Assignment 01

Class Sonnets - Creativity and FUNdamentals
*01 Assessment Quiz*

Class Sonnets - Creativity and FUNdamentals

01 Assessment Quiz

by Demented Sonneteer on Jul 02  

Please understand that this assignment is for me to understand about where the average class knowledge for sonnets stand. This will not be a grade and I do not want you to turn it in via AP. I want you to email the answers to me at kife@mail.utexas.edu

1. Have you ever heard of a sonnet?

Yes, I am studying a Major in Creative Writing and English Literature at Concordia University in Montreal.  Shakespeare wrote approximately 175 sonnets; Spenser, Tennyson, and Woodsworth have forms named after them for their personal specificity and changes in the traditional writing of sonnets of their times (the Italian and the Shakespearean), and every writer has a need to attempt to write at least one of these in their careers because of the level of difficulty in sustaining a beat, meter, and rhythm in a strict form of not only what each stanza stands for in a separate subject matter, but that the two ideas between the two speakers must be brought together at the very end in the last two lines.

2. What is a sonnet?

A sonnet is a lyrical poem and means ‘song’.  It is an argument between the first speaker in stanza one, the second speaker in stanza two, the presentation in the third as the two connect and the conclusion in the couplet.  

In literary terms, in the Shakespearean Sonnet,  the First Quatrain is an exposition of the main theme and metaphor.  The Second Quatrain is the extended theme or extended metaphor Also known as a complex metaphor) when often some imaginative example is given.  The Third Quatrain or Peripeteia (a twist or conflict) is then introduced to present the conflict.  The poem ends with a couplet and leaves the reader with a new and conflicting idea.  The Italian Sonnet is similar but instead of a couplet the third stanza has eight lines to it called a sestet.  

3. How many lines are in a sonnet?

There are 14 lines to a sonnet.

4. How many meters is a sonnet suppose to be in?

A sonnet is to be written in iambic pentameter (10 syllables per line)

5. What type of beat does a sonnet have?

A sonnet has 10 beats per line—short-long/short-long/short-long/short-long/short-long

6. How many types of sonnets are there? What are they?

The Italian/Petrarchan Sonnet
The Shakespearian Sonnet (Elizabethan Sonnet)
The Spenserian Sonnet (Edmund Spenser)
The Milton Sonnet (John Milton)
The Woodsworth Sonnet (William Woodsworth)
The Blank Verse Sonnet

7. Write out a rhyme scheme for any one of the sonnets.

The Italian/Petrarchan Sonnet abbaabba/cdecde
The Shakespearian Sonnet (Elizabethan Sonnet) ababcdcd/efefgg
The Spenserian Sonnet (Edmund Spenser) ababbcbc/cdcdee
The Milton Sonnet (John Milton)
The Woodsworth Sonnet (William Woodsworth) abbaacca/dedede
The Blank Verse Sonnet (Could or could not have a rhyme scheme)

8. Have you ever tried to write a sonnet?

Yes, I have attempted to write four sonnets to date.

9. Have you written a sonnet successfully? (right beat and meter)

I’ve Danced My Last Dance

By Gregg Rowe

How do I wish to count my days of time,
Twas only borrowed, on this dark/grey earth?
While a white-haired beard has erased my prime,
I display forty-some years, since my birth.

Male bloodlines end here, dare I do regret;
Perhaps selfish, an impregnated chance,
I do not have offspring that were beget:
With men, in my bed, I danced my last dance.

I kiss the paper with my fountain pen;
A history of a man who survived.
They -- are my children -- singing like a wren,
Spinning tales of a man, who's n'ver deprived.

With my heart, these writings I pen by hand;
And wishing some -- were written in the sand.

10. When you here of the word sonnet, who is the first poet (not just on AP) that comes to mind?

Milton and Shakespeare, Woodsworth and Tennyson, Browning and Spenser.  And Demented Sonneteer!