The secret to sonnets

Last February, I introduced you all to my favourite type of verse, iambic pentameter. One of the most common places you can find iambic pentameter is in the English sonnet. I’m particularly fond of writing sonnets, so this February I’ll take you through the basics of how to write a sonnet yourself.

The first step is to examine the components of a sonnet. As an example, let's look at one I've written called "But If My Brain...".

If brains were birds, my brain would be a crow,
Collecting all the shiny things I see.
A hummingbird, it flitters to and fro:
Now here, now there, in every place I'll be.

If brains were fish, I'd be a swimming shark,
Which never stops or slows, or it may drown.
Or no—a school of minnows in the dark,
That flash with fractured light: a broken crown.

But brains aren't fish, nor are they birds that fly;
No species can contain my mental part.
And as I look towards the sea and sky,
A multitude of thoughts leap from my heart.

And like the beat of wings or sound of rain,
The constant hum of thoughts is my refrain.

As you can see above, the sonnet is broken into three stanzas of four lines apiece, and finishes with a rhyming couplet. Each four-line stanza follows an ABAB rhyming pattern. By counting the syllables, you'll notice that there are ten in each line, alternating between unstressed and stressed—that's the iambic pentameter.

So there's your template, but how do you fill it? Let us turn now to the content. Each stanza, and the final couplet, encompasses a single thought or concept; this means that within the overall topic of the poem you'll have four different facets to discuss (or, more accurately, three facets for the stanzas and a more general subject for the couplet). The final element of the setup of a sonnet is the volta, which is a shift in message or tone. Sitting between the second and third stanzas, the volta gives the poem a second opinion, balancing out the subjects of the first two stanzas with another angle. Quite often, this shift is marked by beginning the third stanza with a "but" or "yet", as you can see above in our example.

And that, my dear readers, is what makes a sonnet. All you need to do now is plug in the words—a task that is, admittedly, not as easy as it sounds. The first thing to wrestle with is figuring out the metre, and then once you've gotten more comfortable with that you can assemble lines into stanzas and thence whole sonnets. It may take a bit of practice, but is highly achievable.

Are you game to try one out yourself? If so, I'd love to see what you come up with; drop your sonnets in the comments at the bottom of the page so we can all congratulate you on learning a new skill! If you have questions, pop them below too and I'll help you out.

Good luck, and happy writing!