Hamilton (modified from a Steininger assignment)
Honors English 1 – Due Monday 10/27
THE SONNET: Let’s Get Creative in our Writing.
Pre-Writing: Make a list of your four favorite moments or scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
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A SONNET is a square-looking 14-line lyric poem. It is normally composed in iambic pentameter, which
means that each line consists of five groups of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, so the beat
goes like this:
da Da
da Da
da Da
da Da
da Da
Let ME
not TO
the MAR
riage OF
true MINDS
A sonnet also usually has a fixed rhyme scheme. The English form has 3 groups of four lines followed by a
couplet. The rhyme scheme is ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, GG See markings on the sample sonnet.
Many sonnets feature a "turn," a moment about line 8 where focus switches, understanding makes a sudden
advance, or tone undergoes a distinct change.
Prompt: Write a Sonnet
1. Decide which of your four favorite scenes you want to write about.
my scene:
2. Choose a topic related to that scene. Consider using one of the topics we have been studying
(friendship, nature of love, illusion & reality, loyalty/cruelty, rational/emotional, love/infatuation,
primitive/sophisticated, blind/sight, youth/age) OR you can choose another topic related to the
scene which we have not examined.
my topic:
3. Choose a point of view from which to write your sonnet (your poem). You could choose a character
that is in the scene OR a character who is not in the scene. You may want to write from a more
unexpected point of view like a teenage boy, or an elderly woman.
my point of view:
4. Based on your scene, topic, and point of view…..what point about your topic would your writer (point
of view) want to make
my “writer’s” take on the topic:
Hamilton (modified from a Steininger assignment)
Honors English 1 – Due Monday 10/27
5. Write your poem – and put those rhymes in there…. You might want to start by picking the rhymes.
They rhyme in this pattern: abab cdcd efef gg.
Pick enough rhymes to fill out a rhyme scheme, plus a couple of extras in case some don’t work out.
By the way, a couple of slant rhymes (hot-that) won’t hurt your poem at all.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.
Wm. Shakespeare
A
B
A
B
C
D
C
D
E
F
E
F
G
G
6. Put the lines together with an easy da Da / da Da / da Da / da Da / da Da rhythm. Some people
find it helps to pound out the rhythm on their desks or laps. I use my right hand, starting with the thumb
and tapping each digit on my paper when a read an iamb—an unstressed plus a stressed syllable.
Whatever method you use, you will have to read the line aloud to evaluate its rhythm.
7. Have fun!
Type your final poem.
I can’t wait to read them 