Sonnets have always bothered me. In fact, I have yet to come across a sonnet that I did not absolutely despise. Perhaps it is the sickly sweet "perfect" way they depict love. Love is not perfect. Well, perhaps love itself is. But a relationship between two people, even a romantic one, is full of pain and trouble. I may have a bit of a cynical outlook in this area, but the "fairy tale" sonnets are cheesy and cliche.
Another problem with these poems is their structure. It is all but impossible to cram feelings of love into a 14-line patterned-rhyme cookie cutter mold. The results are hollow and cramped, and often sacrifice beauty and flow for syllable count and rhyme correctness. Sonnets are so popular that love has been transformed (in the poetic literary world) into a theatrical flowers-and-butterflies dream-state. Which is not what it is intended to be. In modern society, where these sonnets have been implemented into romantic comedies and happily-ever-after stories, TRUE selfless honest love has been overlooked. This had led to young people growing up believing that infatuation and love are the same thing, and that marriage on butterflies alone is good enough. But a life can not be built on butterflies, as many people find out a year or two or ten into their marriage when the flame is gone and the fuzzy feelings are gone and they are left with a painful divorce and a wasted irreplaceable hole in their lives.
I do believe, as we discussed in class, that some writings are not meant to have a "deeper meaning". Sometimes, the deeper meaning, or interpretation, kills the magic of the piece. By the same token though, the distraction epidemic that is so prevalent in modern culture is not improved in the slightest by wasting hours reading extremely cramped, closed-structured, irritating poems. The monotony of day to day life, and all of the crap that we have filled it with, leaves us searching for SOME thing that means something. We are distracted because we are searching for something. Searching, in a sense, for silence. In my humble opinion, sonnets counteract this mission by adding to the "clutter".
Anyhow, for this class we are required to each write a sonnet about love. I look forward to the challenge of writing one that I can actually stand to read. Rhymes irk me. However, with a natural sentence flow I believe I can take the emphasis off of the choppy, annoying pattern of the typical sonnet. I will also tweak the theme a bit to make it focus on escaping love through infatuation.
This will lead to a much more interesting piece than the sing-songy puppy-love disgustingness that is embodied in many if not most sonnets I have dealt with in my English career thus far.
-AS
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