Listening to Poetry: Sounds of the Sonnet

Activity 1. Learning from Nonsense

• Hand out copies of "Jabberwocky," by Lewis Carroll, available from the EDSITEment-reviewed Academy of American Poets. Give students time to read it silently on their own. Ask the class to summarize the action of the poem, and make sure everyone has a sense of the scene that is being described.
   
• SOUND EXPERIMENT 1: Have students stand up and assume a bearing appropriate to the poem—boastful, pompous, as if recounting an exaggerated account of their own heroism, perhaps waving their imaginary vorpal swords in the air.

  Now have everyone sit down and hunch over the poem. Ask them to read as if they were recounting a horror story around a campfire. Students should speak in a raspy or creepy voice and fill their speech with dramatic pauses, gestures, grimaces, and wide-eyed staring to punctuate their tales of fear and terror.

  Discuss the contrasting effects of these two styles of reading. Did anyone picture the scene being described? How can we understand and even visualize the events, if most of the words used to describe those events are nonsensical? How is meaning conveyed, if not by the literal meanings of words? On the board, try to list the ways that a poem, particularly a poem read aloud, conveys its meaning. Note that one of the reasons the poem conveys meaning is that its nonsense words are not, in fact, complete nonsense, that they convey information because they correspond to recognizable parts of speech—nouns, verbs, adjectives. Use this to introduce the main point of this exercise and lesson (see the guiding question, above). (If you want to capitalize on this moment to review grammar, see Jabberwocky Nonsense, a WebQuest designed to teach students about the parts of speech; the link is provided by the Lewis Carroll Home Page, a link on the EDSITEment-reviewed Academy of American Poets. For more activities related to the writing of Lewis Carroll, see the EDSITEment lesson plan, Childhood Through the Looking Glass.)

  Point out that poetic meter is another kind of underlying form or structure in poetry that affects meaning. Explain that iambic meter refers to accentual feet of an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable. To illustrate the sound and effect of iambic meter, read aloud stanzas five and six of "Jabberwocky"; notice that in one of the lines—"Come to my arms, my beamish boy!"—the iamb is reversed at the beginning. This reversed iamb is called a trochee. (Here's a mnemonic: You can remember the difference between iamb and trochee by saying iamb the way Popeye might say it: "i AMB what i AMB." To remember "trochee," say it quickly as if you were clearing your throat: "TRO chee, TRO chee.") Point out to students that a good poet will always vary the meter, and that these variations contribute to meaning. How, for example, does the metrical variation in the line, "Come to my arms…," change the feeling of the line, and therefore contribute to its meaning? How does it enhance the story being told?

• SOUND EXPERIMENT 2: The purpose of this experiment is to demonstrate how meter is as much a matter of what we expect to hear as it an intrinsic property of the words themselves. Meter in English poetry, as we will see, has subjective as well objective aspects.

  Let's start with the subjective aspects of meter. An example of a sound pattern that exists only in our minds is the tick-tock of clocks. Objectively, the sound might be a steady tick-tick-tick, but the pattern-loving human mind will hear tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. Another example: have you ever been kept awake by a dripping faucet that seemed to take on rhythmic pattern--drip, drop, drippety-drippety, drip, drop?

  In a sense, the human mind is wired for poetry. To illustrate the role of pattern in our minds, have the class reread (everyone at the same time) stanzas four and five while exaggerating the iambic meter (what Shakespearean actors call a "singsong" reading). The idea here is to imprint the pattern as strongly as possible in the minds of listeners. Next, have one person reread the same stanzas with normal emphasis; you might want to do this, rather than asking a student to read, because it's important this time to avoid any trace of iambic "singsong." This experiment can have some surprising effects! Discuss what effect hearing the poem read the second time had on listeners. Could they still "hear" the strong ta-DA of the iambic beat just below the surface?

• In the next experiment in sound, we will learn how that "surface" constitutes a second level of pattern: rhythm. As we will see in our experiments with the sounds of Shakespeare's Sonnet 29, a skilled poet is able to play meter and rhythm against each other in meaningful ways.

Activity 2. The Shakespearean Sonnet

• Hand out a copy of Sonnet 29, "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes…," available from the EDSITEment-reviewed Academy of American Poets. Give students time to read the poem silently, and to ask questions about any unfamiliar words or syntax. As a class, discuss the literal meaning of the poem: what is happening? What is the speaker feeling? Where and why does that feeling change?
   
• SOUND EXPERIMENT 3: resembles the first sound experiment we did with "Jabberwocky." First, have everyone stand up on their feet, assuming a defiant and boastful stance. All students should now read Sonnet 29 with as much bombast and triumph as possible. Now have students sit down and read the entire poem in a whisper. They should not read too quickly, and they should read as if they were very sad (perhaps punctuating their speech with heavy sighs).

  Neither of these readings, of course, is entirely accurate. Discuss their different effects. Which one best fits the poem? Where are the places that do not fit one style of delivery or the other? Are there emotional shifts in the poem? If so, where are they, and how could a person reading aloud modulate his or her voice to express those shifts accurately, perhaps by combining aspects of the two delivery styles we practiced earlier? As you discuss particular lines or sections, ask your students to mark down the points at which these emotional shifts occur.

  Now step back a bit and look at the text on the paper. What kinds of punctuation do you see? Where do the pauses fall? Which kind of pause do students think should be longest: semicolon, dash, or comma? If you look at the poem as a whole, could you divide pieces of it into stand alone sentences? Where would you make the division? Finally, look at lines 11 and 12: "Like to the lark at break of day arising / From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven's gate." Notice that the syntax of the sentence runs over the end of line 11: point out to students that this is called enjambment. Again, have students note these features on their copy of the poem.

  All the sentence and phrase level features we have been examining constitute the rhythm of the poem. Ordinary conversational speech has its own distinct rhythms, as do formal speeches or sports broadcasts or rap music. Rhythm, like meter, expresses meaning. Compare the notes you made on the rhythm of the poem to the places where you found emotional shifts. What kinds of correspondences do you find?

• SOUND EXPERIMENT 4: Now redo the exercise described in sound experiment 2, this time with Sonnet 29. Have the entire class read the sonnet with an exaggerated emphasis on the iambic meter. (Before you read, this might be a good time to introduce the term iambic pentameter: demonstrate the meaning of this term by writing one line of the sonnet on the board, and dividing it into five metrical feet.) Tell students to force the iambic ta DA, ta DA, even if it doesn't seem quite right for the line they are reading.
  
  For it turns out that it difficult to read Sonnet 29 in this way, despite the fact that it's iambic pentameter. Did your students find that there were places where it was hard to maintain the iambic meter? Was this harder or easier than reading Carroll's poem in an iambic "singsong"? What might account for the difference?
  
  Point out to students that the places where they may have stumbled, where they felt that they were forcing the iambic meter upon the words, probably indicate metrical variation. Such variation is employed for expressive purposes--and Shakespeare's meter is constantly varied (in fact, it is sometimes difficult to find lines of unvaried iambic pentameter). As a class, try to locate the places of metrical variation in this poem, the places where you stumbled in your singsong reading. Now, look again at your notes on the rhythm of the poem and its emotional shifts. Is there any correspondence? Does metrical variation contribute to meaning in this poem? (Don't worry if you can't assign a meaning to every single variation-just have students keep these places in mind as they complete the next two experiments in sound.)

• SOUND EXPERIMENT 5: Now ask students to read the poem silently to themselves. Ask them to try to imagine a voice not their own. It could be a deep male voice, or a woman's voice. They could even try to imagine Shakespeare's voice. The point is to imagine the sound of a voice and to try to really "hear" it in their minds. After everyone has had a chance to read through the sonnet in this way, discuss any discoveries they made about the sonnet. Could they hear the pauses, the rhythm, as well as the expressive variations in meter? Could they feel the places in the poem where an emotional shift occurred?

• Now may be a good time to introduce some of the formal terms that are used to describe the structure of a sonnet—what makes the sonnet a sonnet and not something else? You might think of these as a third level of form, the foundation "beneath" the levels of meter and rhythm. Introduce the distinction between a Shakespearean or English sonnet, which divides its 14 lines into three quatrains and a couplet, with the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg; and a Petrarchan sonnet (the Italian original from which the English imitation was derived), which divides its 14 lines into an eight-line octave and a six-line sestet, with the rhyme scheme abbaabba cdecde. An example of a Petrarchan sonnet, translated into English but retaining the Petrarchan rhyme scheme, is Thomas Wyatt's "The long love that in my heart doth harbor"(see the Sonnet Bank below for more details).
  
  Petrarch's model had established the custom of presenting a problem, situation, or incident in the octave, followed by a resolution in the sestet. But English poets eventually developed a more flexible sonnet form which could be divided not only into octave and sestet, in the manner of Petrarch, but also into three quatrain-length variations on a theme followed by an epigrammatic couplet. Shakespeare uses this form, quatrains followed by couplet, to embody the nuances of shifting emotion and thought. On their copies of the poem, have students write letters corresponding to different line endings. Note how these groups of rhyme create quatrains. Draw lines indicating the divisions into quatrains and a final couplet. How does this form correspond to the shifts of rhythm, meter, and emotion that you detected earlier? How do sound and formal structure (the three quatrains followed by epigrammatic couplet) work together to produce an emotional effect on the reader?

• SOUND EXPERIMENT 6 (Optional): This exercise involves watching an online video, available from the Favorite Poem Project, a link from the EDSITEment resource Internet Public Library. To view it, you will need to have "Real Player," which can be downloaded from the site; before sharing this with your students, make sure your school's computer has sufficient connection speed to play the video.
  
  On the video, Daniel McCall, an 81-year-old retired anthropologist, speaks about how a poem he memorized when he was in seventh grade, Shakespeare's Sonnet 29, has stayed with him all his life. Sometimes there is a strange and wonderful alchemy between the performer of a poem and the poem itself. The poem takes on something of the personality of the speaker, and the personality of the speaker is revealed in the words of the poem. After speaking briefly about his life, Daniel McCall recites Sonnet 29, conveying to us a sense of words imbued with a lifetime of experience and feeling. (Just possibly, his example might inspire some students to memorize a sonnet themselves!)

Activity 3. Student Project

• SOUND EXPERIMENT 7: The final experiment in sound is a student activity for individuals or groups. To complete it, your students will need to have access, either inside or outside of class, to the online links provided in the Sonnet Bank (below). Conceivably, you might download a selection of sonnets for your students, but this is unadvisable, unless you have a great deal of time on your hands! Alternatively, you could provide students with a printout of the list only, and make the task of locating and copying their chosen sonnet part of the assignment (although this may be difficult with some of the lesser-known writers).
  
  Students will also need to have access to a tape recorder. In case access to tape recording activity is limited, the exercise below describes both individual and small group options.

• Start by sharing with your students some details about the history of the sonnet form. Provide students with a little bit of historical context. Perhaps the central fact in the history of the sonnet in English is that it has always been an old form, an inherited form. As we have seen, when Wyatt and Surrey began writing sonnets for the first time in the sixteenth century, they were adapting a well-established Italian model that had been around for more than a century. The ironic intent of Shakespeare's My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun (Sonnet 130), for example, presupposes a knowledge of how the beloved is traditionally praised in sonnet sequences. Yet sonnet writers from the sixteenth to the twentieth century have continued to find ways of making this old form new, stretching and tweaking and morphing its features to suit new circumstances, new tastes, new purposes. When Romantic poets John Keats and William Wordsworth revived the sonnet form in the early nineteenth century, they were rescuing and reinventing a poetic form that had been out of fashion for over a century.
   
• Now that they know a little about the various stages of sonnet development, students are ready to look through the contents of the Sonnet Bank see below) and choose an interesting sonnet from any historical period. You could have students choose sonnets individually, or, to ensure coverage of all four historical periods, ask students to count off by fours and having those in group 1 look at Elizabethan, group 2 at Romantics, and so on.
   
• Their assignment will be to 1) read and understand the sonnet thoroughly, looking up any terms that need defining; 2) learn about the sonnet's author (in the case of some the more obscure writers, this may be a challenge; in other instances, they may find the amount of information a bit overwhelming); 3) write a few paragraphs answering the question "how does sound influence meaning in your chosen sonnet?"; and 4) produce a tape recorded performance of the poem. The recordings could be produced individually, in pairs, or in groups; if in groups, it might be feasible to produce the recordings as a class activity. In any case, encourage students to try some of the sound experiments discussed above on their own; students may wish to make a number of recordings before they settle on one that seems the best.
   
• Have students present their recordings to other students as a class; alternatively, you might have students share the recordings they made in small groups, then have each group choose a favorite. Before playing a selection from their tape, students should say a few words about the writer they chose and the period in which he or she wrote. Students should also talk about the kinds of sound experiments they performed, as well as how they finally settled on one particular performance as the best. In the course of listening to a wide variety of sonnets, you should also have opportunities to discuss some of the similarities and differences between sonnets of different time periods.

The Sonnet Bank
 

1. Elizabethan and 17th Century Sonnets

• Sonnets by Shakespeare, from the EDSITEment-reviewed Academy of American Poets:
  "From you have I been absent in the spring..." (Sonnet 98)
  "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun" (Sonnet 130)
  "Not marble nor the guilded monuments" (Sonnet 55)
  "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" (Sonnet 18)
  "That time of year thou mayst in me behold" (Sonnet 73)
  "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought" (Sonnet 30)
  "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes" (Sonnet 29).
  A facsimile edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets. (A copy of the 1609 Quarto, in the Huntington Library. Available through a link on Mr. Shakespeare and the Internet, which has additional background materials for the study of Shakespeare's sonnets.)
  "Like as the waves make toward the pebbl'd shore" (Sonnet 60). (From the University of Toronto English Library, a link on Mr. Shakespeare and the Internet.)
  "Let me not to the marriage of true minds" (Sonnet 116). (From the Atlantic Poetry Pages, a link on Academy of American Poets; if your computer supports RealAudio, you can also listen to clips of Sonnet 116 read by four contemporary poets.)
   
• Thomas Wyatt, "The long love that in my heart doth harbor." (From Luminarium, a link from the EDSITEment-reviewed Mr. Shakespeare and the Internet. Note: This sonnet is an English translation of Petrarch's Sonnet 109.)
• John Milton, "Methought I saw my late espoused saint." (From the University of Toronto English Library, a link on Mr. Shakespeare and the Internet; annotated version.)
• John Donne, "Death Be Not Proud" (Holy Sonnet 10). (From Academy of American Poets.)
• Lady Mary Wroth, "Come darkest Night, becomming sorrow best," "Flye hence, O Joy, no longer heere abide," as well as a number of other sonnets by Wroth. (From the website One Phoenix: Four Seventeenth-Century Women Poets, a link on the EDSITEment-reviewed Internet Public Library.)

2. Romantic Poets

• Lord Byron, "On the Castle of Chillon."
• John Keats, "Bright Star," "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer." (From Academy of American Poets.)
  "When I have Fears that I may Cease to be."
• Percy Shelley, "Ozymandias". (From the EDSITEment-reviewed Romantic Circles High School; hypertext with links to additional materials.)
• Horace Smith, "On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below." (Romantic Circles High School; hypertext with links to additional materials and to Shelley's famous poem on same subject.)
• Mary Tighe, "Sonnet Addressed to My Mother"; dedicatory poem for her longer allegorical work, Psyche. (Electronic edition prepared by Harriet Kramer Linkin, Melissa Davis, and Jerry Parks (July, 1997); re-formatted and corrected by Harriet Kramer Linkin (September, 2001); a link on Internet Public Library.)
• Helen Maria Williams, "Sonnet to Hope," "Sonnet to Twilight," and numerous other sonnets. (From British Women Romantic Poets, a link on the EDSITEment-reviewed Romantic Circles.)
• William Wordsworth, "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802" and "The World Is Too Much With Us, Late and Soon." (From Academy of American Poets.)

3. British Victorian and 19th Century American Poets

• Louisa Sarah Bevington, "I Thought I was quite happy yesterday" and several other sonnets. (From the EDSITEment-reviewed Victorian Women Writers Project.)
• Elisabeth Barrett Browning, "How Do I Love Thee?" and "My Letters! all dead paper. . ." (Sonnet XXVIII). (From Academy of American Poets.)
  "If Thou Must Love Me," "When our two souls stand up erect and strong," and several other selections from Browning's collection, Sonnets from the Portuguese. 
• Christina Rossetti, "REMEMBER me when I am gone away" and "Aloof." 
• Edward Arlington Robinson, "Oh for a poet for a beacon bright." (From the EDSITEment-reviewed American Verse Project.)
• Emma Lazarus, "STILL northward is the central mount of Maine" and "The New Colossus." (From the EDSITEment-reviewed American Verse Project.)
• Dante Rossetti, "A Sonnet is a moment's monument"; item number 163 in an extensive selection of Rosetti's sonnets from Ballads and Sonnets (1881). (From The Rossetti Archive, a link on the EDSITEment-reviewed Victorian Web.)
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "O River of Yesterday, with current swift," and other sonnets in Another Rosary of Sonnets (1878). 
• Edgar Allen Poe, "Sonnet to Zante" and "Sonnet to Science." (From the EDSITEment-reviewed American Verse Project.)

4. 20th Century Americans

• Branch, Anna Hempstead (1875-1937) , "A Sonnet for the Earth" and a number of other sonnets from Branch's Shoes that Danced and Other Poems. (From the American Verse Project.)
• Louise Bogan, "Sonnet." (From the EDSITEment-reviewed Modern American Poetry.)
• Gwendolyn Brooks, "The Sonnet-Ballad." (From Academy of American Poets.)
• Edna St. Vincent Millay, "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why." (From Academy of American Poets. There is also a selection of six sonnets by Millay, originally published in the volume Renascence; available online at the Women's Studies Database Reading Room, a link from Academy of American Poets.)
• Robert Frost, "Oven Bird." 
• Countee Cullen, "Yet Do I Marvel" and "From the Dark Tower." (From Modern American Poetry.)

• "You Kiss By the Book": Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (grades 9–12)
• Writing Poetry Like the Pros (grades 3–5)

Selected EDSITEment Websites

• Academy of American Poets
• American Memory Project
• Modern American Poetry
• Mr. Shakespeare and the Internet
• Victorian Web
• Victorian Women Writers Project