March of the Internet Nobody, day eight: Poetry corner…

The idea to explore a different poetic form each day this week had not so far proved to be much of a problem, until I decided to attempt today’s excursion into verse, that is.

This style of poetry was introduced to England in the early 16th century (initially translated from French and Italian) and quickly became a popular form with English writers, the most famous of whom was a certain Mr William Shakespeare, who loved it so much he wrote 154 of them.

There are a number of sub-genres within the overall definition, but I have chosen to go with what we shall call the Shakespearean version for my experiment, which is defined thusly;

Sonnet – Traditionally, a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter, following the rhyme scheme ABAB CDCD EFEF GG which now characterizes the English sonnet and adheres to a tightly structured thematic organization. The fourteen lines are structured as three quatrains and a couplet. The third quatrain generally introduces an unexpected sharp thematic or imagistic “turn”, the volta.

Well I can tell you that this took some considerable thought and, despite not quite scaling the linguistic heights of old Bill Waggledagger, I’m rather pleased with the result.

After realising the challenge I’d set myself. I picked what I thought was the most apposite theme for my sonnet; writing a sonnet.
A meta-sonnet, if you will.

Calculating how to write a sonnet
Turns out to be inordinately hard,
I may as well try to catch a comet
As trying to impersonate The Bard.
This bloody iambic pentameter
Means everything is much harder to rhyme,
I’m including the word “diameter”
Or it will take until the end of time.
I’ve no experience in poetry
But then you don’t need me to tell you that,
It’s more like “what you get is what you see”
And look, you see, I still inverted that.
Finding rhymes is harder than knitting fog,
I think I’ll go back to writing my blog.

*****

And that, I think you’ll agree, is quite enough of that.