Vocabulary 2 due today. After class, 10 points off per day.
Due on Monday: finish play and turn in your Act V responses. This is your final assessment on Hamlet.
In class: sonnet review. See copy of handout below.
we are looking at two contemporary sonnets by Sherman Alexie and sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare. See copies of the material below.
“A sonnet is fundamentally a dialectical construct which allows the poet to examine the nature and ramifications of two usually contrastive ideas, emotions, states of mind, beliefs, actions, events, images, etc., by juxtaposing the two against each other, and possibly resolving or just revealing the tensions created and operative between the two. “
O. K., so much for the fancy language. Basically, in a sonnet, you show two related but differing things to the reader in order to communicate something about them. Each of the three major types of sonnets (Italian or Petrarchan, Spenserian (from Spenser’s Faerie Queene) and Shakespearean) accomplishes this in a somewhat different way. There are, of course, other types of sonnets, as well, but since we are looking at Shakespeare…The English sonnet has the simplest and most flexible pattern of all sonnets, consisting of 3 quatrains of alternating rhyme and a couplet:
a b a b
c d c d
e f e f
g g
As in the Spenserian, each quatrain develops a specific idea, but one closely related to the ideas in the other quatrains.
Not only is the English sonnet the easiest in terms of its rhyme scheme, calling for only pairs of rhyming words rather than groups of 4, but it is the most flexible in terms of the placement of the volta, that is the turn, when a new idea is introduced.
SONNET 116
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 proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Blood Sonnets by Sherman Alexie
Years ago, in Spokane, a woman saved
A family of orphaned baby geese.
An amateur ornithologist, she raised
Those birds into adulthood, and then released
Them into the pond at Manito Park,
Where a dozen swans, elegant and white,
Tore the tame geese open and ate their hearts.
Of course, all of this was broadcast live
On the local news. Eyewitnesses wept.
My mother and I shrugged, not at death,
But at those innocent folks who believe
That birds don't murder, rape, and steal.
Like us, swans can be jealous and dangerous,
And, oh, so lovely, sure and monogamous.
When my father left me (and my mother
And siblings), to binge-drink for days and weeks,
I always wept myself into nosebleeds.
And sure, you might think this is another
Poem about a wounded father and son,
But honestly, the only blood was mine,
And it flowed from absence, not from a punch
Or kick. My father, drunk or not, was kind
And passive, and never lifted a fist
To strike. Drunk daddy only hit the road,
missed And I'd become the rez Hamlet who
His father so much that he bled red ghosts.
Years later, in Seattle, my nose bled
When my mom called and said, "Your father is dead."
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