Is my sonnet good? please help! i need an A on this!

Question

The dance has start, calmly through out the night
Long dresses sweep and swift the floors polite
Angelic`ally awaking thy sight
Feathery touches whisper my invite
Thy spirits spin around in Versailles
Thy golden sky with plenty sparkly eyes
While paintings flung up as evil disguise
Thy laughter and shouting deafens thy cries
Where are thou now? Oh sweet, sweet melody!
Bring thy face to me for understanding
Thou scene has made thee with melancholy
Thy faking smile will never stay blending
Cherish me please i am but sweet sorrow!
Don't leave me dying untill tomorrow.

Mister Micawber · Accepted Answer

Not bad.  It is almost all iambic pentameter, with a little stretching of pronunciation.  The main problems are (1) you are trying to put it into Elizabethan English-- 'thou' is no longer acceptable English, even among Quakers-- and (2)  the sentence structure is terrible.  It should be made of the same solid sentences that prose is composed of.

CalifJim · Answer

Not bad if this is one of your first tries!

I don't think anybody is using thy's and thou's anymore. I think you could be permitted to update the language a bit:

O ailing love, compose your struggling wing. (St. Vincent Millay)

It's hard to control language that you're not familiar with on a daily basis. "thou scene" should be "thy scene", for example.

Good iambic pentameter for the most part, but you probably know as well as any of your readers that the meter could be cleaned up a bit in places. Watch your syllable count!

The final "s" in Versailles is not pronounced, so you don't have a good rhyme there. The "blending, understanding" rhyme is a bit off, but that's not the main objection. It's a feminine rhyme -- the only one in the sonnet, and unusual for sonnets as I recall -- so it rather sticks out as out of place. I think that's easily fixed though if you keep working at it.

Sonnets are usually about love or death, and yours seems to be more about love, but I think the message could be a little clearer. It's good that you have tried to follow the "normal" progress of a sonnet: eight lines of "question", four of "response", and two of "summation" or "the punch lines", but I think you could make these sections even more distinct. In general, it's hard to follow your story line, i.e., the message of the sonnet. Your images aren't bad, but they seem to float somewhere above, below, or around the meaning, rather than being an intrinsic part of it. But that's what you can work on in your next attempts.

Read Edna St. Vincent Millay's Fatal Interview if you want some good examples of modern sonnets. Note how she usually structures the sonnet into its three parts and how she uses no imagery that is extraneous to the message of the poem.

Good work! Let's have many more. (You might post in the writers forum instead of the grammar forum. You'll probably get more reponses there -- and more intelligent ones. I, myself, am basically a grammar wonk, not a poetry critic!

)

CJ

AlpheccaStars · Answer

Anon - Poetry is very challenging!
There are various sonnet forms, but this is the principal one that I assume you wanted to follow:

A Shakespearean, or English sonnet consists of 14 lines, each line contains ten syllables, and each line is written in iambic pentameter in which a pattern of a non-emphasized syllable followed by an emphasized syllable is repeated five times. The rhyme scheme in a Shakespearean sonnet is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG in which the last two lines are a rhyming couplet.

Your poem follows the form AAAA BBBB CDCD EE. One line does not have the required 10 syllables, and the iambic pentameter is not followed faithfully. There are places where the grammar and meaning is on very shaky ground, but teachers will allow leeway for poetic license. (The dance has started, then throughout the night - would fix the grammar, spelling and iambic pentameter pattern problems in line 1)

Did you have to use the old form of "you"?

Is my sonnet good? please help! i need an A on this!

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