An Unbelievable Lesson: My First Sonnet

Having used English as my second language for decades, I first learned the word sonnet a long time ago, but I did not know what it was exactly. Since then, I have come across it countless times because it's such a popular word. In an effort to figure it out I looked into the dictionary and Wikipedia many times for a definition, but still I could not get a clear picture of it. The best I could imagine was that it's a type of poem, popular in the English world but different from the Chinese poetry that I was taught at school.

Incidentally, as part of my self-study of Shakespeare’s plays, I enrolled in a seminar organized by the Shakespearean Society here. The seminar was held on 24th of August, with a keynote speech delivered by Dr. Chiu, the former Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at  National Taiwan University, introducing what a sonnet is, how to appreciate it,  why it still matters today and how an interested, albeit untrained, reader like me may try composing a sonnet, using proper AI tools. 

Dr. Chiu is among the most knowledgeable scholars in Shakespearean literature here. With her well-organized, logical and easy-to-follow introduction, supplemented with examples and demonstrations, I understood for the first time what a sonnet is: including its origin, its 14 line structure consisting of three quatrains and one couplet, and it's rhyming rule and its rhythmic pattern (iambic pentameter).

Subsequently, seated in the audience and following Dr. Chiu, I read and appreciated a sonnet for the first time, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, and the experience was simply surreal. I could not believe that I could start exploring something that had remained a puzzle to me for ages! Here, let me quote what is said to be the most popular for beginners among the 154 sonnets composed by William Shakespeare:

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 dimmed;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed:

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.[1]

—William Shakespeare

 

After the seminar ended, I tried the tips that Dr Chiu shared to create a sonnet, using ChatGPT. You know what? It worked, and here's my first AI-enabled sonnet:

In flowing red, her golden hair entwined,  

She stands and wonders where her lover sails.  

The winds, they whisper, but no word she finds,  

No sign of him who braves the stormy gales.  

His ship, unknown, may battle fierce and wild,  

While she, alone, awaits with heavy heart.  

No friend to ease her mind or voice her trials,  

She seeks the sea, from which they’re far apart.  

The mocking wind does laugh at her despair,  

At every sigh she sends across the foam.  

It teases her, but none can lift her care,  

Her heart, adrift, no longer feels like home.  

For in that breeze, she knows her love is gone— 

Her first, and lost, though life still lingers on.

—Jeffrey Wu, enabled by ChatGPT

It's unbelievable. I only learned to read and appreciate a sonnet at the seminar, and the next moment I was already a poet, albeit AI-enabled, creating a sonnet by following all the metering and rhyming rules.  To this end, I also realized, more than ever, the power of AI, and the pressing need for one to understand and make good use of it.

I have no idea how modern readers appreciate sonnet as a whole, but in my view its readership is quite limited in my country, in part because none of the people surrounding me knew it. Having tasted the beauty and experienced my first sonnet, I was much encouraged and will certainly explore it further. 

To this end, I looked up the definition and history of sonnet again on Wikipedia, and this time I understood what it is. As part of my reflection on this unbelievable lesson learned, I'm describing it, in my own words, for my own inernalization and for those who may be interested but are still puzzled about it (as I had been until 2 weeks ago).

The sonnet was invented in Sicily, Italy, in the 13th century by the poet Giacomo da Lentini. However,  it did not gain popularity until it was introduced in Tuscany, Italy, where it was adapted to the popular Tuscan dialect that would later become the standard Italian language. 

In Tuscany, many Italian poets adopted the sonnet, a new fixed-verse poetic form consisting of 14 lines and following certain metering and rhyming rules. With the rise of the sonnet, among other developments in parallel, Italy would progress toward its Renaissance, the first of its kind in modern history.

Among those great Italian poets who popularized sonnet before the Italian Renaissance, Dante Alighieri is one of them. To this end, I felt blessed to have read his masterpiece The Divine Comedy for the first time last year. 

Reading an English translation, however, I didn’t know then that this great work, not just of Italian but also world literature, was written in the Italian sonnet form, too. So I read again the translator notes of the book, and learned interestingly that it's next to impossible to have good translation for the book, for many reasons, among them is the terza rima rhyming scheme and the hendecasyllable metering rule that Dante Alighieri followed throughout the book. This form simply can't be replicated in the English language, which is considerably rhyme-poor compared to the Italian.

Following the Italian Renaissance, sonnet was adopted in all major languages across Europe, North America, and Asia (India), largely from the 16th century onwards and contributing to the overall Renaissance that would usher in the Age of the Enlightenment, particularly in Europe.

What an unexpected and unbelievable lesson I have learned in the past weeks! I'm sure that it has better equipped me, a new literature lover without any academic training background, to continue my self-learning journey of Shakespeare’s works and the world literature at large. I look forward to reading and appreciating my 2nd sonnet.