Think of your first crush. Or think of the time when you realized you had a best friend. Think of the moment you heard a melody that you wanted to dance to, or learn how to play yourself. Think of a meal, savory or sweet — or the perfect mix of both — when eating it sharpens and brightens everyone and everything else around you. That’s what I think it’s like to read a sonnet. A sonnet, or any poem for that matter, is something you experience.
My hope when I taught the form in middle school classrooms was not that students would “get it,” but that they would want to return to it. That they would be intrigued and curious enough to look again.
Once in a seventh grade classroom, we were reading Gary Schmidt’s The Wednesday Wars, a story that is in part about a boy who must read Shakespeare with his teacher. Holling Hoodhood, the main character, detests the Bard at first. Something happens, though, and I think trying to explain what that something is, is like trying to explain why you must get up and dance to the melody that tugs at everything within you. Understanding the sonnet is the least of Holling’s concerns. He just wants to interact with the language. “I decided to learn them all by heart — even if I didn’t know exactly what they meant.”
I think there is a lesson in what it means to learn in Holling’s decision to memorize the sonnets. Here, to learn feels like something that deepens with time and practice: like a relationship, like a friendship, like a dance.
With that attitude, I created a little sonnet project for my seventh-graders. I handed out several of Shakespeare’s sonnets and had students choose one to work with. They were to copy it by hand and, using a dictionary or a thesaurus, find meanings to any words they didn’t understand. They drew a picture and wrote a summary of what they thought the poem was about, and then finally they memorized it.
On an afternoon when leaves the color of burnt orange and brown grocery bags crunched from the cold and from their fall from tree limbs, telling us autumn was turning itself into another season, I brought in homemade cupcakes and my students, who’d already grown out of their new school pants, whose voices creaked and cracked at the emergence of something deeper, stood in front of their classmates and shared William Shakespeare’s words with one another.
It was an intense experience, sharing something from your heart that you don’t completely understand. Certainly, it’s an experience much like middle school — perhaps even in the world we are living in today. Perhaps the sonnet is the perfect form of poetry for us all to take to heart and wrestle with right now.
Try It
This week, copy, draw, summarize, and memorize a sonnet. Start with Shakespeare, if you wish. Jeanne Murray Walker’s book of sonnets, Pilgrim, You Find the Way by Walking, is one of my favorites as well. Here’s a worksheet you can try, or share with a parent or teacher you know.
Download a printable Experience a Sonnet worksheet
If you wish, write a sonnet. Share your poetry, your pictures, or maybe even your memorized sonnets in the comments below.
Featured Poem
Thanks to everyone who participated in last week’s poetry prompt. Here’s on from Megan Willome that we enjoyed.
Fences I Have Known
rock beside log,
for deer, for hogs,
from oil pipelines,
with barbed wire,
open, shut with padlocks
side by side we
drive past fences in the white truck
the ancient gives way to the next.
Spring in every direction. I’ve
never built a fence,
never dug a hole for a fence post,
never whitewashed one—but you, you
erected a fence around yourself
and on this bluebonnet drive
you hand me the key
Photo by David Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Callie Feyen.
Browse more poetry prompts
Browse the Shakespeare sonnets library (all 154!)
Browse the Top 10 Best Shakespeare Sonnets
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Megan Good says
“The World is Too Much With Us” gave a voice to my teenaged metamorphosis. “Getting & spending” characterized most of the highs of my childhood. It was how my family celebrated (or clung to) life. I saw little in nature that was mine, so I set out to change that. She is generous, and each day I inherit a bit more: naming wildflowers with my daughters, noticing the difference between chickadees & black-capped towhees, having a sacred space on the ocean-front that is mine.
You inspired me to memorize more than the first lines & copy it into my journal just for the pleasure of it!
Katie says
Callie,
I’m on my second read through Jeanne Murray Walker’s Pilgrim, You Find the Path by Walking.
Here is one of my favorites from the first section of poems:
THE MUSIC BEFORE THE MUSIC
When the concertmaster gestures to the oboe,
silence flutters through the massive hall.
Then comes the tuning up. Before that, though –
go back. Before the obedient violin falls
to his A, before the flutes, trombones,
and tuba head like horses in the same direction
to plow and plant one of Beethoven’s
great fields. Go back.
Hear the nickering run
of a scale, the brash cymbal. A bright lash
of squeaks, the wigged-out chug of a bass viol,
scripscraps of bang and clank, a swirling flash
of flotsam. Go back to unselfconscious style
before style. A grace that’s not yet botched –
before they know that they’re being heard or watched.
Oh, the alliteration in that last stanza:)