to settle this and these? Compare
the scrape of bone on slate, and if you dare,
then tell yourself that dreams are made of air.
     Compose me, sonnet, nothing's tethered sure.
     The animals within begin to stir.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - wwarby

Quantity Genius

Continuing my time theme from the last sonnet, today I gave myself the challenge of writing a sonnet inside 10 minutes. So, while I sat at my son's cello lesson, I wrote this (with 12 seconds to spare!). The theme of it comes from a blog post by Mark McGuinness that I read about how the ratio of great artistic works to mediocre ones, over the centuries, has had more to do with volume than genius (he used Bach as his example). Lesson: churn out more "chip wrappers," as this blogger called them (mediocre works), and you'll churn out more diamonds along the way. I'm counting on it at OpenSourceSonnets!

Quantity Genius
by Gideon Burton

It's said that things of genius occur
when stars align, the muses speak, or some
sublime endowment outward starts to stir--
inevitable what it will become.
And in my moments, I have felt this flow
of grace artistic, everything attuned;
it is the sort of thing one yearns to know --
oh, may it come just once, though late or soon.
But I have heard the masters (such as Bach)
were not so touched by winds of the divine
as they were scribbling just to beat the clock.
For revelations they had little time.
     A masterpiece or two more likely comes
     by massing many pieces, one by one.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - Cross Duck

Iamb, I Said

Iamb, I Said
by Gideon Burton


It matters where you put the stress. The beats
repeat their splattered bounce, their spluttered skid,
their scrambled rambling, roughshod shots. Amid
the coughing chaos, rhythming these cheats
with sounder sound, a grounding smooth and fleet,
the patter brought to pattern by a grid
of taming order, evening what slid
and balked its awkward way with heavy feet.
My rioting and writhing wording slows its jerks;
my syllables are mesmerized by flow
and ebb and ebbing flowing, tide by tide
by stress, unstress, a side-by-side that works
the knots and spiky kinks with gentle blows;
my fiery thoughts are tempered as I ride.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - normality relief

After Poetry

After Poetry
by Gideon Burton


Of what remains, initially the shells
of words, so many husks of verbs and nouns,
there ought to be some substance more profound,
not moody mannerisms one can tell
are just the caricatures of better thoughts
now soured by the pregnancies of doubt.
It is as though a bureau drawer kept
a paper secret, mildewing, that left
no question, nothing like the inky grout
grown resident despite the bleach I’ve sought
with solvent rhythms, music, or the thrum
and swish of even sentences. Reserved
and waiting, venom still intact, the curve
of evening renders every speaker dumb.


Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Image: flickr - photine

On Writing

On Writing

by Gideon Burton

Of what exists that matters in the gray

and wet cerebrum, liquid rivers flush

with possibility, ideas that stay

until of course new currents crossing rush

a mash of second thoughts, as though the poles

of gravity inverted in a flash–

I only feel, yet cannot firmly know;

so volatile the mind, so fragment-fast.

But as the ink commits me to its form,

as sentences reveal what hid before

(secure in mute obscurity), the storm

subsides; the spyglass finds the shore.

        For as I write I come to know my thought,

        unborn until I craft it as I ought.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - athena