Amateur Sonnets

Recently I've been sort of into writing sonnets. I'm not a particularly poetic person, but in the past few months I've been reading more poetry than I ever have before and I've been learning a lot about it.

When I first started learning to write serious poetry (aka not the silly rhymes we all wrote in grade school), sonnets were my favorite. Despite my love for writing and creative things, I'm really more of a left-brained person. I like things to be organized and logical. And sonnets are very organized and make a lot of sense. I never really liked how poetry was considered so "free," etc. etc. I felt like that just meant that we ended up with a lot of stupid poetry.

Sonnets, though, are a challenge to write no matter what. No complete amateur could write a sonnet. (Although of course, there are plenty of stupid sonnets out there. But that's not the point.) Even after I've written a dumb sonnet, I feel pretty good that my meter and my rhymes are right on.

So here are my amateur sonnets. You will probably see more of these as time goes on and I try to really learn the art of the sonneteer.

This was a sonnet I wrote in the Petrarchan form, about the Petrarchan form.


So, Petrarch, I hope you're happy now?
Now rookies, pros alike have used and torn
apart your form, a tiny lamb now shorn.
Without its wool, does sheep become a cow?
The last I heard, the word ABBA, you know,
referred to an eighties band, not a rhyme form.
I think, Petrarch, it might be time to mourn
the painful death of your sonnet. But how
could we, just maybe, save its loveliness?
Convince the world it's not worn out and sick?
That there's still more to say about that girl
with eyes like flowers, skin like snow, and tresses--
No, now the world is fixed on politics.
Petrarch, your sonnet's for a better world.

Get the irony? ...Eh? Eh? Okay, moving on.

This is one that's rather more corny, but I'm pretty attached to it. It's in the Shakespearean form.

Photo by Felix Neiss on Flickr

My deepest fear, my most beloved desire
stretching before me, my Arabian desert;
the pain, the heat, the sacrifice, the hurt
that to survive are desperately required.
Yet of the beauty I have heard such praise!
The golden sands, the endless paradise;
the warmth forever banishing the ice
of loneliness, the devil's sneering gaze.
In my love's eyes I see my desert fair,
an endless adventure, a sea of stars,
and when we reach the end, that heaven afar,
in each other's arms shall we rest there.
And so, to God's altar I joyfully go,
that I, for him, God's love will always know.