The sonnet is my favorite form of poetry. I am especially fond of the Shakespearean form of abab cdcd efef gg. Who can not help liking something with 14 lines of iambic pentameter? Since April is National Poetry Month I thought I would join the girls in trying to post a poem a day but I am notoriously better at coming up with ideas than executing them and I am already 3 days behind.

I thought to jazz it up I would post sonnets. Have you ever written a sonnet? I am afraid I am rather like Shakespeare when it comes to sonnets; I don’t have any trouble cribbing from others, stealing rhythms and rhymes. You know, I don’t blame Shakespeare one bit nor does it make me think less of him. Aren’t all great writers essentially wonderful mimics? There is no new thing under the sun. Why give artists credit for pretending there is? And even though I mentioned myself in the same breath as Shakespeare I have no pretensions about my own writing. The scope of Shakespeare’s genius truly baffles.

Maybe by the end of the month I will post one of my own sonnets and maybe I will even post chapter 4 of Death of a Blogger but don’t cross your fingers, hold your breath or nag. I am afraid I won’t be able to finish that tome until I get back from the God is Not Mad at You Conference and I haven’t even decided when that is.

But here is a sonnet written Arthur Hugh Clough

VII

Shall I decide it by a random shot?
Our happy hopes, so happy and so good,
Are not mere idle motions of the blood;
And when they seem most baseless, most are not.
A seed there must have been [up]on the spot
Where the flowers grow, without it ne’er they could.
The confidence of growth least understood
Of some deep intuition was begot.
What if despair and hope alike be true?
The heart, ’tis manifest, is free to do
Whichever Nature and itself suggest;
And always ’tis a fact that we are here;
And with being here, doth palsy-giving fear,
Whoe’er can ask, or hope accord the best?

I like the line “What if despair and hope alike be true?” Certainly we would not know hope if we didn’t know despair. Why not choose hope?

This is not a Shakespearian sonnet. The rhyme pattern is abba abba ccdeed which is rather unusual. I think it would still be classified as the Italian form but I could be wrong.

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