Shakespearean

Sonnets
English 10

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What is a sonnet?
A sonnet is a fourteen-
line poem in iambic
pentameter.
Iambic what?

Let’s take a look…

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 Iambic Pentameter
  Iambic Pentameter is a poetic form which poets and
playwrights typically used to write poems in Elizabethan
England. It is the meter that Shakespeare mostly uses.

Meter in poetry is a rhythm of

accented and unaccented syllables
arranged into feet.

Iamb: has the first syllable unaccented and the second accented.

Shall I / com pare / thee to / a sum / mer’s day? 3

Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18"

foot
Syllables

 What is a syllable?
 A syllable is the unit of sound
 It is either stressed or unstressed

“But soft, what light through yonder window breaks.”

 How many syllables are there in that quotation?

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 Meter: Meter in poetry is a rhythm of accented
and unaccented syllables arranged into feet.

- Meter in poetry is what brings the poem to life and is the internal
beat or rhythm with which it is read.

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Pentameter

 Well an ‘iamb’ is ‘dee Dum’ – it is like a heart beat.

Pentameter:
 Penta is from the Greek for five.
 Meter is really the pattern

 So, there are five iambs per line!

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For the sound of Iambic Pentameter,
think of a heartbeat

 it sounds like this:

 dee DUM, dee DUM, dee DUM,
dee DUM, dee DUM.
 It consists of
 a line of five iambic feet
 ten syllables with five
unstressed and five stressed
syllables

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 Anexample of Iambic
pentameter from
Shakespeare’s Romeo &
Juliet:

but SOFT what LIGHT through YONder WINdow BREAKS

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Iambic Pentameter – put it all together

b i c
Iam
Iamb

Shall I / com pare / thee to / a sum / mer’s day?

foot foot foot foot foot

Pentameter
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Rhyming patterns

 The Shakespearean sonnet has three

quatrains followed by a couplet, the
scheme being: abab cdcd efef gg.

Quatrain: 4 lines of Couplet: 2 lines of

rhymed verse rhymed verse

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 Sonnet 116
  
Let me not to the marriage of true minds (a)
3 Quatrains
Admit impediments. Love is not love (b)
Which alters when it alteration finds,(a)
Or bends with the remover to remove:(b)

O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,(c)

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;(d)
It is the star to every wandering bark,(c)
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.(d)

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks(e)

Within his bending sickle's compass come;(f)
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,(e)
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.(f)

If this be error and upon me proved,(g)

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.(g)
Couplet
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The sonnet’s argument

 A sonnet is also an argument — it builds up a certain

way. And how it builds up is related to its metaphors and
how it moves from one metaphor to the next. In a
Shakespearean sonnet, the argument builds up like this:
 First quatrain: An exposition of the main theme and main
metaphor.
 Second quatrain: Theme and metaphor extended or
complicated; often, some imaginative example is given.
 Third quatrain: Peripetia [per-uh-pi-tahy-uh, -tee-uh] (a
twist or conflict), often introduced by a "but" (very often
leading off the ninth line).
 Couplet: Summarizes and leaves the reader with a new,
concluding image.
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Sonnet 18 – First Quatrain

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.

First quatrain: Shakespeare establishes the theme of

comparing "thou" (or "you") to a summer's day, and why to
do so is a bad idea. The metaphor is made by comparing his
beloved to summer itself.

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Sonnet 18 – Second Quatrain
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed

Second quatrain: Shakespeare extends the theme, explaining

why even the sun, supposed to be so great, gets obscured
sometimes, and why everything that's beautiful decays from
beauty sooner or later. He has shifted the metaphor: In the
first quatrain, it was "summer" in general, and now he's
comparing the sun and "every fair," every beautiful thing, to
his beloved.

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 Sonnet 18 – Third Quatrain
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest,
Nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest.

Third quatrain: Here the argument takes a big left turn with the familiar
"But." Shakespeare says that the main reason he won't compare his
beloved to summer is that summer dies — but she won't. He refers to the
first two quatrains — her "eternal summer" won't fade, and she won't "lose
possession" of the "fair" (the beauty) she possesses. So he keeps the
metaphors going, but in a different direction. And for good measure, he
throws in a negative version of all the sunshine in this poem — the "shade"
of death, which, evidently, his beloved won't have to worry about.

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Sonnet 18 – final couplet

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Couplet: How is his beloved going to escape death? In

Shakespeare's poetry, which will keep her alive as long as
people breathe or see. This bold statement gives closure to
the whole argument — it's a surprise.

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