The Art-A-Thon event that I attended on March 7 was called “How to Read a Sonnet.” My first assumption was it was going to be long and boring because I was not into reading poems as much. I still decided to attend it because I wanted to experience something new. The sonnet our instructor focused to analyze on was by Shakespeare. It did not a specific title; it was just called Sonnet 20 because Shakespeare wrote a big with multiple sonnets. First, I discovered the breakdown on how to identity a sonnet. I learned that the word “sonnet” means “little sound.” A sonnet is known to have 14 lines with 10 syllables each line so 140 syllables in total. Sonnet 20 has 11 syllables throughout every line; I suppose Shakespeare can do whichever because he is Shakespeare. a group of sonnets, like the book Shakespeare made, is called a sonnet sequence. Sonnets tend to explicitly be about love and romance whether it is about either a woman or a man, but a sonnet is decided to only one person. A sonnet follows a specific pattern; it will be 4 quatrains then one couplet. A quatrain is when the poem is put to rhyme in an “a, b, a, b” pattern. The rhyming will be with the last word of the line after the upcoming one. A couplet is the basic rhyming after the next line like “g, g.”
The most important part and point in attending this event was to learn how to read a sonnet and our instructor gave us three questions that must be answered beforehand.
- What does it sound like?
- What does it mean?
- How does the sound affect the meaning?
It can be hard to answer these questions, but with enough discussion and hearings as we did, we were enough to figure it out. We listened to the sonnet read aloud five times and began to analyze the meaning line by line. Overall, we concluded that it can be about either a man or a woman. Although, the poem states feminine words as woman, it was found to be words of only a description. This poem has a syllable of feminine which the rhyme was more than 2 syllables. When it is only one, it has a masculine rhyme, it can be depicted upon one’s opinion, but it can go either way. it was an enjoyable time and it made me take a liking more into short poems.