Freedom in Constraint: Why the Sonnet Is the Perfect Genre for a Lockdown

In this age of pandemic, the itch to write a sonnet comes on as suddenly as the itches on my face I fight not to scratch. Luckily, I can satisfy the former urge.

The sonnet is the perfect genre for a plague: a bite-sized poetic snapshot of a mood using strict patterns of rhyme and meter. Neither too time-consuming nor too easy, it’s an exercise of creative freedom within constraint. It’s the coronavirus lockdown in poetic form.

I am not a professional poet–not even amateur. Most of the poems I’ve written in my lifetime were school assignments. Like most people in these unprecedented times, however, I find myself doing unprecedented things. At a time when our eyeballs are chafing against windowsills and our cheeks are chafing against mask straps, the sonnet reminds us that rules can enable fun, not just suffocate it. If you’re someone whose creativity has been shut down by the shutdown, consider playing around with the sonnet form yourself.
The sonnet’s rise to poetic prominence is in part a plague story. The 14th-century Italian humanist and poet Francesca Petrarca (Petrarch to English speakers) didn’t invent the sonnet, but he popularized it. The 317 sonnets in his Il Canzionere, or ‘Songbook,’ chronicle a man’s unrequited love for a beautiful married woman named Laura. Her passionate gaze burns him like fire. Her icy coldness chills. Cupid’s arrows shoot into his heart and leave him in exquisite pain that sometimes feels like pleasure.

Then she dies. Scholars don’t agree on whether Laura was a real person, but the best candidate is a noblewoman named Laura de Noves, who died at 38 of the Black Death. In Il Canzionere, this event transforms the tone of the remaining sonnets from unrequited physical desire to spiritual veneration and longing.

These poems, in other words, tell the story of a socially and physically distant love devastated by plague.

The rules of the sonnet are relatively straightforward. Petrarch’s sonnetti (‘little songs’) are 14 lines and two stanzas long. Between the first 8 lines, or octet, and the sestet, the remaining six, is a volta, or ‘turn.’ It usually shifts tone and perspective from a more descriptive mode to a philosophical one.
In English, the standard sonnet meter is iambic pentameter: 10 syllables, divided into 5 pairs of unstressed-stressed sounds (da DUH). The rhyme scheme can vary. Petrarch used ABBA ABBA for the octet, then some combination of CDE CDE for the sestet. Spenser copied him.
Shakespeare, that endless innovator, created an easier version for a language with a lot fewer rhymes: ABAB CDCE EFEF GG. (Four quatrains and a couplet.) Those are the rules, but remember that rules are meant to be broken.
Robert Frost, who published nearly 40 sonnets himself, once called free verse “tennis without a net.” The game, he implies, would be boring if the webbing and the lines didn’t compel players to develop devastating shots and angles. Same with board games: the possibilities are infinite without being exhausting precisely because the rules already exist. We just play the game; we don’t have to invent it.

Love remains the sonnet’s most common subject, but it’s not the only one.

Keats wrote sonnets about reading Shakespeare. Wanda Coleman wrote about slavery. In 2018, Terrence Hayes published American Sonnets for My Present and Future Assassin, meditating on what it means to be a black man in Trump’s America. The most anthologized one opens,
I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison,
Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.
I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat
Grinder . . . . (ll.1-4)
Hayes’s sonnets rarely rhyme. They disregard meter almost completely. Yet their rhythms are dynamic. They, too, take on a virus: the systemic virus of racism that plagued American society long before coronavirus.
When asked why he chose the sonnet form, Hayes said it provided “a great kind of containment.” It’s a perfect description. The sonnet demands concision. It asks that we pay attention to the form and sound of a word as much as the content. It requires focus in a time when, as I wrote in one of my own plague sonnets:
My sense of time has calcified to rust,
Like I’m suspended in solution, free
Of meaning, referentless . . . .
It helps me process the strangeness of these days with humor and compassion, as in this sonnet I wrote on boredom:

. . . . The line is thin
Between ennui and madness. Ask Wuhan,

Four months in. Playing pool with chopsticks, dressed
In sheets and giving speeches, like a queen
(Ordained or drag, your guess.) Thus boredom dons
A festive mask that fails to mask the stress.

Even when my other writing is as blocked as a clogged toilet, an hour spent making up rhymes and playing with the length of lines helps me remember why I loved writing in the first place.

Nowadays, when the inspiration hits, I pull out my pocket-sized spiral notebook and my mechanical pencil and have some fun. After all, as my first plague sonnet concludes:

When movement kills, but stasis mummifies,
At least our minds and pens have space to glide.

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Hello, I’m Sara!

Words are the writer’s fabric that weave bridges across cultures, countries, and centuries. I’m happy you’re here to read them! Grab a cup of tea and enjoy. You can relax here.