hey, welcome to 12tone! 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.
that's the beginning of William Shakespeare's
Sonnet 18, probably one of the most famous
poems ever written, even if many people only
know the first line.
but this is a music channel, why are we talking
about poetry?
well, poetry and music are actually pretty
closely related.
writing a good poem requires a deep understanding
of sounds and rhythms.
it's like writing a song, except your instrument
is language.
plus it helps if you're writing lyrics, but
even if you're not, learning poetry makes
you a better musician, so today I want to
look at one of the most famous traditional
forms, the sonnet.
the first thing we need to consider here is
the meter. this is the underlying pulse that
everything is built on top of. in music, this
is easy, because someone is usually playing
that pulse, but poetry doesn't have a backing
band.
if a poet wants rhythm, they have to make
it themselves, and to do that they turn to
the only tool they've got: words.
humans don't naturally speak in monotone.
we accent certain parts of the words we're
saying, like I just did with "parts", "words",
and "say".
poets weaponize this natural tendency, carefully
arranging their words so that rhythms appear
just by reading them out loud.
this is the main difference between poetry
and normal writing.
a novelist doesn't really care where the emphasis
falls, and their prose tend not to have any
cohesive structure to them.
a poet, on the other hand, cares deeply, and
in order to describe the rhythms they create,
we've developed a system that we call feet.
a foot is a short repeating pattern of accents,
almost like a time signature but for words.
there's lots of different kinds, and we've
covered them before, but the important one
for our discussion of sonnets is the iamb,
which is two syllables with the accent on
the second one, like "hello", "goodbye", or
"explode".
compare those to the other main two-syllable
foot, the trochee, which puts the stressed
syllable first, like "summer", "music", or
"12tone".
as a brief aside, when I talk about the importance
of meter, I'm talking specifically about western
poetic traditions.
other kinds of poetry, most famously the haiku,
get their structure in different ways, but
in European poetry, meter is king.
anyway, back to the point.
most english-language sonnets are written
in what's called iambic pentameter, which
sounds scary but actually just means that
each line is made up of five iambs, like "shall
I compare thee to a summer's day".
notice that sometimes the foot can stretch
across words, so even though "summer" is a
trochee, it combines with "a" and "day" to
form two iambs instead.
the other important part of poetry is rhyme,
and here, sonnets get much more complicated.
there's a general agreement that sonnets are
14 lines long, but there's a couple different
ways to fill them in.
the simplest one is probably the Shakespearian
sonnet, which breaks it into three groups
of 4 lines with an extra two at the end.
a group of four lines is called a quatrain,
and each quatrain has the rhyme scheme ABAB,
meaning that the first line rhymes with the
third and the second rhymes with the fourth.
if we look back at Sonnet 18, we see "summer's
day" rhyming with "month of may" and "too
short a date" rhyming with "more temperate",
at least if you pronounce it like Shakespeare
would've.
the Shakespearian sonnet features three of
these quatrains, each with its own set of
endings, and then wraps up with a couplet,
which is just two lines that rhyme. in sonnet
18, we have "So long as men can breathe, or
eyes can see, So long lives this, and this
gives life to thee." this final couplet helps
wrap things up and signals the end of the
poem.
but that's not the only rhyme scheme you might
find in a sonnet. one of my favorites is the
Spenserian sonnet, which is a lot like the
Shakespearian sonnet, but a little more connected.
each of the quatrains still takes the form
ABAB, but in addition to that, the first line
also rhymes with the last line of the previous
quatrain.
so, if Sonnet 18 were a Spenserian sonnet,
the first and third lines of the second quatrain
would have to rhyme with "date".
but those are pretty similar, and they're
both relative newcomers: the earliest known
sonnets weren't English, they were Italian,
and these are best exemplified by the poet
Petrarch.
Petrarchan sonnets have a somewhat more involved
form.
the first 8 lines are combined into one giant
rhyme scheme called an octave, which means
something completely different to poets than
it does to musicians.
in a Petrarchan sonnet, the octave always
has the rhyme scheme ABBAABBA, which means…
well, it's kind of like a couplet sandwich:
you've got this couplet in the middle, in
between two more couplets that also rhyme
with each other, all stuck in the middle of
one last couplet that rhymes with our first
one.
if that sounds confusing, don't worry: all
that matters here is that the 8 lines are
all connected.
the second half is what's known as the sestet,
which covers the remaining 6 lines.
here, the structure is looser. sometimes they
have two rhymes, like the form CDCDCD, and
sometimes they have three, like CDECDE.
there's no hard and fast rules as to how this
part should be arranged, although technically
you're not supposed to end with a couplet.
people did it anyway, though, 'cause poets
are the original punk rockers.
this sudden change in rhyme scheme brings
up an important structural element in sonnets:
the turn, or volta.
sonnets are usually divided into two parts,
with a sudden thematic shift marked by a change
in sections.
in Sonnet 18, that change occurs between the
second and third quatrains: the first part
describes the subject as beautiful in the
moment, but the line "And every fair from
fair sometime declines" tells us that beauty
is impermanent.
however, at the start of the third quatrain,
we get the line "But thy eternal summer shall
not fade" and from there on out, the subject
and their beauty become immortalized by the
poem itself.
the volta is most commonly found in the ninth
line, especially in Petrarchan sonnets since
that's where we switch to the sestet, but
it can go anywhere, at least in theory.
you can even leave it out, if you're feeling
especially punk rock.
sonnets can be an interesting challenge because
they force you to think about language in
ways you may not be used to.
they have enough structure to them to guide
you through the process, but there's still
enough freedom to allow for a wide range of
expression.
they can be difficult, but they're great practice
and besides, they're just fun.
anyway, thanks for watching! if you want to
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subscribe, and keep on rockin'.
