What do you think when someone says sonnet? I think confusion. What's so great about them? Why is it so special that it has formatted in fourteen lines? That it is either in Elizabethan (ababcdcdefefgg) or Petrarchan (abbaabbaccdeed)? That the last line is a couplet? To me, it is just another confusing poem that takes me hours to understand. Others think it is beautiful while I think it's the reason that my head aches.
So far this school year we have dove into two sonnets by the well-known William Shakespeare. When Mr. Burge read "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?" and asked us what the speaker was literally saying, I was in the dark. I stared at the words in each line long and hard. Re-reading it over and over. Nothing. My brain made no connections at all. All that was going through my mind was me thinking that it was stupid. I didn't understand it even though multiple students were yelling out answers. When we answered the questions for this sonnet for homework, I had no clue how to approach any of the questions. I had to go online to see explanations and paraphrases of it to begin to understand.
Yesterday we had a discussion regarding Sonnet 29. Again, I had no idea what Shakespeare had written. I got irritated trying to figure it out as everyone began to discuss it. Mr. Burge was asking us where the shift was and why it had occurred. I could easily find it because line 9 began with the word 'yet'. Easy enough. But to say why it shifted and what he was saying before and what he was saying now? You have got to be kidding me. It was almost impossible for me to answer. Luckily, I wasn't called on. With the last two minutes of class, he stated that he wouldn't let anyone leave until someone told him what the couplet meant. Thank the Greek gods someone answered him because if it was me who had to tell him, we would all still be in class.
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