Sonneteers Forum Your favorite sonnet!

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate;
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

~ William Shakespeare.

This is like the big daddy of sonnets. I love this due to it's splendid imagery and the style in which it is written. Shakespeare FTW ;)

I love Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer Day also..
I want to ask a question. I do not really know how to write a sonnet.
I joined to see if I can learn .. So my question is ... do we need to know how to write sonnets?
It is a rather silly question lol
If not I will resign from the group..
Thanks!
Chloe

Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass, --
The finger-points look through like rosy blooms:
Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms
'Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass.
All round our nest, far as the eye can pass,
Are golden kingcup-fields with silver edge
Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge.
'Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass.

Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky: --
So this wing'd hour is dropt to us from above.
Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,
This close-companioned inarticulate hour
When twofold silence was the song of love.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti   I knew this  originally as one of the most beautiful of songs about love and the English countryside,
It is something I have sung often as a concert piece.  The music (which is exquisite) is by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Although there are one or two 'sonnet inaccuracies' in rhyme and line, I have no quarrel with its acceptance as a sonnet
JohnL