We haven’t looked at formal poetry structures for a while, so this week I’m taking you back to the sonnet for your creative writing prompt/exercise.

I was inspired to start writing a poem after a week of gloomy thoughts about life, love and death, and I decided to try it as a sonnet. It is still a work in progress (which I may never finish), but see if you can do better and take Shakespeare’s theme and turn it into your own sonnet.

This is a 14-line poem, usually created in rhyming couplets, with a thematic turn of some kind in the last six lines.

Of course, Shakespeare did it so well in 1609, using the metaphors of autumn, twilight and ashes to describe aging (and he was only 45!):

Sonnet 73 by William Shakespeare
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.
    This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
    To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

This is an example of what is known as the English or Shakespearean sonnet. It has three quatrains, then a final rhyming couplet. It follows a typical rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, and is composed in iambic pentameter.

Of course, you are writing in the 21^st Century, so you won’t be using Shakespearean English in your poetry, but you can still be creative using a formal structure like this.

I’m trying to excuse myself for not having yet finished my poem about aging by saying I don’t know enough about the subject. But who am I kidding? And anyway, since when did a shortfall of knowledge ever stop a writer?

As always, call back next week (5pm Dublin time, Wednesday) when there will be another creative writing prompt/exercise posted here to encourage you to create some new material.

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