Right now, we’re studying Romeo and Juliet in Humanities. This past week, we’ve learned a lot of things, including the history of Shakespeare, Elizabethan times, and playwriting. We’ve also begun to discuss the play itself; we’ve read, watched, and listened to the first act of Romeo and Juliet. But the important thing that I learned about this week that I want to highlight is how to write a sonnet! Now, before this week, I knew what a sonnet was, but I didn’t exactly know what they were for. I had no idea that, during Shakespeare’s time, you could hire someone to write sonnets about you. That just seems very vain to me, but it’s interesting to consider how that part of our worldview has changed since then.
To show what I’ve learned this week, I chose to write a sonnet and create an illustration that goes with it.

Sonnet 1
Here is the sonnet!

And this is the image that I created to illustrate it. Through the sonnet and the illustration, I attempted to compare the cycle of a relationship to the cycle of the seasons.
Writing a sonnet was, honestly, about as hard as I expected. I did, however, expect it to be hard. It took me some time to find the right words for the things I wanted to say, and fit them into the rhyme scheme. And no, it’s not in iambic pentameter, but every line is, in fact, ten syllables (last I checked.) I’m fairly proud of it, and I kind of want to write more sonnets after writing this one.
Thanks for reading my TWIL blog post. See you next week (after I learn more)!