The Difficulty of Crafting a Shakespearean Sonnet -- A Self Critique

When rock is stripped bare of Nature’s kind garb And left exposed to battering ocean waves, Which scar eternal like poisonous barbs, And animals haste to refuge of caves; When watchèd boughs are nude or yellow clad And frightful cold impregnates autumn air, When weary limbs beg rest from journey bad And summer’s green is lost from my mind’s care; When Time cruel strikes and murders sweet life And I watch the rape, rape of all beauty, And my mind’s travels are filled with pure strife, No rest or respite sought I from my duty:             To set verse immortal ‘gainst Time’s furor             And praise the world’s worth to future jurors. My sonnet follows a basic structure Shakespeare utilized; the successive quatrains each finesse and change the tone and theme of the poem and the couplet adds a fourth aspect. Sonnets 12, 60, and 73 are all examples of Shakespeare’s 4-4-4-2 scheme (less so for “Sonnet 12”) – which my poem attempts to imitate with limited success – however Shakespeare has several sonnets that also fail to perfectly adhere and instead have a 4-4-3-3 structure. My sonnet focuses on themes Shakespeare constantly explored – the passage of time, destruction of beauty, and concept of poetry standing as a sort of autotelic memorial. I also attempted to use language frequent in the Shakespeare’s sonnets, particularly, “waves,” “eternal,” “Time,” “boughs,” “weary,” “rape,” “sweet,” “beauty,” “travels,” and “praise.” I made the decision to structure my sonnet as I did for three reasons: Shakespeare revisited certain themes many times – suggesting no individual sonnet could fully capture a concept; the 4-4-4-2 scheme offers a blueprint to attempt to craft a sonnet on; and Shakespeare explored themes with sonnets that are alternatively convoluted/obscure or fairly straightforward. I often had a difficult time figuring out what certain sonnets meant and so I attempted to create a sonnet on the opposite spectrum – Shakespeare at his most explicit and straightforward – essentially a blueprint for the convoluted sonnets addressing the themes I focused on. Shakespeare explicates many of the same statements I made in my lines, but never all in a single sonnet. My third quatrain and couplet were an attempt to clarify Shakespeare’s goals and thoughts:      When Time cruel strikes and murders sweet life      And I watch the rape, rape of all beauty,      And my mind’s travels are filled with pure strife,      No rest or respite sought I from my duty:                  To set verse immortal ‘gainst Time’s furor                  And praise the world’s worth to future jurors. However, I encountered many difficulties in creating a Shakespearean sonnet. My main issue was meter – Shakespeare’s sonnets, as a whole, tend to have very few variant feet, and, when variant feet are used, it is typically for a purpose; for example, “Sonnet 60” uses seven trochaic feet as line openers (“Like as,” “So do,” “Crawls to,” “Crookèd,” “Time doth,” “Feeds on,” and “Praising”) – but the trochees speed up the poem and evoke the “haste” of the “waves” and “Time.” I found my initial attempts to be predominately trochaic rather than iambic meter and had to rewrite several times to attempt to correct the mistake. Despite my attempts, I still ended up with upwards of 25 variant feet, some of which I think serve a purpose in the poem, others which I simply could not figure out how to convert into iambs without major changes; I had trouble doing the prosody on a poem I was writing – typically I have no trouble doing prosody, but I often second guessed myself when creating a sonnet since I was not sure if the line actually read as I thought or if I merely wanted it to read a certain way. I focused on meter specifically for the second quatrain, which has far fewer variant feet than any other section of my sonnet, but the line “when weary limbs beg rest from journey bad” irks me (“bad” seems obviously tacked on for the sake of meter). Furthermore, some of the lines I thought worked best are highly sporadic in meter (“And I watch the rape, rape of all beauty” – “And praise the world’s worth to future jurors”). Still, parts of my sonnet turned out fairly well; I think I caught a sense of Shakespeare’s language at moments. I was happy with the lines: “When watched boughs are nude or yellow clad / And frightful cold impregnates autumn air.” When I consider my poem as a sonnet written by Shakespeare, I believe it fairs better than “Sonnet 145” – but it still looks more like a working draft instead of a complete sonnet – especially when compared to the level of the three sonnets I used as guidelines (“Sonnet 12,” “Sonnet 60,” and "Sonnet 73”). The third quatrain is a metrical mess and I had to use the last line to set up the couplet’s turn. The first quatrain is not balanced with two lines to an image, making the fourth line seem bare. The third line needs tweaking. The second quatrain works well, but I dislike line seven. The language of the third quatrain conveys what I wanted it too, but it needs to be finessed: the rhyme words all being trochees seems amateurish; lines eleven and twelve are overly straightforward; and “cruel strikes” does not work for me in line nine. The couplet, despite being all over the place in terms of meter, works for me, but would work better with quatrains that rigidly adhered to iambic pentameter. I believe that would give the wild meter of the couplet a purposefully rebellious tone – something that is often present in Shakespeare’s sonnets.