Question: Will you please kindly respond to my first attempt at a Spenserian sonnet?

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Answer #1:

Em, promise not to throw a thunderbolt at me, but work needs be done here! The rhyme scheme of the Spenserian sonnet, an outgrowth of the stanzaic structure of Edmund Spenser's "Faerie Queene," is of course a b a b b c b c c d c d e e, and this poem has a different rhyme scheme. That alone will require rewriting the poem in some fundamental way. Note also that iambic pentameter is standard in this form, so each line must contain five iambic feet, i.e. the unstressed-stressed syllable pairing repeated five times. Many lines contain other than ten syllables, so your poem is neither accentual-syllabic nor syllabic; although Spenserians do not allow the luxury of sprung rhythm or podic verse, I tried to make sense of your choices based on these formulations and once again I stumbled. Those are essentially the available options for making your poetry musical, and each one has its distinctive undertones.Conceptually, I am happy with the choices of theme you've made, but the form you've adopted is not that of a Spenserian sonnet. If I wished to make it one, I would need to write a substantially different poem, and then it would not be yours. Ah, the bind! Back to the drawing board my lady...

Em, I just took a couple of minutes to jot down a Spenserian sonnet (not good but technically proficient) on the birth of the vernal season:

“Spring”

When Ded Moroz leaves off his icy crown,
And Gaea in maternal warmth’s reborn
To don anew her dandelion gown
That through untold millennia she’s worn,
We sense in blissful dawning of the morn
A hope long buried and too long forgot
Since we last gleaned the remnants of her corn
And bound them up into a tidy knot.
Yet, in our mind’s remembrance the lot
Of all that’s born in springtimes past lives on,
A fleeting thought that all that is is not
Long destined for display, and soon is gone.
In spring is written life that soon must bow;
Its heartbeat, brief, lives in the here and now.


*Ded Moroz ― Old Man Winter in traditional Russian folklore

Answer #2:

Yowee, I'm still so a DUH, and I don't know what a Spenserian Sonnet is supposed to be, but I have one suggestion in so enjoying the piece.

I might have used "On" new air rather than 'in'

Oh wait is it Geah or Gaia?





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