John Green Reads Poetry

John from the Past: Mr. Green! Mr. Green! What’s a sonnet?

John: Good question me from the past. In fact, such a good question that your seventh grade English teacher answered it for you, but apparently, you’ve forgotten. A sonnet is a poetic form consisting of fourteen lines and there are various ways to order the stanzas and the rhyme scheme. But the Shakespearean stanza (named for Will, not because he invented it, but because, you know, he was the best at it) consists of three four line stanzas and a final rhymed couplet. So the rhyme scheme is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. And the meter in Shakespearean sonnets, as in much of Shakespeare’s plays, is iambic pentameter, which means that every line has 10 syllables consisting of five iambs. Which is just a fancy word for pairs of unstressed and stressed syllables. So a line of a Shakespearean poem goes da-Duh-da-Duh-da-Duh-da-Duh-da-Duh. This turns out to do something to English speaking brains that’s just very catchy. Like, a lot of times pop songs are written in iambs, like a lot of times when we speak we accidentally speak in them. But when I’m trying to remember the sound of iambic pentameter, I just remember John Keats’s last will and testament, which was one line of iambic pentameter:

My chest of books divide among my friends.