Not Writing Sonnets: a rant.

 The University of Salford's creative writing course has (or had) a module requiring the writing of poems in traditional formats.

That sounds quite fun, to me.

The University calls these formats pre-established - though how that differs from established I do not know. 

In any case, the University feels a need to decolonise the curriculum (which would surely involve moving out of it and then leaving it entirely to its own devices. Or do they mean decolonialise?).

Anyway, the sonnet is out. Or possibly now optional, I couldn't quite be bothered to read the press-release so I'm relying on an article in the Telegraph newspaper, which finished with the following remarkable statement:

The Shakespearean form [of sonnet] is usually made up of sixteen lines, with three sets of alternatively rhymed quatrains, followed by a couplet. It was often used to express romantic themes.

I don't mind that the writer has added together three quatrains (that is, groups of four lines of a poem) plus a couplet (a group of two lines) and made sixteen. You don't necessarily expect a journalist to be able to count.

But I do mind that the quatrains are alternatively rhymed.

What's an alternative rhyme? Is it when you put in another rhyming word for the one you want, as in rhyming slang?

Shall I compare thee to a summer's jay?

Thou art more lovely and more generate

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of prey

And Summer's lease has all too short a fate...

...hmm. There might be a whole academic career, there - though not at Salford. The only trouble is that the original is approximately a thousand times better than the new version.

But still, perhaps we could do something with the sixteen lines thing...add an extra couplet. 

Well, that's easy enough as far as that particular sonnet goes:

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.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
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...

And, more important, lets the world see me/So conquering my own mortality.

I'm sure Shakespeare would have said that, really, if he'd had the nerve.

Word To Use Today: alternate. This word is different from alternative. Alternate comes from the Latin alternus, which means one after the other.