Sonnet

[stray jungle]

This is beautifully written and has a really nice message :)

[runic yarrow]

Cheers!

[hallow flax]

@runic yarrow That's a great sonnet. I really like it! Also, isn't there a rule in writing a sonnet that you have to write in iambic pentameter?

[runic yarrow]

Thank you!
Yeah, they’re practically all IP - I don’t think I’ve ever come across one that wasn’t - which isn’t to say that it couldn’t or shouldn’t be done!

[hallow flax]

The second last line follows the rules

[runic yarrow]

Having said that, have just encountered this:

After all, the great sonneteer, George Meredith, wrote his novella-in-sonnets, Modern Love, in sixteen-line sonnets! And what of the poems in Gerald Stern's American Sonnets, which are meterless and rhymeless and vary wildly in line count? Are they sonnets simply because he calls them sonnets? Each of us has to answer that question in our own way. Certainly, Stern's title asks us to think of his sequence of short lyrical poems in the context of the tradition of the Petrarchan sonnet sequence, and, in that sense, they are in conversation with tradition, seeking ways to expand or renew that tradition, which for me, at least, creates an instant spark of interest. In fact, as I see it, any practice is acceptable so long as it works as poetry.

Meredith's Modern Love is fantastic, mind you.

Though his early attempts at writing sonnets were unmitigated failures ("I've fond anticipation of a day / O'erfilled with pure diversion presently, / For I must read a lady poesy / The while we glide by many a leafy bay"), later in life Williams wrote a poem modeled upon the sonnet form that was simply a free-verse poem in fourteen lines. Nevertheless, he titled it "Sonnet," as if to say, "Here is how you make the sonnet new; you turn it into free verse." Certainly, that is one way to do so.

[final pond]

A stark and muffled stillness

The first verse really took it off, good work.