1. Shakespearian Sonnets!
Check out the three sonnets in your packet and work with a partner or by your self to determine the similarities all of them share.

2. Shakespeare’s sonnets

3. About Shakespeare’s Sonnets:
He wrote 154 of them (!)
In his sonnets he focuses on love, lust, friendship, mortality, and immortality

4. The format of a sonnet 14 lines
Lyric poems (short poems with one speaker expressing thoughts and feelings)
Rhyme scheme:
ABAB
CDCD
EFEF GG
So three quatrains (three stanzas with four lines each where every other line rhymes), then one rhyming couplet (one stanza with two lines where those two lines rhyme)

5. Rhymes in a Sonnet Uses both ear-rhymes and eye-rhymes
Ear-rhymes: rhymes in sound (like “increase” and “decrease”)
Eye-rhymes: rhymes in sight (like “compare” and “are”

6. Sonnets use Iambic Pentameter
Each line has 5 metric feet with alternately unstressed and stressed syllables
Each line is ten syllables long
The accent is always on the second syllable
By “iambic”, it means the rhythm goes from an unstressed syllable to a stressed one
This happens in words like: divine, caress, bizarre, and delight
The underlying beat, then, is like a heartbeat

8. Please work independently to complete the syllables worksheet

9. Stressed and unstressed syllables
This is what allows the same word or words to take on different meanings without a different sound.

10. Discus vs Discuss

11. Present vs Present

12. I scream vs ice cream

13. It also can be the difference between an American accent and a British one

14. Aluminum vs aluminum

15. Metric feet \ U \ U \ U \ U \ U
Shall I| compare| thee to| a sum|mer’s day?

16. Use your knowledge of iambic pentameter to break sonnet 18 into:
Metric feet
Stressed and unstressed syllables

17. Read sonnet 18 (forgetting about the form and rules and such) with a partner
And try to identify:
What is the subject of the poem?
What is the purpose of the poem?
How does the speaker feel about summer days?
How does the speaker feel about his/her lover?
What does comparing these two things allow this speaker to say?

18. Read sonnet 130 with a partner
And try to answer:
How is this poem drastically different than Sonnet 18?
Why does the speaker explain his/her love in this way?
How is the couplet different from the rest of the poem?

19. Tonal Shift in Poetry
Poems are exploration of life and love and experience! They are often written to portray, not just a realization or understanding, but also the journey a person must take to reach that realization or understanding.
What do the first three quatrains say, and then what does the last couplet say?

20. Read sonnet 29 independently and Identify (in this order):
What emotions this speaker feels throughout the poem
The tonal shift
The message Shakespeare might be sending through that journey and shift
The metric feet
The stressed and unstressed syllables