Is this quite a sonnet yet?

Question

I am still not sure on the Iambic pentameter, Am I getting closer?

Does it still need a brush up?

And how can I improve it?

Here is the link from the one I had up yesterday so you can see the changes I have made.

http://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AtgCKvLKiW.xpC_pgMDv4IPg5gt.;_ylv=3?qid=20080728115520AA76P8H

Sonnet

A Sonnet is a poem consisting of 14 lines (iambic pentameter) with a particular rhyming scheme:

rhyming scheme:

Ab ab cdcd efef gg.

11 syllables.

Enfold God sits upon his petal seat throne,

Praise vast beauty sowed monotonously by hand,

Glistening crystal blue Sapphire Jewel sewn,

Swiftly caress against golden soft buff sand,

Enveloping great mega coliseum,

Luminous sun reflecting God’s graceful glee,

Gastly Wind orchestrates earth’s athenaeum,

This beautiful Glia which captivates me,

Autumn leaves percussion, bee’s dance upon hives,

Bird sing songs whilst humming birds sing their hymns,

Drum beats roll across charcoaled sleekest black eyes,

Seasons do inspire nature’s creative whim,

Subtle harmonious tunes played by nature,

Twirling atoms dances to earths denature.

Coliseum has 4 syllables

Athenaeum has 4 syllables.

Answer 1

I may be able to come back later and scan this. It sounds mostly iambic but I have to really sit down and work at that as the stresses don't come naturally to me.

It doesn't seem to be pentameter (10 syllables per line). I'm getting varied syllable counts throughout. Iambic Pentameter is five Iambic feet...Thus pent- like pentagram.

Edit: Here's a link I have to Sonets (Italian is the lead one). It doesn't seem to allow for 11 syllables. It seems to still be 10. I am comfortable with a version that uses 11 they simply can't refer to it as Iambic Pentameter. It's like saying I have a square circle.

http://www.sonnets.org/basicforms.htm

Edit 2: I did a little more research on this here's what I came up with:

In short, Italian sonnets in Italian have 11 syllables; Italian sonnets in English have 10 in the form of iambic pentameter.

Well, that was interesting to find out.

Edit yet again:

This question just made my watchlist for the excellent addtional answers by Hypocorism and Eldkatt (good discussion points--thank you).

Answer 2

Your first stanza

L1 (11) -///-//-///

L2 (12) //-//-/-/--/

L3 (10) /-/-//-///

L4 (11) /--/-/-/-/-

Iambic requires a soft followed by hard sound: daDUMdaDUM

                           -      /     -        /      -      /    -      /   -          /

An example:  So soft the sand, golden caress of warmth

This is an iambic pentameter: 5 feet, 10beats.

When you speak in iambic it almost becomes lyrical thus one of the primary reasons it was used in sonnets which where primarily love based.  If you are not already you should speak your words as you pen.  You have some great images and thoughts, more attention to flow and meter is needed.  Keep at it.

Answer 3

its good. I think it is a good sonnet but I am no expert

Answer 4

do not know -but enjoyed very much -this part the best

Autumn leaves percussion, bee’s dance upon hives

Bird sing songs whilst humming birds sing their hymns

SAWEET

Answer 5

A little over a year ago, when I posted a sonnet here...it got plastered...I couldn't even count to ten. It had been YEARS since I'd studied poetry.

I am a song writer, a lyricist. It hadn't occurred to me that a poem was simply a song with the notes removed.

The simple way is to start with the rhythm.

An iamb goes; da DUM!

Five of them strung together makes a ten-beat line:

da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM.

Just repeat the 'dums' in you head until you have just the beat. Sing your 'dum' song...

da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM...

Do it until the rhythm is all you feel...then start plugging in words until you find ones that fit.

"the WAY to MAKE a POem SING

is PLUGging IN the WORDS that RING."

Answer 6

From a purely metrical point of view, approaching this as an attempt to write in iambic pentameter, only one of your lines seems entirely metrically satisfactory to me:

Enveloping great mega coliseum.

(Scanned, with caps for stressed syllables: enVEloPING great MEga COliSEum)

I suspect the core of the problem here might be your idea that a line of iambic pentameter has eleven syllables. This isn't necessarily correct. It consists of five feet (hence pentameter), and each foot is an iamb (an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable: da-DUM). Thus the most "regular" iambic pentameter line has ten syllables:

da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM

But I urge you to think of this as five iambs rather than ten syllables. This is very important--in most of the Western Classically derived tradition of prosody, the basic unit is not the syllable, but the foot (or the stressed syllable, which is usually one-per-foot in modern English prosody) and to think of any meter as having a particular total number of syllables is usually quite misleading.

So how come your eleven-syllable coliseum line above is acceptable? Well, it's very common in this kind of meter to tack on an extra unstressed syllable at the end--a feminine ending. (One very famous example: "To be or not to be, that is the question.") In rhymed verse, you'd do this every time you use a feminine rhyme. In that case it's eleven syllables.

There's another formal concern I think you should be aware of, regarding the form of sonnets in particular. One core concept in the Italian sonnet (and one that is largely maintained in the English tradition) is the two-part structure, which divides the first eight lines, the octave, and the following sestet. The octave can pose a question or a problem, and the sestet provides an answer or a resolution--more generally, there tends to be a distinct change of tone at this point: the volta, or "turn". The typical Italian rhyme schemes, where the octet is united by a single pair of rhymes, which are then abandoned in the sestet (e.g. ABBA-ABBA-CDE-CDE), reinforce this structure--whereas in for instance the English sonnet, with rhyme schemes more like yours, the volta can occur at other places. But it's always there. While you could surely call any 14-line poem a "sonnet", you should be aware that, traditionally, the volta is perhaps the most characteristic element of the sonnet, more important to the structure than the number of lines or the rhyme scheme. If your intention is not at all to evoke any transformation or problem-resolution idea, but instead to paint a single, coherent picture, then perhaps you should choose a different form, because of the implications of the sonnet tradition. Unless this cognitive dissonance makes a point in itself, of course.

Answer 7

I am sorry I did not comment on this sonnet the first time you posted it; I meant to.  I actually thought your metre, in the first stanza especially, was enjoyable: each of the first four lines had a pair of adjacent long syllables which gave the scene of the earth an interesting heaviness.

My attitude is that if you know how to write iambic pentameter, then any 14 line poem is a sonnet if you choose to call it that.  In Shakespeare the pure iambic pentameter line is the most common (From fairest creatures we desire increase: -`-`-`-`-`), and the eleven-syllable hypercatalectic iambic pentameter line is also very common (Like to the lark at break of day arising: -`-`-`-`-`-).  Both of these are staples ; the third most common is the iambic pentameter line with one anapestic substitution (I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought: -`-`-`--`-`), which also has eleven syllables.  This one is used often, but unlike the hypercatalectic line, Shakespeare seems to require some justification of sound to use it, and not just laziness.  I could go on, but you get the idea.  If you look at a book like John Fuller's Oxford Book of Sonnets, you will see that the post 1850 examples are increasingly written in all kinds of metres.  

Still, you seem to want to try to get this in lines Shakespeare would have used, so here is how I read what you have.

-`-`-`-`--` Enfold God sits upon his petal seat throne,

`-`-`-`--`-` Praise vast beauty sowed monotonously by hand,

`--`--`--`` Glistening crystal blue Sapphire Jewel sewn,

`--`--`-`-` Swiftly caress against golden soft buff sand,

-`-`-`-`-`- Enveloping great mega coliseum, (-`--``-`-`-)

`--`-`-`--` Luminous sun reflecting God’s graceful glee,

`-``--`-`--  Gastly Wind orchestrates earth’s athenaeum,

-`--`--`--` This beautiful Glia which captivates me,

`-`-`-|-`--` Autumn leaves percussion, bee’s dance upon hives,

`-`-`--`-` Bird sing songs whilst humming birds sing their hymns,

`-`--`-`--` Drum beats roll across charcoaled sleekest black eyes,

`-`-`-`--`-` Seasons do inspire nature’s creative whim, (`-`-`|`--`-`)

`--`--`|`-`- Subtle harmonious tunes played by nature,

`-`-`--`-`- Twirling atoms dances to earths denature.

There might be quite a few ways to scan many of these lines, but the above is one way.  Did you notice most of your lines have a trochaic tendency (meaning they like to start off on a long syllable, rather than iambic, which likes to start off short)?  As an exercise, I would make this proper iambic pentameter; but then I would consider rewriting it in trochaic pentameter to see if that captures your inclination better.  If you do it both ways then you definitely have every right to call the one you like more a sonnet.  The other noteworthy feature from the trochaic is a frequent tendency to use dactyls instead of trochees; often in trying to get ten syllables, it seems the poem lights on two dactyls (Swiftly caress against: `--`--) instead of the requisite three iambs or trochees.

I'm sorry this comment was so technical; I forgot to mention this was a luxuriantly visual poem, and I enjoyed many of its images.

I hope you're having fun--

Answer 8

You have the form, now you need to work a bit on the meter. Meter is the heartbeat of poetry; or as TD says, its drumbeat. If you could put a stethoscope to this poem, would the heartbeat be regular or erratic? That is the test of iambic pentameter and other classical meters. Another test: does the drummer follow the music or go off on his own? Reread this aloud and you may answer your own question.