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(Lesson Five - The Sonnet is part of a unit on The Poetry of Fixed Structures.)

In the last lesson I talked about the lyric and the distinction between “talking” and “singing” lyrics. This distinction still applies to the poetry of fixed structures, but less flexibly. In terms of tradition, fixed structures came into the British current during the Renaissance from France and Italy. Poetry at that time tended to be the preserve of diplomats and courtiers (apart from rich popular and religious verse). They were susceptible to Italian and French influences as these were the dominant diplomatic languages of the day. The transition from continental Latinate to English, Germanic-based language was made easier through the influence of Norman French from the Eleventh Century onwards. The French tradition has as much of a role to play as the Italian. One word about origins needs to be made. The Italian and French traditions wove music, dance and poetry into one, rather like popular music to-day. Yet we have no clear view of what kind of dance gave rise to these forms. It was not so much rhythm, but the complex interweaving of rows of dancers that gives these forms their structure.

By far the most popular of these forms was the sonnet. It is easy to see why. It is short enough to be concise and long enough to be elaborate. The form also admits of song-like expression, or meditative one.

The first English sonnets were written by Sir Thomas Wyatt and his friend, the Earl of Surrey. They were both diplomats and, tragically for Surrey, courtiers. An Italian sonnet consists of fourteen lines, eight rhyming abba, abba (the first two interweaved quatrains form what is called the octave) followed by six (a sestet consisting of two tercets,) variously rhyming symmetrically ccd,ccd or rhyming cde cde. I regard this form as archetypal and other forms as phenotypes or derivatives. The Italian sonnet was written in hendecasyllables, an eleven syllable line, modeled on Catullus (“Reason, tell me my Mined yf here be Reason” is Sydney’s www.poetry-online.org/sydney-sir-philip-poetry.htm best shot at it in Arcadia.) This always sounds clumsy in English as our ears cannot distinguish words such as “ditty” from “pity.” To an Italian the first is a trochee of a heavy and a light and the second two light syllables. Wyatt’s early attempts at Englishing the hendecasyllabic sound dumpy and inelegant. (“Ye that in loue finde luck and swete abundance”) The Italian sonnet also tended to use double rhymes. (“Again, remain” etc.) Surrey simplified Wyatt’s modified Petrarchan form. He uses the iambic pentameter, rhymes on single syllable words and changes the rhyming structure to three quatrains and a couplet, usually rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. This became the standard English form, called the Shakespearean sonnet after its greatest Renaissance proponent, though Sir Phillip Sidney deserves attention.
Shakespeare and many other Elizabethans, including many barely-known women poets, preferred the freedom of four rhyme sounds in the octave and the drama of a concluding couplet. Spenser the parts into a relay; abab, bcbc,cded, ee, which creates a vivid more private world.

Another interesting aspect of the Sonnet is the way the tradition is predisposed to certain themes. The origin of the Italian sonnet lies in Sicilian folk songs which were (and are) usually dialogues between lovers or those plotting love. Giacomo da Lentini who was Sicilian and wrote in both Tuscan and Sicilian invented the sonnet as a showpiece designed to exploit both sides of the dialogue, hence la volta, the leap from the octet to the sestet: from one side of the argument to the other. Dante and Petrarch lost the Sicilian roots and established a talking lyric in which a sudden shift took place such as in an appeal to the beloved. Wyatt, Surrey, Sydney and Shakespeare took over this convention but gradually introduced a shift in the theme. Wyatt introduced a certain melancholy. Surrey brought in distainfulness. Sydney introduced themes such as fortune and change, Spenser, time and decay and Shakespeare created a synthesis of all these themes, held together by a luxuriant diction that oozes through the fixed rhetoric to issue in a style that is still unique. It is also a conscious rejection of the Puritanism that was gradually taking over the form. Platonic abstraction is put aside for sensual realism.

After Shakespeare, John Donne’s powerful word-play rescued the form from the English imitators of the Italian Marinist school and the French Calvinists, Du Bartas and Sponde, such as Drummond of Hawthornden with his abstract God. Donne’s articulate Christocentric, Anglican conscience brings back Shakespearean realism, but in a new form; Shakespeare end-stops, whereas Donne’s lines overflow. Donne’s realism is conceptual, rather than sensual but equally as concrete and visual. Milton returns the sonnet to the Puritans. He breaks with the tradition of love as a theme which is so powerfully theological in both Shakespeare and Donne. You could define Puritanism as the subordination of God, society and sex to the perception of the individual. In Shakespeare, the self is vulnerable. Its sexuality conflicts with society and issues as the God of inner morality. In Donne the self is mortal. The conflict of the sensual body with death mirrors the conflict between God and human society. George Herbert’s voice is more individual, in Herbert the self is a sinner, seeking forgiveness from the world of conscience, beauty and the Anglican God. In Milton, the individual consciousness quells the conflicts in a processional flow of rage, or grief or regret. Even though Milton is the most Italianate of all English poets, he does not observe the leap between the octave and the sestet. His sonnets never end-stop, but weave flowing paragraphs of prophecy, denunciation, or exhortation to which the social, the sexual and the divine are subordinated. The effect is one of astonishing power.

The Eighteenth Century preferred the Ode, the Elegy, or the Epistle to the Sonnet. Milton had broken its magic. Only Pope’s On His Grotto and Cowper’s To Mrs Unwin stand out among the prattling Miltoneers, such as William Mason and William Lisle Bowles. It’s a mistake to think the Romantic poets were particularly good at the sonnet. They were at their best in other forms. They merely wrote a lot of them. Coleridge’s efforts remain slight. Wordsworth wrote more bad sonnets than any poet in English history. He bankrupted on rhymes and was often forced to change the second quatrain to acca. It was simply that when the intoxication with the self and the Romantic obsession with description came together that a worthy collection emerged. Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed on Westminster Bridge” is a perfect example, as are Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and Keats’ “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” They all imitate the Miltonic style and utter swathes of magnificent description with no break of thought until the climax. There is no great English love-sonnet in the Romantic tradition, despite the very word “Romantic” being debased as a euphemism for love.

The late Romantics were subtler, Tennyson wrote few, but innovated, trying to make it more song-like. Arnold feared he’d be told off if he didn’t and Browning wrote none. Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s “Sonnets from the Portuguese” are metrically dull, do not shift thought between the octet and the sextet, but often rise to an effective climax in Miltonic fashion on the last line. They also take up the refrain introduced by Tennyson. Although “The Portuguese” was her nickname, Barrett -Browning wrote under the influence of Felicia Heman’s translations from the Portuguese poet, Camoens. Hemans is metrically deft, despite her heavy diction. ( Translations from Camoens and other poets with original poetry. Oxford, London 1818.Camoens Reviews: Quart Rev Oct 1820, Ladies’ Monthly Museum ns13 1821.) a highly-descriptive poet, was very popular among the Victorians. Like Milton, Camoens tended to ignore the shift in thought between the octave and the sestet, though not always. However, Barrett-Browning certainly in re-introduced the sonnet as a love-poem back into the tradition: all the better for being a woman’s view of love.

We owe the restoration of the sonnet to Christina Rossetti, (not her brother Dante Gabriel whose muddy House of Life sequence nonetheless restored the shift in print-space if not in thought.) “By day she woos me, soft, exceeding fair” has an austere intensity that also renews the form. She takes Tennyson’s unsuccessful innovation of a refrain and uses it with success, marking the three quatrains, yet cleverly disguises the conclusion by rhyming cdcede, a technique used by her follower, Alice Meynell in Renouncement. Despite its success the new sonnet still did not shift thought, but tended to drive to a conclusion. Above all these women wrote about love again, bringing back the vulnerability in dialogue with sex, society and God. Bridge’s “The Growth of Love” is a meandering sequence in worthy, but archaic abstraction. He carries on the Miltonic tradition like Arnold heedless of its stylistic failure. Even when he does separate the octave from the sestet there is still no dialogue of thought.

Yet Bridges is interesting as he helped Hopkins achieve the restoration of the sonnet begun by his mentor, Christina Rossetti whose spirituality and technique Hopkins admired. The vulnerable self seeking solace from society and its sexual distractions in the contemplation of God were precisely the themes that preoccupied Hopkins’ early poetry. Hopkins’ problem was the very sensuousness of Rossetti’s diction seemed to contradict her message. He was a man with a very male sexuality. She was a beautiful woman who wanted God and saw no difficulty in taking the sensuous and passionate diction of Barrett- Browning and giving it a more austere style, modeled on Herbert, rather than Milton. While he admired Herbert and Rossetti, he did see this as a problem and in some letters to Bridges sought to innovate the form.

He did this in two ways. The first was the curtal sonnet. This is a sonnet of ten and a half lines which by rather mathematically contrived argument is a proportional reduction of the sonnet. The aesthetic intent is of more importance than any claim that the sonnet’s success as a form lies in its proportionality. Hopkins wants to strip down the rhetoric of Bridges, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Barrett-Browning to preserve the purity of diction Christina Rossetti had introduced. Rather like Webern, the 20th Century Austrian composer, who had daft ideas about form, but utterly cleansed the language of classical music with clear, taut sounds, Hopkins’ language is clean-limbed and pure. He achieves this by using simple, concrete nouns, coupling words together, exploiting vowelling and alliteration. He also uses clear, concise visual pictures. The curtal sonnets of which he only wrote three also end with a deliberate half-line. This is to formalise a tendency that begins with Barrett-Browning. In the Sonnets from the Portuguese 1, she brings the poem to a climax with
“The silver answer rang-not death, but love”

Hopkins’
“He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.”
Has similarly dramatic effect, but its terseness is inherent in the form, not imposed on it. Hopkins seems to have found certain aspects of Christina Rossetti’s spiritual escapism unacceptable. His mature verse has a dynamism that accepts the world as a place full of the adventure of divine encounter. This encounter carries an underlying ambiguity that shows Hopkins never fully resolved the Manichaean tendency, which gives his theology an eccentric turn. This is not the world of the Victorians, rather Hopkins has taken in the morbid, but energetic diction of Swinburne and given it a new life. To do this, Hopkins felt he had to expand the form.

He called this the caudate sonnet, following an obscure sub-tradition of humorous verse, used by Milton. There are two rules to a caudate sonnet. Six extra lines are added and there is a deliberate enjambement between the fourteenth and fifteenth lines. Hopkins himself refers to That Nature is an Heraclitean Fire…as “having three codas”. The poem ends with a climax and a broken line. The poem has an ebullient visual and metrical energy that goes beyond any of the torrential sonnets of Meredith, such as Lucifer in Starlight, or Swinburne’s John Webster. Yet despite all the fuss, all of Hopkins’ other sonnets are in traditional form, yet with the mixed metre and long lines he called “sprung rhythm.” Every sonnet Hopkins wrote strictly observes that pause and contrast in the sequence of thought that is proper to the transition between the octave and the sestet, from his Christina Rossetti inspired “Let me be to thee as the encircling bird” to his final to RB, he observes the pause and yet can also be master of the climax. His is a spiritual synthesis whereby he reasserts the vulnerable voices of the pre-Miltonic sonnets while correcting the spiritual escapism of Christina Rossetti. He also counters the heady melodrama of Swinburne.

Hopkins was read after 1918 only and only became an influence in the ‘thirties. The modern English sonnet evolved separately. The Georgian contribution to tradition is its realism tempered with an aesthetic fastidiousness. If something unavoidable can be found to regret then they are up for it. They have their feet and hands in the world yet cannot rid themselves of nostalgia for a secular Eden. Most are agnostic, yet the issue of God, or atheism, remains objective. Few of them wrote sonnets. Hardy and Scawen Blunt wrote lively descriptive ones and I have mentioned Bridges. He and Masefield eventually ran the Georgian sonnet into the sand, Cecil Day Lewis almost drowning in the attempt to rescue it in O Dreams O Destinations. Laureates should be banned the sonnet.

Before that, one of them who did, Rupert Brooke, also made a decisive shift from Milton. He did this by re-instating the masculine sensuality of Shakespeare and using end-run lines in dramatic contrast with short words and pithy endings. Most of his poems, however, fail to convey the drama of the love relationship. They can be abstract and distant, as in Love, but once Brooke has a single theme, or a clear event his sonnets are remarkable. Eden. Brooke expresses this well in sonnets like Success and The Hill. His war poem, Clouds too expresses a picture of the human condition with great integrity and, yes, The Soldier probably is the greatest sonnet of the Twentieth Century and one of the greatest ever written. Its achievement is technically perfect with its sestet evading couplets, or a climax, rhyming efgefg.It is neither jingoistic nor sentimental. Brooke’s other war poems are a disappointment. Its nearest rival is Wilfred Owen’s stunning Anthem for Doomed Youth. This sonnet is more Romantically descriptive, looking back to Keats. It is a true dialogue poem with the terrible question of waste answered by a sestet, whose very concrete understatement gives the poem its power. Owen uses assonance whereas Brooke rhymes accurately. Yet Owen’s technique was innovative and imitated. Brooke’s was eclipsed.

Yeats’ Leda and the Swan is doubly remarkable in that Yeats toyed with the idea of writing a sonnet all his life, writing fourteen line poems such as Never Give All of the Heart and Presences and imitating Ronsard’s sonnets with a playful allusion to the form. In 1923, at the height of Modernism he produced a peerless modernist masterpiece. Modernism could be defined as any systematic attempt to reassert the Puritan self as determining secular divinity, society and sexuality. Many were tempted to adopt Fascism, including Yeats. Like Milton the sonnet is a single vision of one theme. Inspiration as divine revelation becomes a force contradicting nature with its grace. Nature as creative tradition and history staggers under its force and can only witness a deterministic unfolding of events, symbolized by Helen and the Trojan war. The break in the line between the two tercets almost expresses the violated body falling back. It is also the shattering of history. The shift in thought is double. The tragic history of Leda’s children unfolds as it must. Historical determinism is indifferent, but could some privileged insight have been transmitted? We are back in the Platonic world of Dante and Petrarch. The poem is concrete immediate and dramatic, like Milton at his best. It also uses assonance with a cunning informality that gives the poem its stylistic immediacy. Yeats had an instinct for tradition, like all great poets. The fact the poem is a sonnet signifies the very tradition whose tragedy it expresses.

After Yeats, the Modernist sonnet was taken up by Auden. He is the only Twentieth Century poet of abiding fame who followed the form with consistency. He wrote about forty six which is high in comparison to his contemporaries. One of his earliest poems, The Secret Agent radically proposes an un-rhyming sonnet. It is a strange metaphoric evocation of his childhood Yorkshire landscape. The poet is an exposed spy awaiting elimination, yet his killer at least brings his isolation to an end. Violence can be a principal of action. Another early poem, Our Bias, shows a Yeatsian preoccupation with the conflict between time and reality. His two sonnet sequences, Sonnets from China and The Quest of 1938 and 1941 respectively seem the apotheosis of the Modernist sonnet. The mother-cell of both sequences is the poem he published later as Ganymede. It is closely modeled on Yeats’ Leda. Instead of the heterosexual swan, the divine is a same-sex eagle. Instead of the divine determining history, the divine cannot make any headway with the boy and yet the mortal learns the thrill of killing from the God. This is a direct reference to Auden’s Spanish Civil War poems. The power of the individual to dominate society, sexuality and the divine is thus a restatement of the puritan, Miltonic ideology. The sequence uses a Vico-based mythology of origin to prepare the way for the Ganymede poem in the first eight sonnets. In the next section, the praise of war is advocated despite the grief of history. The problem of suffering cannot be solved.

The language is reminiscent of Rilke, who had just died. Rilke is probably the other Modernist sonneteer whose work is known internationally. The Seventh Sonnet of Part One of the Sonnets to Orpheus states that the poet as Orpheus can praise even the dead or the suffering. The middle five poems relate this principle of action to the Sino-Japanese War. Auden seems not to have liked them and tried to hide them. They were originally part of a sequence called In Time of War, which he broke up. They certainly do nothing to defend themselves against the accusation of Neo-Colonial condescension. So what if the comfortable poet cannot solve the problem of suffering! The third part makes a direct tribute to Rilke. It also tries to address the situation in Europe, one which Auden evaded. The sonnets are difficult, but the language has some of the power of Milton to convey vision in metaphor, parable and metonym. As a technical achievement, they are remarkable for all the different phenotypes of the sonnet form they present. Yet none them is Auden at his best and they are all problematic. The second sequence, The Quest, seems almost to reflect and contradict the first. This time, instead of the past, the sonnets plot the future. The Ninth Sonnet seems to counter Ganymede with a reference to “a virgin made her maidenhead conspicuous to a God.” This blends Christian and classical images and skirts blasphemy. Auden was soon to adopt an Eliot-type Modernist, Christian lore. Yet the sequence fails to go beyond the demesne of the self as arbiter of social, sexual and spiritual values. So what if the poet brushes off the muse! Again the collection is prodigious in its variation of the sonnet form. There are no love-sonnets, however. Like most poets since the Seventeenth Century, Auden’s greatest verse was expressed in other forms. The sonnet is a mother to weak poets, but a bitch to the best.

Post-War verse was characterized by the occasional good sonnet, Edwin Muir’s love sonnet Love’s Remorse carries on the freshness of the Scots tradition started by Montgomerie. George Barker’s To My Mother is vibrant with humanity. William Empson too, in Camping Out innovated the sonnet, using two stanzas of seven lines each, rhyming in the second stanza with a tercet-like structure. Dylan Thomas’ sequence Poems for a Poem, published the same year as Auden’s first sequence 1938 eventually spanned ten sonnets on mytho-religious themes which hurl a dense yet fiery mixture of biblical and mythological themes onto the fourteen line canvas. They invert the sestet and octave. They use assonance in a fully Owenesque fashion and make use of the ideas of Hopkins and Eliot. They were met with bewilderment, as was the movement started by Treece and Hendry which was inspired by them. Recently poets such as C.K.Williams and others have found them more amenable. If you can find them, read them.

Vernon Scannell’s Any Complaints, Thomas Kinsella’s Scylla and Carybdis and David Holbrook’s Drought are fine sonnets, innovating with assonance. Of the so-called Movement poets, Geoffrey Hill stands out as a creator of sequences often of evanescent fourteen line elegies which emerged in Lachrymae and Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England as sonnets and then faded again. Hill’s particular concern with the power of the word to convey faith, even though it is not faith in the Word, gives his poetry a pure, incisive style that all too often falls into cleverly academic pastiche. The Movement whether it existed, or not is a good title for the poet of his times as he looks back at Auden’s Modernist lore of violence as well as looking down on the philistine, secular age is certainly an uncomfortable twist. Hill does not innovate the sonnet and uses them to lament the decay of the Platonic Puritanism that in my view impelled and impeded the tradition. His use of assonance is interesting as it shows even a deliberate attempt to use the form to denote a past faith is not without a nod to Owen and Dylan Thomas. Other Movement poets seldom used the form at all. Among poets known as The Group, the sonnet sequence of George McBeth, A Christmas Ring, succeeds in renewing the tradition of La Corona, which entailed repeating the opening line as the last of fourteen sonnets and repeating the last line of each as the opening line of the next. McBeth introduces a rather jarring metre based on a Hungarian one, but there is no rule about the metre in which a sonnet can be written, as the hendecasyllabic line simply is not a norm in English. The poem deserves greater attention than it has received so far.

Heaney’s sonnet sequences, Glanmore Sonnets and Clearances are significant in that they are both love-poems. The first is to his wife; the second to his mother. They too use the assonantial technique of Owens. The Glanmore Sonnets deliberately allude to the sonnet tradition. He quotes a line from Wyatt in the last sonnet. The intimate tone of the poems is striking, but Heaney is far from free of the descriptive, Romantic influence. There is no argument to the relationship, except some banter over Wordsworth. They are open celebrations of married, family life. They are fine poems, but Heaney has written finer in more open style. The second sequence, Clearances, deals with his memories of and the death of his mother. It is a poem of tender, restrained grief with a remarkable unity. The sonnets are as descriptive as the earlier ones, full of concrete detail and seldom make any break in point of view. As such they point back to Wordsworth. They resume rather than renew the tradition.

The Post-modern sonnet has all the life and none of the freedom of a protected animal. Its proponents tend to be academic and few launch their careers with it. The current smog of Structuralist verbiage tries to find a way round the bald facts of language. It is not the verbal artifice, but the “attitude de lecture” (Genette) that makes us attend to the poem. Technical devices are only one part of the “diectics” of a poem. There is a non-empty “signified” behind every poem being absorbed and reconstituted in the poem as the “signifiers”. The senselessness of such notions is that you never get to put the poem in a cyclotron and knock out the technical devices and then attend to the diectics. Yet unless you can do this you have no business claiming the existence of such imaginary beasts as Greimas’ “four term homology,” Kristeva’s “colliding signifiers,” Barthes’ “density out of formal continuity,” Todorov’s ”figuration,” or that canonized sprite Levi-Strauss’ “binary opposition.” It is these notions that are mere conventions while formal structures are part of tradition. They revisit us from the past like ancestors seeking to be remembered. Rhetoric is the prayer sheet by which we remember them.

Another fashionable point of view considers all poetry to be an allegory of the poetic act. An allegory is a metaphor, not a simile. Trotsky didn’t look like a pig in Animal Farm, a pig stands for the political attributes of the man, Trotsky. Now if every poem is a metaphor of itself then what attribute of the poem is either being compared, linked or referred to, when we call it an act of creation? It can be no more than the formal structure of the poem. Nothing can be metaphoric of itself, except something unseen or believed which is brought to bear on almost every aspect of it. The body is a metaphor of health, but a corpse is a metaphor of death. I can completely understand someone who believes that every poem is about writing a poem. Yet it makes no sense to say we cannot understand a poem except as about writing a poem. To understand a poem as a poem about writing a poem, we must first understand it is a poem.

Finally, it was fashionable in the eighties and nineties to decry traditional rhetorical structures, as if the soul of poetry was being maintained by broken and redundant tools. The failure of the new Structuralist rhetoric has at least re-instated them, though not always with the sophistication proper critical practice should assume. One structuralist critic tries to claim a metaphor “is a combination of two synechdoches.” A synechdoche moves from a part to whole or vice versa, as in “England beat Australia at cricket,”or “Victory by a hundred bats.” Yet this is not what a metaphor accomplishes. A metaphor refers to a function or frame in one argument, , and relates it to a function, or focus in another argument. This interweaving of arguments links concepts in the real world in such a way as to be jointly false. I.A. Richards uses the word “tenor” for reference and “vehicle” for relatum. Sapir calls the referent the “continuous term” and the relatum, the “discontinuous term.” Take “the monstrous anger of the guns” in Owens’ sonnet. If a gun were human it would be angry if a human were a gun he would be a monster. In no way is anger part of being a gun, or being made out of metal part of being human. O my Empson and my Leavis long ago!
I make this three paragraph protest because writing sonnets is a part of the tradition and many sub-traditions in English poetry. Unless a poet has a clear grasp of how the lyric tradition works, he or she is better off leaving it alone. Tradition renews itself by going back to its origins and bringing them to bear on the immediate now. The sonnet is the Ariadne’s thread of the British tradition that brings to light many features the contemporary collapse of poetry could use to recover its integrity. It is time to sharpen old critical tools, not to invest in blunt new ones.

Among the protected species, there are few good, current sonnets. I define the sonnet as any fourteen line poem showing either the rhyming, or assonance, structure of the tradition, or its thought divisions and preferably both. Innovations such as a different metre, inversion of the sestet and octave and a different rhyming scheme are welcome. Mere fourteen line unrhyming poems cannot be sonnets. Nor can so-called Meredithian sonnets be allowed. A sixteen line poem has a very different timbre. Douglas Dunn’s Little Rich Rhapsody changes tone carefully at the turn and concludes powerfully. Paul Muldoon’s Why Brownlee Left and Quoof are superb underminings of the pastoral and realist traditions which nonetheless strengthen the main tradition of the sonnet.

The intense intimacy of Christina Rossetti and the liveliness of Hopkins have yet to be equaled in our centuries. For me there is a clear frame in the Brookean love-sonnet yet to be used. The tradition of the sonnet as an argued love-poem too has yet to find a great poet in these days. The religious sonnet is a particular challenge as too close a following of the tradition will result in pastiche: too much of a departure fails to make use of it.

I had said I would return to the Myth of poetry. As this has been a far more extensive lesson, I will that until the next lesson. You may be thinking how on earth do I write a sonnet? I think there are two options for beginners. One is to take Auden’s option and write a poem that follows the argument, yet not necessarily the rhyme structure of the sonnet. Here it might be an idea to take two contrary positions and see if they can be reconciled using the Volta or turn in thought. This is the feature most neglected by contemporary poets. Another alternative could be to write a simple prose draft. On the other hand you might want to write a sonnet.The nature of a sonnet is intimate, addressed to a beloved and yet argumentative. It is the only lyric in which love can argue. Remember all the earlier features:
The immediate concrete sensory evocation, the use of short pithy words, the creation of a consistent picture, avoidance of adjectives and adverbs, the expression of belief and the making of narrative taut and spare. Good writing, Best wishes
Duncan McGibbon