Sonnet thread

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Post your own sonnets here, as well as any of your favourites.

This isn't very good, it's just the most recent one I've written:

I wrote this one last weekend

Many bright stars adorn the face of night
The moon rises higher and higher still
heavenly spheres without a flaw or blight
The silence speaks of times primordial

a gentle breeze brushes across my face
the wind picks up a few leaves off the ground
in a moment they're gone without a trace
apart from me there's no one else around

It's far away from urban confusion
a lone refuge for God's untouched vision
It needs no dighuise or vain illusion
Heaven and Earth in perfect unision

As of now this paradise has been saved
But in time even Eden will be paved

How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)
- by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.

I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.


(Thank you for starting this thread! Even though I've never truly mastered the Sonnet form, it still remains one of my three favorite forms of poetry, along with Haiku and Limericks. -F-)

I think the sonnet is due another revival. There's much still to be done with this form.

I used to write a haiku almost every day but I've been in a sonnet mood lately.

@Asperger96, I like how your sonnets sound natural. A lot of people mangle the language to fit the form, but the best way is to marry form an language over time and practice.

Here's a fairly modern sonnet. Simon Armitage:

i think Millay wrote many of the best sonnets of the 20c.... here's one by a forgotten contemporary of hers:

"Who Shapes the Carven Word

Who shapes the carven word, the lean, true line,
And builds with syllable and chiselled phrase,
To rear a sheltering temple and a shrine
To house a dream through brief and meagre days

Must know that time wears words away like stone
And blurs the sharpness of the clean, straight thought;
A ghost will wander out and leave alone
And tenantless the temple that he wrought.

This will be ruins for another day,
Of lichen-bitten stone and empty tower,
A tumbled shrine whose god has moved away...
Yet later-comers, in some moon-hushed hour,
May find a strange light haunting still the shade,
And footprints that no mortal feet had made."

--David Morton, Anthology of Magazine Verse 1925

Ferry of years, whose course swerves look at stars
uncomprehendingly, you may not boast
of many sure arrivals, sandy bars
aplenty; yet here i am and almost
free. This wild foray into darkness spread
around me, upon toxic waters, i [eye]
have learned to call home. Here a brave child is buried;
on such officious caravan i'll die.

Not as shark's teeth bear the only fight,
is a tart will welded to fate: small complots foiled
provide what squalls and tides cannot requite,
soft nor runic sheaves on which have toiled
sad eyes, spiralling scurry of dwarves belov'd
the more its young squawk-polyps are removed.

It has always bothered me that the division in sonnets between the octave & the sestet, comes about six syllables short of dividing this 140 syllable form into the Golden Section. E.g. 86 + 53 = 139 for a much more numerologically satisfying arrangement. Or 137 = 85 + 52, which i have sometimes lineated as 13-11-13- 11-13-11-13 & 11-9-7-9-7-9. For a long time i only wrote thirteen line sonnets ("treizains"), & the same numbers i mentioned above for 137 syllables total can easily be lineated into 11-10-11-10-11-10-11-11 & 10-10-11-10-11.

I smoke and cry. It rains and moss eats walls.
I've put my logic out to dry all day
and like a friend I hate, dear madness calls.
Torrentially, it's chosen me as prey.

It bothers every cranny of my mind,
eroding what I thought were strong beliefs.
My definitions are no more defined.
My landscapes are now flat with no reliefs.

You'd stuggle recognising me right now;
a formless slab of tears is what I am*
but I'll redo myself for you, somehow
become as cute as when our love began.

But if this restoration work won't do,
I'm screwed because I keep myself for you.

*Not really, it's just a poem.

I'm an atheist, but I love this:

Prayer - George Herbert

These make the last few embers of dinosaur sunlight.
This will be a legendary day: we were so free,
so bold, so murderous. Our mayfly-brief
glory will be unsurpassed & the talon
of our joy has marked the spot indelibly.

What is there more to say? We touched the stars
but our hearts were not touched. Our first resort
was annihilation. Waking now, we still won’t label
this fury of a pastime anything but innocence.

What wonder if our trinkets, that litter the earth,
when they work no more, become bleak plethora
of talismans? Holding them now, our karma upon us,
we still want to click on a window & do it over.

Am not Broken. Sonnet in Iambic Pentameter

Monday, November 04, 2013
8:13 AM

Oh NO! This object works so different!
Obviously that means that its broken,
We'll find some way to fix the referent,
Which suffers from an ailment unspoken

We'll use our resources and every tool
to fix that which shows no signs of decay
for all of us agree that but a fool
would want a machine to behave this way

every machine must work like each other
dissimilarity means disrepair
to distinguish them from one another
must obviously mean that we don't care

We'll stop at nothing till a cure we find

to fix a unique and unusual mind

^ That's very good. Wish I could write like that at 17.

'Stray melodies of dim remembered runes'
Return when I am anything but ready.
What is a poet stricken thus, but giddy
With future thwarts, and present lost balloons?
I fail, and I am wise with a plangent mist
That tells me all I need to know of beginnings.
Riddle me more, or let the next swift innings
Contain their inmost cure as much as thirst!

Ah, well. I dwell among such eerie forms,
I learn and lose my way as at the first;
Someday when a chance wind sends me reeling
I"ll know what sort of monster writes these norms,
And what black seas I carry for my visit's ceiling.

Why did you bother? Guess that I can guess:
I served you seating-like, a mental sofa
secure for you to take your sexless rest,
whilst dreaming ways to be Casanova
in other destinations but my bed.
I served you houseplant-like; I cleaned your air.
I was your piece of something that's widespread,
a potted love, immobile, always there.

Why did I bother? I thought you'd come back
like moonlit tide or surge of sweet green shoots.
I thought you'd grow, make live and then unpack
my stony self - adapt my heart's disputes
into the music of the world at peace
with chaos, singing songs that never cease.

Shakespeare Sonnet LXI

Is it thy will, thy image should keep open
My heavy eyelids to the weary night?
Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken,
While shadows like to thee do mock my sight?
Is it thy spirit that thou send'st from thee
So far from home into my deeds to pry,
To find out shames and idle hours in me,
The scope and tenor of thy jealousy?
O, no! thy love, though much, is not so great:
It is my love that keeps mine eye awake:
Mine own true love that doth my rest defeat,
To play the watchman ever for thy sake:
For thee watch I, whilst thou dost wake elsewhere,
From me far off, with others all too near.