Sonnets: this is only the beginning

The sonnet form of poetry is highly structured and unique in its themes of tone. Often, sonnets serve as romantic and dramatic expressions but they are not limited to such themes. Other forms of writing, such as tweets have limits on the allotted amount of characters but not necessarily the syllables or lines. Tweets are small blurbs of information put forth by the writer. They serve as small updates, facts, quotes, jokes, or anything really that can represent a significant event in the writer’s life or express their emotional state. A person can display unique writing styles even through something so short as a Tweet. Sonnets serve a similar purpose. While there are obvious differences in structural freedom for the writer, they are both short segments of creative expression. Tweets are often cryptic and carefully worded like sonnets, as they are only small pieces of information meant to be significant and interesting to the reader. Sonnets do the same: in a limited amount of words they work to capture the reader and construe a significant emotional condition. The casual nature of most modern writing differs from the sonnets we went over in class. It can be very hard to read and comprehend sonnets when you are out of the practice of reading poetry. I feel that if something cannot be deciphered, its point is not going to be received. Honestly, I would prefer to read novels or even Tweets over poetry; not because I don’t like poetry, I just have a hard time understanding it (especially Shakespearean poetry.) Despite the effort I put in, I do not learn as much from something I do not understand and cannot read fluidly. One advantage of poetic writing is that people always expect it to be deep and significant. People take more time reading a poem and pondering the imagery and word choice. It is naturally expected to be a complicated piece of literature.

While I try to understand the relationships between words, my ears seem to be very stubborn entities. I have a tricky time trying to decipher the significance between rhyming schemes and accentuation. Edmund Spenser’s Sonnet 75 is one of despair and denial by the woman he desires and the beginning is a quatrain and takes the reader through a pattern of taunting hopefulness and desire but them washing it away. The sonnet leads the listener to the woman and washes away his hope and then repeats. This gives the listener a reinforced idea of his despair. The female tone comes across as dark and without sympathy. The ending couplet of the poem shows Spenser’s unwillingness to abandon hope. He doesn’t recognize that his love is unrequited but instead ends the poem with couplet that alludes to his lasting wishes that love will one day, triumph. The couplet is a good way to end a sonnet because it varies from the abnormal rhyming pattern of the main sonnet. It provides variation and a conclusive quick beat. I cannot for the life of me recognize the difference in stressed and unstressed syllables. I can guess?