Robert Frost reportedly said, “Writing poetry without rhyme is like playing tennis without a net.” The same could be said of meter-free poetry.
We’ve been working on poetic meter in English I Honors, and yesterday I sent them packing with deceptively simple homework: write a sonnet.
“What’s a sonnet?” they thought. Fourteen lines of iambic pentameter — da-Dum times five.
One by one they filed in today, and one by one they declared, “That homework was a nightmare!”
We took some individual lines and examined them, adding words and massaging the lines until they were roughly iambic pentameter. The homework for tonight: rework the first four lines so that they are all the proper meter. Just before the bell, I reminded them of the next hurdle in sonnets: “Remember, we’re working on English sonnets, so ultimately we’ll be having an a-b-a-b rhyme scheme for this first quatrain.”
The moans were overwhelming, but at the very least, they have a newly found respect for Shakespeare: “He wrote 154 sonnets.”
“Did he not have any friends?” one young man asked.