Sonnets

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Sonnets

• Italian vs. English

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Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare

• 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 dimm'd
• And every fair from fair sometime declines,
• By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd
• But thy eternal summer shall not fade
• Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest
• Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st 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.

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Christina Rossettis Remember

• REMEMBER me when I am gone away,
• Gone far away into the silent land
• When you can no more hold me by the hand,
• Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.
• Remember me when no more day by day
• You tell me of our future that you plann'd
• Only remember me you understand
• It will be late to counsel then or pray.
• Yet if you should forget me for a while
• And afterwards remember, do not grieve
• For if the darkness and corruption leave
• A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
• Better by far you should forget and smile
• Than that you should remember and be sad.

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Sonnet XXX by Edna St. Vincent Millay

• LOVE is not all it is not meat nor drinkNor
  slumber nor a roof against the rain,Nor yet a
  floating spar to men that sinkAnd rise and sink
  and rise and sink againLove can not fill the
  thickened lung with breath,Nor clean the blood,
  nor set the fractured boneYet many a man is
  making friends with deathEven as I speak, for
  lack of love alone.It well may be that in a
  difficult hour,Pinned down by pain and moaning
  for release,Or nagged by want past resolution's
  power,I might be driven to sell your love for
  peace,Or trade the memory of this night for
  food.It well may be. I do not think I would.

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Henry Wadsworth Longfellows The Cross of Snow

• In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
• A gentle face--the face of one long dead
• Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
• The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
• Here in this room she died, and soul more white
• Never through martyrdom of fire was led
• To its repose nor can in books be read
• The legend of a life more benedight.
• There is a mountain in the distant West
• That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
• Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
• Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
• These eighteen years, through all the changing
  scenes
• And seasons, changeless since the day she died.

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Sonnet Quiz

• Complete the True/False Questions 1-6 on the
  handout
• Mark the Rhyme Scheme of this sonnet
• Identify what type it is explain why
• Draw lines and label the divisions as
  quatrains/couplet OR octave/sestet
• Label the iambic pentameter in line one by
  dividing the syllables into feet and labeling the
  unstressed/stressed pattern