The Sonnet:

Songs can be considered a form of poetry. The most popular form of a love poem is the sonnet.

Sonnets have been around for hundreds of years. What do you know about them?

Name Those Songs!

Write down the names of five of your favorite songs.

Now, look at your list. What are they each about? Is there a common theme? 

Were most (or all!) of your songs about love in some form or other? 

Since the beginning of time, love has been one of the most common themes in poetry and song. Why do you think that is?

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The Different Types of Sonnet

There are many different types of sonnet. The one that you are probably most familiar with is the Shakespearean Sonnet.

In pairs, you’ll each receive a type of sonnet. What can you find out about the sonnet you have been given?

Make thorough notes – you’ll be presenting when you’ve finished!

You should investigate:

• the number of lines in the sonnet;
• the rhythm of the sonnet;
• the rhyme scheme of the sonnet;
• what the sonnet is about;
• if you divide the sonnet into sections.

What Have You Found?

We’re now going to share our findings on the different types of sonnet. Make sure you take notes on your Sonnet Notes Worksheet – you’ll need it later!

Remember:

• just because sonnets have a set form, does not mean this can’t be adapted;
• many modern poets play with the sonnet form – changing the rhythm and the rhyme;

sonnets are usually love poems

Commentary

This sonnet is certainly the most famous in the sequence of Shakespeare’s sonnets; it may be the most famous lyric poem in English. Among Shakespeare’s works, only lines such as “To be or not to be” and “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” are better-known. This is not to say that it is at all the best or most interesting or most beautiful of the sonnets; but the simplicity and loveliness of its praise of the beloved has guaranteed its place.

On the surface, the poem is simply a statement of praise about the beauty of the beloved; summer tends to unpleasant extremes of windiness and heat, but the beloved is always mild and temperate. Summer is incidentally personified as the “eye of heaven” with its “gold complexion”; the imagery throughout is simple and unaffected, with the “darling buds of May” giving way to the “eternal summer”, which the speaker promises the beloved. The language, too, is comparatively unadorned for the sonnets; it is not heavy with alliteration or assonance, and nearly every line is its own self-contained clause—almost every line ends with some punctuation, which effects a pause.

Sonnet 18 is the first poem in the sonnets not to explicitly encourage the young man to have children. The “procreation” sequence of the first 17 sonnets ended with the speaker’s realization that the young man might not need children to preserve his beauty; he could also live, the speaker writes at the end of Sonnet 17, “in my rhyme.” Sonnet 18, then, is the first “rhyme”—the speaker’s first attempt to preserve the young man’s beauty for all time. An important theme of the sonnet (as it is an important theme throughout much of the sequence) is the power of the speaker’s poem to defy time and last forever, carrying the beauty of the beloved down to future generations. The beloved’s “eternal summer” shall not fade precisely because it is embodied in the sonnet: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,” the speaker writes in the couplet, “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”