Famous Sonnets: A Brief Poetry Lesson

Brueghel's 1558 Landscape With The Fall Of Icarus inspired poems by W.H. Auden and William Carlos Williams.

Literature Professor Thomas Foster thinks famous sonnets can be explained in a brief poetry lesson. So grab a beverage of your choice and read on.

Foster says the sonnet is the only poetic form you’ll ever need to know. Sonnets have been around since the English Renaissance in the 1500s, but before you worry about the form (14 lines) or the meter (iambic pentameter), just read the poem for the pleasure and experience of it.

You’ve got plenty of time to worry about the images or language later.

A BRIEF POETRY LESSON FOR ROSSETTI’S A FAMOUS SONNET

One famous sonnet is An Echo from Willow-Wood by Christina Rossetti.

Two gazed into a pool, he gazed and she,
Not hand in hand, yet heart in heart, I think,
Pale and reluctant on the water’s brink,
As on the brink of parting which must be,
Each eyed the other’s aspect, she and he,
Each felt one hungering heart leap up and sink,
Each tasted bitterness which both must drink,
There on the brink of life’s dividing sea.

Lilies upon the surface, deep below,
Two wistful faces craving each for each,
Resolute and reluctant without speech:–
A sudden ripple made the faces flow,
One moment joined, to vanish out of reach:
So those hearts joined, and ah were parted so.

Some questions to consider are:

1.  How many sentences are in An Echo from Willow-Wood? Two. Lines and stanzas are nice, but if a poem is any good its basic unit of meaning will be the sentence.
2. Where does the first period fall? At the end of line eight. The octet and sestet are each a single unit of meaning.
3. What is the rhyme pattern? Rossetti repeats a four line rhyme pattern in the octet, then picks an uncommon rhyme pattern for the sestet.
4. What idea does the octet convey? A moment between two lovers. The watery images recall the myth of Narcissus.
5. What can you say about Rosetti’s use of the word brink? She uses it three times. Would the meaning change if she used a synonyms for brink?
6. How do things change in the sestet? What is possible in the octet becomes actual in the sestet. What was together on the water is now separated.

 VIDEOS OF FAMOUS SONNETS

• Famous Petrarchan (Italian) sonnets – Sonnet 104 by Petrarch
• Famous Curtal sonnet – Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins
• Famous Spenserian sonnet – One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon the Strand by Edmund Spenser
• Famous Shakespearean (English) sonnet – Sonnet 73 by William Shakespeare
• Famous blank sonnet – Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

7 OTHER VERY FAMOUS POEMS READ OUT LOUD

• Sestina: Altaforte by Ezra Pound. Pound was known for Imagism, a technique based on classical Chinese and Japanese poetry—stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language, and forgoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound’s words, “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome.”
• The Waking by Theodore Roethke. A villanelle, this 1954 Pulitzer Prize-winning title poem can also be found in Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut.
• The Bridge by Hart Crane. His first, and only, attempt at an American long poem, sometimes called the ‘modernist epic.’ Inspired by New York City’s Brooklyn Bridge.
• The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot. Beyond explanation. Just listen and enjoy.
• Out, Out by Robert Frost.  A supposedly inanimate object is described as a cognizant being, aggressively snarling and rattling as it does its work.
• Clearances by Seamus Heaney. An elegiac sequence of eight sonnets on the death of Seamus Heaney’s mother.
• Easter 1916 by William Butler Yeats. Describes the events of the Easter Rising staged in Ireland against British rule. Think Sunday, Bloody Sunday by U2, only 67 years earlier.

POETRY RESOURCES

• How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry by Edward Hirsch
• Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics