The Experimental Sonnet

(Linked sonnet is at the bottom of this post) For fifteen years I taught a high school British Literature class. The Elizabethan unit included a two-day study of sonnets that was a primer on form (iambic pentameter, etc.) and the introspective and expressive qualities of “the Renaissance man.” In my third year of teaching the class, while the students were reading silently several samples in the text, I sat at my podium and scratched out a sonnet of my own. Love is the predominant emotion of most sonnets, so I attempted to expose the destructive nature of its opposite—hate. Satisfied with my experimental sonnet, I took it one step further by typing a supplemental handout with my piece sandwiched between Shakespeare's sonnets XVIII and CXVI, allowing the students to think they were all from the same period. They were to read each sonnet and summarize one of them on a separate sheet of paper. To my surprise, the students treated all three sonnets equally and many chose to comment on mine. The homework assignment was to begin (if not to complete) their own sonnet in the same form. Some groaned that they could understand sonnets but couldn’t “think” in syllables or write in such restrictive lines. "Think of it as a game. That's what I did." It was then that I confessed that the middle sonnet on the page was one I had written while sitting at the front of the class. Their comments were kind, and for most of them, this was just the creative nudge they needed to get started with their own. The experiment was so rewarding that I did it for many years running. When I was transitioning from my classroom career to administration, I found some of the old sonnet assignments in the back of a lesson plan book. The sonnet itself is so-so—definitely not Shakespeare— but after all these years, I’m still pleased with the summaries the students wrote about it. I hope that they somehow remember as middle-aged adults what they ascertained that day as students. Here are some excerpts of their brief summaries: “If hatred came slowly, hesitantly, to tear love apart, it would grow weak before it could finish. Love is hard to break if it has been around a long time. / Hatred isn’t trying to break love, just hurt the object, it [seeks to] hurt the owner of it…” Sarah D. 1984 “If people could only stop + think before acting in anger, then they would avoid hurting someone they love dearly.” Susan E. 1987 “I think the sonnet is describing marriage and how the hands that tie “the knot” [can be] those hands that tear the knot of love apart…. Hatred comes too easily for us. If only it would come more slowly, it would not tear us apart.” Diane B. 1987 “It describes how hatred can cut through the knot of love with words that hurt…words never to be forgotten… it makes one weep.” Mark H. 1987 “The person is wishing that there was a way to halt hate before it becomes destructive [and that] if hate did come, people would let it pass when they remember how much they love each other.” Larry F. 1987 “If hatred slowly came the love would withstand it, but instead it tears quickly, too quickly, and afterward there is much regret…” Chelle V. 1987 “We are supposed to love but it is hard because hatred comes at love strongly.” Bob S. 1987 “If people were slow to hate, the power to destroy love would be lost.…If they would remember the love, they would make up for the wrong instead of blindly wearing love away to nothing. Hatred grinds on your mind if you let it…. It would be so much better if only we would heed God’s commands to love one another and to be slow to wrath.” Heather C. 1987 If Only Hatred Came with Halted Hands If only hatred came with halted hands To pick and pinch and pull the knot of love, Its power would be lost before the strands Were loosed; REMEMBERANCE—like pow’r from above— Would numb the fingers fast and make amends. Old knots hold tight when time has drawn the ends. But hatred never stops to touch the knot That love has tied. O, no! Instead it grabs In haste the jagged blade of human thought And in a frenzied snap of time it stabs And cuts in two the tie that binds as one… Then stands agasp and weeps at what it’s done. ‘Twould easy be to love as God commands if only hatred came with halted hands. © Copyright: November, 1984, TK, Patterns of Ink.