Shakespeare’s Sonnets

When writing a sonnet in the style of Shakespeare, there are some rules you need to keep. This type of poetry is required to follow a specific format including length, rhythm, and rhyme scheme. To write a sonnet correctly, to follow this process:

Select a subject to write your sonnet about as Shakespearean sonnets are on tradition grounded as love poems. Write your lines in iambic pentameter.

Write in one of the various standard rhyme schemes such as Shakespearean, Petrarchan, or Spenserian.

Necessary Format: Format the sonnet using three quatrains followed by one couplet.
Form your sonnet as evidence that builds up as it goes from one metaphor to the next. Be sure that every line of the sonnet has ten syllables that conform to the Iambic Pentameter. Guarantee your sonnet is precisely 14 lines and the last syllable on each line rhymes with another last syllable on a previous line.

The Shakespeare Rhyming scheme
If you’re writing the most common kind of sonnet, the Shakespearean sonnet, then the rhyme scheme for the last syllable of the line is as follows:

A
B
A
B

C
D
C
D

E
F
E
F

G
G

Every ‘A’ last syllable of the line must rhyme, and every ‘B’ syllables rhyme and so forth. You’ll see this kind of sonnet consists of three quatrains. Or four consecutive lines of verse that make up a stanza or division of lines in a poem, and one couplet (two successive rhyming lines).

How a Sonnet Tells the Story
Ah, but there’s more to a sonnet than just the structure of it. A sonnet is also an argument — it builds up a certain way. And how it builds up is related to its metaphors and how it moves from one metaphor to the next. In a Shakespearean sonnet, the argument builds up like this:

First quatrain: An exposition of the central theme and primary metaphor.

Second quatrain: Theme and metaphor extended or complicated; often, some ingenious example is given.

Third quatrain: Peripeteia (a twist or conflict), often introduced by a “but” (very often leading off the ninth line).

Couplet: Reviews and leaves the reader with a new, closing image.

One of Shakespeare’s best-known sonnets is Sonnet 18, which follows this pattern:

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.

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest,
Nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest.

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The arrangement of a Sonnet like this:

First quatrain: Worship, worship, excellent.

Second quatrain: Worship, worship, excellent.

Third quatrain: But, even if the bad thing happens, still excellent.

Couplet: Future excellent.

So now you see Shakespeare was a master of the english language and has been remembered over four-hundred years after his death.