Yes,  I’ll admit my resolve is weakening or is already broken.  I can’t summon the will to finish my little story. 

Yesterday at a meeting at my daughter’s high school I chatted with her English teacher about a recent assignment requiring the students to write sonnets.  Apparently they found it difficult to work within the technical requirements of an English Sonnet.

I’ve nearly always written free verse.  My knowledge of the history of poetry goes only as far back as Whitman.  I always found contemporary rhyming poems trite and amateurish.  But lately I’ve decided to try my hand at sonnets, thinking perhaps that I should know the rules before I commit to breaking them.  Following are two sonnets, written more or less strictly according to the Shakespearean  convention.  My objective in each case was simply to adhere to the formal structure.

Experimental Sonnet #1

Anger, cynicism, tempting and vile,

Drive me to starve and stab self in spite.

Convinced, proud and righteous but all the while,

Depriving self for ironic “right”.

Superior, stubborn I hold the ground,

Convinced I must teach the lesser.

Only much too late do I hear the sound,

And kneel to my mind’s confessor

How did I come to love the taste of gall,

When of milk I might have partaken?

Pride rushes mindless to embrace the pall,

The future, the self is forsaken.

The light of love, hush of serenity

Found within, a joyful solemnity

 

Marina

Her face can shine like a milky moonbeam

Or defiant of nature fall dark

Giggling with glee over a madcap meme

Or plotting to revenge some small mark

Her courtesy could be called boundless

But for remarkable exceptions

When her wrath, clear, cold and never soundless

Explodes with expletive eruptions

When she is good, no stranger to kindness

Protector of the weak and aggrieved

When she is angry, given to blindness

Reason’s calm plea she fails to believe

But without darkness we’d not love the light

Her darkest, fell moods give way to delight