An example of an English or Shakespearean sonnet, by William Shakespeare:
Those hours, that gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,
Will play the tyrants to the very same
And that unfair which doth excel;
For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter, and confounds him there;
Sap checked with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o’er-snowed and bareness everywhere:
Then were not summer’s distillation left,
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it nor no remembrance what it was:
But flowers distill’d, though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.
The poet expresses grief of the progress of the years, which will play havoc with the young man’s beauty. Human life is like the seasons, spring summer, autumn’s maturity and fruition, followed by hideous winter. Nothing is left of summer’s beauty except for that which the careful housewife preserves, the essence of roses and other flowers distilled for their perfume. Other than that, there is no remembrance of things beautiful. But once distilled, the substance of beauty is always preserved. Therefore the youth should consider how this beauty might be distilled.
Following is an example of a Shakespearean sonnet I have composed:
My Granddad
His silvery hair and little slippers,
His stubbly cheeks and wonderful smile,
He shows me the stars and the big dippers,
I hope he will see me walk down the aisle.
He sits in his chair, watching TV,
Reading a book or eating some fruit.
He is lazy sometimes, I must agree,
But he’s done his job and brought in the loot.
You may think he’s losing his mind,
To tell you the truth, I’m sure that he is,
But he can be so amusing, I find
I can’t help forget that he is.
The things he says are often quite bizarre
That people may think that his words could scar.
Tony Harrison
Tony Harrison was born in Leeds, in 1937. Harrison has a sense of utility and thinks ‘strong, powerful emotions are hard to measure without some form of doing it.” He illustrates his emotions through poetry, and often writes about his family. A lot of his inspiration comes from his earlier life, often based on his family and childhood. The following are one of Harrison’s most famous poems, in the form of two sonnets.
Them & [uz]
I
Ay ay! . . . stutterer Demosthenes
Gob full of pebbles outshouting seas –
4 words only of mi’art aches and . . . ‘Mine’s broken,
you barbarian, T.W.!’ He was nicely spoken.
‘Can’t have our glories heritage done to death!’
I played the Drunken Porter in Macbeth.
‘Poetry’s the speech of kings. You’re one of those
Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose!
All poetry (even Cockney Keats?) you see
‘s been dubbed by [λs] into RP,
Received Pronunciation, please believe [λs]
Your speech is in the hands of the Receivers.’
‘We say [λs] not [us], T.W.!’ That shut my trap.
I doffed my flat a’s (as in ‘flat cap’),
My mouth all stuffed with glottals, great
Lumps to hawk up and spit out . . . E-nun-ci-ate!
II
So right, yer buggers, then! We’ll occupy
Your lousy leasehold Poetry.
I chewed up Littererchewer and spat the bones
Into the lap of dozing Daniel Jones,
Dropped the initials I’d been harried as
And used my name and own voice: [uz] [uz] [uz],
Ended my sentences with by, with, from,
And spoke the language that I spoke at home.
RIP RP, RIP T.W.
I’m Tony Harrison no longer you!
You can tell the Receivers where to go
(and not aspirate it) once you know
Wordsworth’s matter/water are full of rhymes,
[uz] can be loving as well as funny.
My first mention in The Times
Automatically made Tony Anthony!
Tony Harrison sets out to equalize a historical and cultural wrong – the success of the establishment in identifying itself with great artists throughout history, who really came from the lower and average classes, and spoke a dialect language. The title “Them and [uz]” symbolises the different social classes, with ‘them’ representing the higher classes, and [uz] represent the people below them.
Looking at both sonnets, it is possible to see that both have similar structures. You can immediately see that Harrison has not used the traditional fourteen line structure for his sonnets, but instead has changed it, creating sixteen line sonnets. I think that he did this because the traditional structure of a sonnet is quite old, and he had decided to modernise it slightly. The first sonnet is made up of rhyming couplets, making it have a speech-like rhythm. The second sonnet begins with six rhyming couplets, but the last quatrain has alternating rhyme. This is quite effective, as half way through; the Volta is turned on, showing the contrast between the past and the present.
Both poems use the same type of language, and Harrison uses a lot of colloquial language in his sonnets, e.g. “uz”. I think that he does this to make his sonnets seem more personal, to show how his accent and language got in the way of him achieving his best at school.
In the first sonnet, Harrison talks about his school days. We are told that his teacher put him down because of his accent, and was given the part of the “Drunken Porter” in Macbeth, because of his background. I think that he felt excluded, because the part he was given was “the comic bit”, and would have camouflaged his way of speech. The teacher however does not seem to know that Keats spoke with a Cockney accent. Later in the sonnet, Harrison shows how Wordsworth spoke with an accent that rhymed “matter” with “water”.
In the first line, he uses the name “Demosthenes”. After looking carefully at the word, I noticed that it was an anagram of ‘these demons,’ a rather weird phrase to use in such a context. I think he may have used this because he was being haunted by his past, and how he was tormented at school. It talks of a tough background, whereas the other sonnet talks more about his growth, and how he got out of that barrier. This growth can be shown between the linguistic changes between the sonnets, as he changes from “Tony” to “Anthony” between the two. In the first sonnet, the teacher is talking about how poetry was the speech of kings. It seems as though Harrison felt as if poetry was a field closed to him due to his accent, however, this is quite ironic because years from then, he has become an excellent poet.
The sonnet is full of puns and wordplay – “chewed up litterchewer”, is a visual and auditory verbal gag, but also records a non-standard common pronunciation of “literature”. In “ending sentences with by, with, from”, Harrison perhaps goes against the rules stated by the Oxford dictionary, forbidding the placing of the preposition at the end of a clause or sentence. This goes back to Tony Harrison using colloquial language to make his writing more personal, as he may have believed that the way in which he spoke was correct, and the way in which other spoke was not.
There is much focus on the last line of the second sonnet, as it is obvious that Harrison has let go of his past and is concentrating on the present and future.
I think that Harrison’s sonnets are remarkable in how he is able to capture the reader’s attention with his own style and language. The subjects of his sonnets are different to those I normally read, and I think that the way he managed to put his emotions into words was simply amazing.
