The most common, and probably the most popular, of the traditional poetic forms is the sonnet. However, there are three main types of sonnet – the English/Shakespearean, the Italian/Petrarchan and the Spenserian. Until Saturday I had never written a sonnet; my first attempt, entitled “The See-Saw”, was written in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet and was posted here on Saturday night. Yesterday I tried my hand at a Petrarchan sonnet, and am posting the result here.
The Petrarchan sonnet is slightly more difficult than the Shakespearean. The rhyming scheme is more varied and challenging, and the first stanza (eight lines = octave) poses the problem of each bracket of four lines containing, in its middle, a rhyming couplet which, when handled badly, can sound clumsily repetitive. The alternating rhymes of the Shakespearean sonnet feel more subtle, and the closing couplet gives the poem an emphatic conclusion. The Petrarchan sonnet requires a defter touch to achieve that same balance of subtlety and emphasis. Here is my by-no-means deft first attempt at the form.
Petrarchan Sonnet
You cry in silence and your cries fall dead;
The walls betray your best attempts to rise
Out of yourself and make peace with the skies,
Each anxious prayer a layer in your head.
Only, beneath these layers lie instead
The awkward truth, naked and undisguised:
True motivations, all the things unsaid.
The truest tears are humble and don’t lie;
They do not dress themselves in fine attire.
They open up, give names to each desire,
Both pure and corrupt, the jumbled mess,
In Heaven’s care to sort and answer why,
Our only task to cry out and confess.
The Consolations of Writing 