Quick lesson on Modern Sonnets

1. Modern Sonnets
Still 14 lines
Still a lyric form
Still may contain a volta
Can have any type of meter
Can have any type of rhyme scheme

2. • I met a traveller from an antique land
• Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
• Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
• Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
• And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
• Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
• Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
• The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And
on the pedestal these words appear:
• ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
• Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
• Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
• Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
• The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

3. • If we must die, let it not be like hogs
• Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
• While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
• Making their mock at our accursed lot.
• If we must die, O let us nobly die
• So that our precious blood may not be shed
• In vain; then even the monsters we defy
• Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
• O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!
• Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
• And for their thousand blows deal one death blow!
• What though before us lies the open grave?
• Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
• Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

4. • Sonnet
• BY TODD SWIFTNo children;
• Cold uncoils in the blood;
• Science, true, not good
• For you. So old,
• Suddenly, or so young.
• Lyric inside not to be sung.
• Plug pulled, screen gone.
• Sun out; mind
• Bountiful, playing pain.
• These are my children
• In my head. Unbegotten.
• This is to self-forget,
• To have the future
• Born forgotten.