For example: Shall I | compARE | thee TO | a SUM | mers DAY?

da DUM | da DUM | da DUM | da DUM | da DUM

The lines will also follow the rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg. I’m going to use one of Shakespeare’s famous sonnets “Shall I Compare Thee To a Summer’s Day?” as an example.

A Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

B Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

A Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

B And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

C Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

D And often is his gold complexion dimmed;

C And every fair from fair sometime declines,

D By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;

E But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

F Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,

E Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,

F When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.

G So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

G So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The last two lines of the poem are in their own little stanza or couplet since it’s just two lines. This couplet has the same rhyme as you can see and usually sums up or refutes the poem. In either case, these two lines capture the theme of the poem very well which is something to keep in mind as you are writing.

You may be thinking “that’s way too many rules, I don’t even want to try writing one” but don’t freak out! It looks intimidating but I actually find it helpful because there is a guide on how to write instead of you having an idea for the poem but having no idea how to express it in poetry. Sometimes your rhymes won’t be perfect and your lines won’t have exactly ten syllables, that’s perfectly okay! At the end of the day you still wrote a poem and the little variations give your poem a unique style.

I hope you all read and write some interesting poems this week, and thanks for stopping by!