This is a fact that English teachers love to repeat, so it's a good one to know. In fact, if you read a poem that's fourteen lines, the odds are that it's a sonnet. OK, now that we've explained that let's take this one feature at a time: Fourteen lines: Every sonnet has fourteen lines. That's one reason this poem feels very conventional, maybe even a little inhibited it's playing by all the rules that it can find. But before you even know what all that means, you can notice that this poem is highly structured – the number of lines, the number of syllables in each line, and the rhyme scheme are all prescribed by the literary tradition for sonnets.
Whoa, sorry, we slipped into literary techno-babble there for a moment. It's a sonnet – a fourteen-line rhymed lyric poem written in iambic pentameter.
Line 8 also begins with a trochee: “Childhood” (Line 8).This is a poem that Follows the Rules. A trochee is a foot in which a stressed syllable is followed by an unstressed syllable, so “Welcome” (Line 1). Line 1 begins with a trochee rather than an iamb. For the most part, however, the meter is varied. Alexie’s sonnet, however, does not strictly follow an iambic rhythm, although a regular iambic tetrameter does appear in Line 12: “Let become our church” (Line 12) (to observe the correct rhythm, “” is pronounced “church dot-com”). An iamb is a poetic foot consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. Traditional sonnets are written in iambic pentameter.
In other words, the lines in “The Facebook Sonnet” are shorter than those in the traditional sonnet. A pentameter comprises five feet, whereas a tetrameter has only four feet. The meter differs from the traditional Shakespearean or English sonnet: Each line is a tetrameter rather than a pentameter. The poem, as the title states, is written in sonnet form and thus has 14 lines.
0 kommentar(er)
