Prompt 4- Week 2 Poetry Prompt

Disclaimer: The 250 Poems: A Portable Anthology book I have is probably a different edition than the one the GS teachers use. The page numbers are off, and some of the poems that have been mentioned in the prompts do not appear in my book.

     The first thing I notice about these poems is that they are mostly about one thing. Nowadays, you can find poetry written about practically anything, but it seems that in the Elizabethan period they all focused on love. There is also very consistent rhyming in all of these poems, changing up the two rhyming syllables every four lines:
                                 "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
                         Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
                         Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
                         And summer's lease hath all too short a date;
                         Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines, ..."
                         (Sonnet 18, William Shakespeare)
    
     You can notice how the rhyming does an ABAB, CDCD, etc. kind of thing. At the end of all the sonnets, though, it has two rhyming lines in a row:
                        "When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
                            So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
                            So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."
                            (Sonnet 18, William Shakespeare)  
    
     Considering all Sonnets are 14 lines long, it gives them this kind of rhyming structure: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG

     The line length of these poems, however, differed. For all of Shakespeare's sonnets, the lines were all ten syllables long. But for another sonnet (Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show by Sir Phillip Sidney), all of the lines were twelve syllables. What interested me is that all of the Sonnets were very rigidly structured, having 14 lines, each ten/twelve syllables long, with very strict rhyming.

     I enjoyed Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare the most, because it was the most recognizable and the easiest to understand for me.