New marking period. Vocabulary 3 is due today. As usual, 10 points off for each day late.
In class: a quick sonnet review as an extension of Ms. Kaser's work with you last Thursday. As well, we'll look at two contemporary sonnets by Sherman Alexie. See copies of the material below.
“A sonnet is fundamentally a dialectical construct which allows the poet to examine the nature and ramifications of two usually contrastive ideas, emotions, states of mind, beliefs, actions, events, images, etc., by juxtaposing the two against each other, and possibly resolving or just revealing the tensions created and operative between the two. “
O. K., so much for the fancy language. Basically, in a sonnet, you show two related but differing things to the reader in order to communicate something about them. Each of the three major types of sonnets (Italian or Petrarchan, Spenserian (from Spenser’s Faerie Queene) and Shakespearean) accomplishes this in a somewhat different way. There are, of course, other types of sonnets, as well, but since we are looking at Shakespeare…The English sonnet has the simplest and most flexible pattern of all sonnets, consisting of 3 quatrains of alternating rhyme and a couplet:
a b a b
c d c d
e f e f
g g
As in the Spenserian, each quatrain develops a specific idea, but one closely related to the ideas in the other quatrains.
Not only is the English sonnet the easiest in terms of its rhyme scheme, calling for only pairs of rhyming words rather than groups of 4, but it is the most flexible in terms of the placement of the volta, that is the turn, when a new idea is introduced.
Sonnet 29 William Shakespeare
When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, 5
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least,
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state, 10
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings 14
Blood Sonnets by Sherman Alexie
Years ago, in Spokane, a woman saved
A family of orphaned baby geese.
An amateur ornithologist, she raised
Those birds into adulthood, and then released
Them into the pond at Manito Park,
Where a dozen swans, elegant and white,
Tore the tame geese open and ate their hearts.
Of course, all of this was broadcast live
On the local news. Eyewitnesses wept.
My mother and I shrugged, not at death,
But at those innocent folks who believe
That birds don't murder, rape, and steal.
Like us, swans can be jealous and dangerous,
And, oh, so lovely, sure and monogamous.
When my father left me (and my mother
And siblings), to binge-drink for days and weeks,
I always wept myself into nosebleeds.
And sure, you might think this is another
Poem about a wounded father and son,
But honestly, the only blood was mine,
And it flowed from absence, not from a punch
Or kick. My father, drunk or not, was kind
And passive, and never lifted a fist
To strike. Drunk daddy only hit the road,
missed And I'd become the rez Hamlet who
His father so much that he bled red ghosts.
Years later, in Seattle, my nose bled
When my mom called and said, "Your father is dead."
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