| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nFrom fairest creatures we desire increase,\nThat thereby beauty’s rose might never die,\nBut as the riper should by time decease,\nHis tender heir might bear his memory;\nBut thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,\nFeed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,\nMaking a famine where abundance lies,\nThyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.\nThou that art now the world’s fresh ornament\nAnd only herald to the gaudy spring,\nWithin thine own bud buriest thy content,\nAnd, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding.\nPity the world, or else this glutton be,\nTo eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThou blossom bright with autumn dew,\nAnd colored with the heaven’s own blue,\nThat openest when the quiet light Succeeds the keen and frosty night.\nThou comest not when violets lean O’er wandering brooks and springs unseen,\nOr columbines, in purple dressed,\nNod o’er the ground-bird’s hidden nest.\nThou waitest late and com’st alone,\nWhen woods are bare and birds are flown,\nAnd frosts and shortening days portend The aged year is near his end.\nThen doth thy sweet and quiet eye Look through its fringes to the sky,\nBlue-blue-as if that sky let fall A flower from its cerulean wall.\nI would that thus, when I shall see The hour of death draw near to me,\nHope, blossoming within my heart,\nMay look to heaven as I depart."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI have been one acquainted with the night.\nI have walked out in rain—and back in rain.\nI have outwalked the furthest city light.\nI have looked down the saddest city lane.\nI have passed by the watchman on his beat\nAnd dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.\nI have stood still and stopped the sound of feet\nWhen far away an interrupted cry\nCame over houses from another street,\nBut not to call me back or say good-bye;\nAnd further still at an unearthly height,\nOne luminary clock against the sky\nProclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.\nI have been one acquainted with the night."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nNot mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul\nOf the wide world dreaming on things to come,\nCan yet the lease of my true love control,\nSupposed as forfeit to a confin’d doom.\nThe mortal moon hath her eclipse endur’d,\nAnd the sad augurs mock their own presage;\nIncertainties now crown themselves assur’d,\nAnd peace proclaims olives of endless age.\nNow with the drops of this most balmy time,\nMy love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,\nSince, spite of him, I’ll live in this poor rime,\nWhile he insults o’er dull and speechless tribes:\nAnd thou in this shalt find thy monument,\nWhen tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe stones we have thrown I hear\nfall, glass-clear through the year. In the valley\nconfused actions of the moment\nfly howling from tree-top\nto tree-top, quieting\nin air thinner than now's, gliding\nlike swallows from mountain-top\nto mountain-top till they\nreach the furthest plateaus\nalong the edge of existence. Where\nall our deeds fall\nglass-clear\nto no ending\nexcept ourselves."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\ni want ! to be friends ! with katya ! i want\nto dress ! how i want to dress ! like a gale ! full of glitter ! and back alleys ! a seagull\nlaugh ! to shake our being ! whose secret lies !\nperhaps ! in kicking legs upwards in delight !\npainted ! an omnivorous harpy ! goofy !\nloving our friends ! lighting up around them !\nwhat a man ! unstoppable ! they’ll say, why !\nthey’re the perfect woman ! (now that’s me !)\njudy jetson ! enraged ! with a penis ! and\nobsessed with Contact too ! in every situation !\na little Jodie Foster ! o dear role modelfor my role model ! find meaning ! play parts !\neverything real ! happens ! behind the eyes !\nall those things we cannot prove ! like love !\nlike the world ! is just ! what we make of it"} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nO! that you were your self; but, love you are\nNo longer yours, than you yourself here live:\nAgainst this coming end you should prepare,\nAnd your sweet semblance to some other give:\nSo should that beauty which you hold in lease\nFind no determination; then you were\nYourself again, after yourself’s decease,\nWhen your sweet issue your sweet form should bear.\nWho lets so fair a house fall to decay,\nWhich husbandry in honour might uphold,\nAgainst the stormy gusts of winter’s day\nAnd barren rage of death’s eternal cold?\nO! none but unthrifts. Dear my love, you know,\nYou had a father: let your son say so."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nFarewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,\nAnd like enough thou knowst thy estimate.\nThe Charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;\nMy bonds in thee are all determinate.\nFor how do I hold thee but by thy granting,\nAnd for that riches where is my deserving?\nThe cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,\nAnd so my patent back again is swerving.\nThy self thou gav'st, thy own worth then not knowing,\nOr me, to whom thou gav'st it, else mistaking,\nSo thy great gift, upon misprision growing,\nComes home again, on better judgement making.\nThus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter:\nIn sleep a king, but waking no such matter."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSeeing in crowded restaurants the one you love\nYou wave at the door, tall girl in imperious fur,\nAnd make for him, bumping waiters, dropping a glove,\nArriving soft with affectionate slur.\nAs ladies half-turn, gazing, and men appraise\nYou heap the linen with purse, scarf, cigarettes, lighter,\nLaughing some instantaneous droll phrase.\nAs if sudden sun came out, the table is brighter.\nAll moods: at a party everybody’s delight;\nIntent while brown curls shadow the serious page;\nWhen people are stuffy (more correct than right)\nThe stamp and turn on heel of a little girl’s rage.\nBut woman mostly, as winter moonlight sees,\nImpetuous midnight, and the dune’s dark trees."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nwoke up this morning\nfeeling excellent,\npicked up the telephone\ndialed the number of\nmy equal opportunity employer\nto inform him I will not\nbe into work today\nAre you feeling sick?\nthe boss asked me\nNo Sir I replied:\nI am feeling too good\nto report to work today,\nif I feel sick tomorrow\nI will come in early"} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI like to touch your tattoos in complete\ndarkness, when I can’t see them. I’m sure of\nwhere they are, know by heart the neat\nlines of lightning pulsing just above\nyour nipple, can find, as if by instinct, the blue\nswirls of water on your shoulder where a serpent\ntwists, facing a dragon. When I pull you\nto me, taking you until we’re spent\nand quiet on the sheets, I love to kiss\nthe pictures in your skin. They’ll last until\nyou’re seared to ashes; whatever persists\nor turns to pain between us, they will still\nbe there. Such permanence is terrifying.\nSo I touch them in the dark; but touch them, trying."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhen I do count the clock that tells the time,\nAnd see the brave day sunk in hideous night;\nWhen I behold the violet past prime,\nAnd sable curls all silver’d o’er with white;\nWhen lofty trees I see barren of leaves\nWhich erst from heat did canopy the herd,\nAnd summer’s green all girded up in sheaves\nBorne on the bier with white and bristly beard,\nThen of thy beauty do I question make,\nThat thou among the wastes of time must go,\nSince sweets and beauties do themselves forsake\nAnd die as fast as they see others grow;\nAnd nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence\nSave breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLook up: blazing chrysanthemums in rose\nshriek into bloom above the Tilt-a-Whirls,\nhang for a blink, then die in smoky swirls.\nThey scream revolt at what the body knows:\nall revels end. We clap and sigh. Then, no—\nanother rose! another peony! break,\nflame, roar, as though by roaring they might make\nthe rides whirl in perpetuum. As though\nwe need not finally, wearily turn, to plow\nback through the crush of bodies, the lank air,\nto buses that inch us, sweating, across town.\nAs though we were not dropped in silence there\nto trudge the last blocks home, the streetlamps low,\nthe crickets counting summer's seconds down."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nOne writes telling me I am her guiding light\nAnd my poems her bible — on this cold morning\nAfter moss I smoke one cigarette\nAnd hear a magpie chatter in the paddock,\nThe image of Hatana — he bashes at the windows\nIn idiot spite, shouting — ‘Pakeha! You can be\n‘The country’s leading poet’ — at the church I murmured, ‘Tena koe,'\nTo the oldest woman and she replied, ‘Tena koe’—\nYet the red book is shut from which I should learn Maori\nAnd these daft English words meander on,\nHow dark a light! Hatana, you have gripped me\nAgain by the balls; you sift and riddle my mind\nOn the rack of the middle world, and from my grave at length\nA muddy spring of poems will gush out."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nA barefoot boy! I mark him at his play—\nFor May is here once more, and so is he,—\nHis dusty trousers, rolled half to the knee,\nAnd his bare ankles grimy, too, as they:\nCross-hatchings of the nettle, in array\nOf feverish stripes, hint vividly to me\nOf woody pathways winding endlessly\nAlong the creek, where even yesterday\nHe plunged his shrinking body—gasped and shook—\nYet called the water \"warm,\" with never lack\nOf joy. And so, half enviously I look\nUpon this graceless barefoot and his track,—\nHis toe stubbed—ay, his big toe-nail knocked back\nLike unto the clasp of an old pocketbook."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nO! lest the world should task you to recite\nWhat merit lived in me, that you should love\nAfter my death, dear love, forget me quite,\nFor you in me can nothing worthy prove;\nUnless you would devise some virtuous lie,\nTo do more for me than mine own desert,\nAnd hang more praise upon deceased I\nThan niggard truth would willingly impart:\nO! lest your true love may seem false in this\nThat you for love speak well of me untrue,\nMy name be buried where my body is,\nAnd live no more to shame nor me nor you.\nFor I am shamed by that which I bring forth,\nAnd so should you, to love things nothing worth."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\n…When that joy is gone for good\nI move the arms beneath the blood.\nWhen my blood is running wild\nI sew the clothing of a child.\nWhen that child is never born\nI lean my breast against a thorn.\nWhen the thorn brings no reprieve\nI rise and live, I rise and live.\nWhen I live from hand to hand\nNude in the marketplace I stand.\nWhen I stand and am not sold\nI build a fire against the cold.\nWhen the cold does not destroy\nI leap from ambush on my joy…"} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhat is your substance, whereof are you made,\nThat millions of strange shadows on you tend?\nSince every one hath, every one, one shade,\nAnd you, but one, can every shadow lend.\nDescribe Adonis, and the counterfeit\nIs poorly imitated after you;\nOn Helen's cheek all art of beauty set,\nAnd you in Grecian tires are painted new.\nSpeak of the spring and foison of the year:\nThe one doth shadow of your beauty show,\nThe other as your bounty doth appear;\nAnd you in every blessèd shape we know.\nIn all external grace you have some part,\nBut you like none, none you, for constant heart."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nBaudelaire: \"The dead, the poor dead, have their bad hours.\" But the dead have no watches, no grief and no hours.\nAt first not smoking took all my time:\nI did it a little by little and hour by hour.\nPer diem.\nPro bono.\nCui bono?\nPro rata.\nBut the poor use English.\nOff and on.\nBy the hour.\n\"I'm sorry but we'll have to stop now.\" There tick but fifty minutes in the psychoanalytic hour.\nVengeance is mine, yours, his or hers, ours, yours again (you-all's this time), and then (yikes!) theirs.\nI prefer ours.\nTwenty minutes fleeing phantoms at full tilt and then the cat coils herself like a quoit and sleeps for hours."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nShall I compare thee to a summer’s day?\nThou art more lovely and more temperate:\nRough winds do shake the darling buds of May,\nAnd summer’s lease hath all too short a date:\nSometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,\nAnd often is his gold complexion dimm’d,\nAnd every fair from fair sometime declines,\nBy chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d:\nBut thy eternal summer shall not fade,\nNor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,\nNor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,\nWhen in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,\nSo long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,\nSo long lives this, and this gives life to thee."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLyke as the Culver on the barèd bough,\nSits mourning for the absence of her mate:\nAnd in her songs sends many a wishfull vow,\nFor his returne that seemes to linger late,\nSo I alone now left disconsolate,\nMourne to my selfe the absence of my love:\nAnd wandring here and there all desolate,\nSeek with my playnts to match that mournful dove:\nNe joy of ought that under heaven doth hove,\nCan comfort me, but her owne joyous sight:\nWhose sweet aspèct both God and man can move,\nIn her unspotted pleasauns to delight.\nDark is my day, whyles her fayre light I mis,\nAnd dead my life that wants such lively blis."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nWhen we met first and loved, I did not build\nUpon the event with marble. Could it mean\nTo last, a love set pendulous between\nSorrow and sorrow? Nay, I rather thrilled,\nDistrusting every light that seemed to gild\nThe onward path, and feared to overlean\nA finger even. And, though I have grown serene\nAnd strong since then, I think that God has willed\nA still renewable fear . . . O love, O troth . . .\nLest these enclaspëd hands should never hold,\nThis mutual kiss drop down between us both\nAs an unowned thing, once the lips being cold.\nAnd Love, be false! if he, to keep one oath,\nMust lose one joy, by his life’s star foretold."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIs it indeed so? If I lay here dead,\nWouldst thou miss any life in losing mine?\nAnd would the sun for thee more coldly shine\nBecause of grave-damps falling round my head?\nI marvelled, my Belovëd, when I read\nThy thought so in the letter. I am thine—\nBut . . . so much to thee? Can I pour thy wine\nWhile my hands tremble? Then my soul, instead\nOf dreams of death, resumes life’s lower range.\nThen, love me, Love! look on me—breathe on me!\nAs brighter ladies do not count it strange,\nFor love, to give up acres and degree,\nI yield the grave for thy sake, and exchange\nMy near sweet view of heaven, for earth with thee!"} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWould that you were alive today,\nCatullus!\nTruth ’tis, there is a filthy skunk amongst us,\nA rank musk-idiot, the filthiest skunk,\nOf no least sorry use on earth, but only Fit in fancy to justify the outlay Of your most horrible vocabulary.\nMy Muse, all innocent as Eve in Eden,\nWould yet wear any skins of old pollution Rather than celebrate the name detested.\nEv’n now might he rejoice at our attention,\nGuess'd he this little ode were aiming at him.\nO! were you but alive again,\nCatullus!\nFor see, not one among the bards of our time With their flimsy tackle was out to strike him;\nNot those two pretty Laureates of England,\nNot Alfred Tennyson nor Alfred Austin."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nHow careful was I when I took my way,\nEach trifle under truest bars to thrust,\nThat to my use it might unused stay\nFrom hands of falsehood, in sure wards of trust!\nBut thou, to whom my jewels trifles are,\nMost worthy comfort, now my greatest grief,\nThou best of dearest, and mine only care,\nArt left the prey of every vulgar thief.\nThee have I not lock’d up in any chest,\nSave where thou art not, though I feel thou art,\nWithin the gentle closure of my breast,\nFrom whence at pleasure thou mayst come and part;\nAnd even thence thou wilt be stol’n I fear,\nFor truth proves thievish for a prize so dear."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nWhat a relief\nyou cannot live everywhere all at once.\nToday, here in Diamond Cave,\nthere's no longer any reason to live.\nStay one or two days:\nthis world\n& the Other are drained of difference.\nWind blows.\nAs a pearl is born at seabottom in agony\nout of oyster flesh from within the most obscure darkness\nhere the wind blows from the depths.\nI want to travel far & then return.\nThe wind blows as if I were eighty-five,\nmaybe eighty-seven."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAs an unperfect actor on the stage,\nWho with his fear is put beside his part,\nOr some fierce thing replete with too much rage,\nWhose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart;\nSo I, for fear of trust, forget to say\nThe perfect ceremony of love’s rite,\nAnd in mine own love’s strength seem to decay,\nO’ercharg’d with burthen of mine own love’s might.\nO! let my looks be then the eloquence\nAnd dumb presagers of my speaking breast,\nWho plead for love, and look for recompense,\nMore than that tongue that more hath more express’d.\nO! learn to read what silent love hath writ:\nTo hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLike as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore,\nSo do our minutes hasten to their end;\nEach changing place with that which goes before,\nIn sequent toil all forwards do contend.\nNativity, once in the main of light,\nCrawls to maturity, wherewith being crown'd,\nCrooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight,\nAnd Time that gave doth now his gift confound.\nTime doth transfix the flourish set on youth\nAnd delves the parallels in beauty's brow,\nFeeds on the rarities of nature's truth,\nAnd nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:\nAnd yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,\nPraising thy worth, despite his cruel hand."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThat god forbid, that made me first your slave,\nI should in thought control your times of pleasure,\nOr at your hand the account of hours to crave,\nBeing your vassal, bound to stay your leisure!\nO! let me suffer, being at your beck,\nThe imprison’d absence of your liberty;\nAnd patience, tame to sufferance, bide each check,\nWithout accusing you of injury.\nBe where you list, your charter is so strong\nThat you yourself may privilage your time\nTo what you will; to you it doth belong\nYourself to pardon of self-doing crime.\nI am to wait, though waiting so be hell,\nNot blame your pleasure be it ill or well."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAlone, unfriended, on a foreign shore,\nBehold an hapless, melancholy maid,\nBegging her scanty fare from door to door,\nWith piteous voice, and humbly bended head.\nAlas! her native tongue is known to few:\nHer manners and her garb excite suprise;\nThe vulgar stare to see her bid adieu;\nHer tattered garments fix their curious eyes.\nCease, cease your laugh, ye thoughtless vain;\nWhy sneer at yon poor Indian’s pain?\n’Tis nature’s artless voice that speaks:\nBehold the tear bedew her cheeks!\nImploring actions, bursting sighs,\nReveal enough to British eyes."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nPlease think of this as not merely a piece\nOf writing that anyone would fully\nAppreciate, but as plain and simple\nWords that attempt to arouse whatever\nAppetencies you, especially, depend\nUpon language to fulfill; that drench you\nIn several levels of meaning at once,\nRendering my presence superfluous.\nIn other words, welcome this as a poem,\nNot merely a missive I’ve slowly composed\nAnd tucked under your windshield wiper\nSo that these onlookers who saw me bash\nIn your fender will think I’m jotting down\nThe usual information and go away."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhat passing-bells for these who die as cattle?\n— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.\nOnly the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle\nCan patter out their hasty orisons.\nNo mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;\nNor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—\nThe shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;\nAnd bugles calling for them from sad shires.\nWhat candles may be held to speed them all?\nNot in the hands of boys, but in their eyes\nShall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.\nThe pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;\nTheir flowers the tenderness of patient minds,\nAnd each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMonterosa, your body is dead on Avenue A. Angelo,\nThey found you eyes open staring at the beer\nSoaked floorboards. Did you want that? Did\nYou mind them filling your back with buckshot?\nAngelo, I am angry with them all, and you Monterosa\nKilled and killers, killing and dealing dope. No good\nYou were, no good they are. Still, I wish their fate\nTo be bodies stacking under the same blue smoke.\nMonterosa, there is blood on your song, blood on the juke\nBox. The cowbell, the conga, and your corpse form the trio\nThat is the rhinestone pin of my failure, your failure,\nOur failure, who loved, but did not rescue Angelo.\nAngel, hold him, while I bury him in these clean words,\nAnd pray to see the resurrection of the rose mountain."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nBeloved, thou hast brought me many flowers\nPlucked in the garden, all the summer through\nAnd winter, and it seemed as if they grew\nIn this close room, nor missed the sun and showers,\nSo, in the like name of that love of ours,\nTake back these thoughts which here unfolded too,\nAnd which on warm and cold days I withdrew\nFrom my heart’s ground. Indeed, those beds and bowers\nBe overgrown with bitter weeds and rue,\nAnd wait thy weeding; yet here’s eglantine,\nHere’s ivy!— take them, as I used to do\nThy flowers, and keep them where they shall not pine.\nInstruct thine eyes to keep their colours true,\nAnd tell thy soul, their roots are left in mine."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMy poet, thou canst touch on all the notes\nGod set between His After and Before,\nAnd strike up and strike off the general roar\nOf the rushing worlds a melody that floats\nIn a serene air purely. Antidotes\nOf medicated music, answering for\nMankind’s forlornest uses, thou canst pour\nFrom thence into their ears. God’s will devotes\nThine to such ends, and mine to wait on thine.\nHow, Dearest, wilt thou have me for most use?\nA hope, to sing by gladly? or a fine\nSad memory, with thy songs to interfuse?\nA shade, in which to sing—of palm or pine?\nA grave, on which to rest from singing? Choose."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nOn the first page of my dreambook\nIt’s always evening\nIn an occupied country.\nHour before the curfew.\nA small provincial city.\nThe houses all dark.\nThe storefronts gutted.\nI am on a street corner\nWhere I shouldn’t be.\nAlone and coatless\nI have gone out to look\nFor a black dog who answers to my whistle.\nI have a kind of Halloween mask\nWhich I am afraid to put on."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThine eyes I love, and they, as pitying me,\nKnowing thy heart torment me with disdain,\nHave put on black and loving mourners be,\nLooking with pretty ruth upon my pain.\nAnd truly not the morning sun of heaven\nBetter becomes the grey cheeks of the east,\nNor that full star that ushers in the even,\nDoth half that glory to the sober west,\nAs those two mourning eyes become thy face:\nO! let it then as well beseem thy heart\nTo mourn for me since mourning doth thee grace,\nAnd suit thy pity like in every part.\nThen will I swear beauty herself is black,\nAnd all they foul that thy complexion lack."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nFull many a glorious morning have I seen\nFlatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,\nKissing with golden face the meadows green,\nGilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;\nAnon permit the basest clouds to ride\nWith ugly rack on his celestial face\nAnd from the forlorn world his visage hide,\nStealing unseen to west with this disgrace.\nEven so my sun one early morn did shine\nWith all-triumphant splendour on my brow;\nBut out, alack! he was but one hour mine;\nThe region cloud hath mask'd him from me now.\nYet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;\nSuns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe feeling of time derives from heat,\nan agitation of molecules,\noracles from the friction of air\nthrough fissures and the leaves of oaks.\nA few gnats stitch the lake’s edge\nwhere a fox turns off the gravel road\nto nose through rhododendron\nas children crawl through winter coats\nto reach a closet’s dark recess.\nDawdling at the edge of sleep\nyou work through problems already past\nthough unresolved, a notional path,\na crease through heads of wild blue phlox\nthat waking, you can’t follow."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nFirst time he kissed me, he but only kissed\nThe fingers of this hand wherewith I write;\nAnd ever since, it grew more clean and white.\nSlow to world-greetings, quick with its “O, list,”\nWhen the angels speak. A ring of amethyst\nI could not wear here, plainer to my sight,\nThan that first kiss. The second passed in height\nThe first, and sought the forehead, and half missed,\nHalf falling on the hair. O beyond meed!\nThat was the chrism of love, which love’s own crown,\nWith sanctifying sweetness, did precede\nThe third upon my lips was folded down\nIn perfect, purple state; since when, indeed,\nI have been proud and said, “My love, my own.”"} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhen most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,\nFor all the day they view things unrespected;\nBut when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,\nAnd darkly bright, are bright in dark directed.\nThen thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright,\nHow would thy shadow’s form form happy show\nTo the clear day with thy much clearer light,\nWhen to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so!\nHow would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made\nBy looking on thee in the living day,\nWhen in dead night thy fair imperfect shade\nThrough heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay!\nAll days are nights to see till I see thee,\nAnd nights bright days when dreams do show thee me."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMy spirit is too weak—mortality\nWeighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,\nAnd each imagined pinnacle and steep\nOf godlike hardship tells me I must die\nLike a sick eagle looking at the sky.\nYet ’tis a gentle luxury to weep\nThat I have not the cloudy winds to keep\nFresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.\nSuch dim-conceived glories of the brain\nBring round the heart an undescribable feud;\nSo do these wonders a most dizzy pain,\nThat mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude\nWasting of old time—with a billowy main—\nA sun—a shadow of a magnitude."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIf thou survive my well-contented day,\nWhen that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover\nAnd shalt by fortune once more re-survey\nThese poor rude lines of thy deceased lover,\nCompare them with the bett’ring of the time,\nAnd though they be outstripp’d by every pen,\nReserve them for my love, not for their rhyme,\nExceeded by the height of happier men.\nO! then vouchsafe me but this loving thought:\n‘Had my friend’s Muse grown with this growing age,\nA dearer birth than this his love had brought,\nTo march in ranks of better equipage:\nBut since he died and poets better prove,\nTheirs for their style I’ll read, his for his love’."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIt flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands,\nLike some grave mighty thought threading a dream,\nAnd times and things, as in that vision, seem\nKeeping along it their eternal stands,—\nCaves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd bands\nThat roamed through the young world, the glory extreme\nOf high Sesostris, and that southern beam,\nThe laughing queen that caught the world's great hands.\nThen comes a mightier silence, stern and strong,\nAs of a world left empty of its throng,\nAnd the void weighs on us; and then we wake,\nAnd hear the fruitful stream lapsing along\nTwixt villages, and think how we shall take\nOur own calm journey on for human sake."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nDevouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,\nAnd make the earth devour her own sweet brood;\nPluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,\nAnd burn the long-liv’d phoenix, in her blood;\nMake glad and sorry seasons as thou fleets,\nAnd do whate’er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,\nTo the wide world and all her fading sweets;\nBut I forbid thee one most heinous crime:\nO! carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow,\nNor draw no lines there with thine antique pen;\nHim in thy course untainted do allow\nFor beauty’s pattern to succeeding men.\nYet do thy worst, old Time; despite thy wrong,\nMy love shall in my verse ever live young."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nCanst thou, O cruel! say I love thee not,\nWhen I against myself with thee partake?\nDo I not think on thee, when I forgot\nAm of my self, all tyrant, for thy sake?\nWho hateth thee that I do call my friend,\nOn whom frown’st thou that I do fawn upon,\nNay, if thou lour’st on me, do I not spend\nRevenge upon myself with present moan?\nWhat merit do I in my self respect,\nThat is so proud thy service to despise,\nWhen all my best doth worship thy defect,\nCommanded by the motion of thine eyes?\nBut, love, hate on, for now I know thy mind;\nThose that can see thou lov’st, and I am blind."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nDown milk-bright colonnades\nthe leper’s bell recedes.\nShades lowered against the gleaming waste of ice,\nI sit back, bathe in lukewarm acquiescence.\nDutiful, prompt,\nstrapped, doped, a little drunk,\nsquinting at international afternoon\nI’ll soon pass GO again.\nAnd if these colored pencils, nose drops, passport\nshould plummet with the rest of the huge oval,\ngiant time capsule soft for the shark’s maw,\nwill a notebook ambered back to front with words\nrescue me from oblivion?\nSyrup of skittish travelers, fame. I yawn."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThou comest! all is said without a word.\nI sit beneath thy looks, as children do\nIn the noon-sun, with souls that tremble through\nTheir happy eyelids from an unaverred\nYet prodigal inward joy. Behold, I erred\nIn that last doubt! and yet I cannot rue\nThe sin most, but the occasion—that we two\nShould for a moment stand unministered\nBy a mutual presence. Ah, keep near and close,\nThou dove-like help! and when my fears would rise,\nWith thy broad heart serenely interpose:\nBrood down with thy divine sufficiencies\nThese thoughts which tremble when bereft of those,\nLike callow birds left desert to the skies."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nNot marble nor the gilded monuments\nOf princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,\nBut you shall shine more bright in these contents\nThan unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.\nWhen wasteful war shall statues overturn,\nAnd broils root out the work of masonry,\nNor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn\nThe living record of your memory.\n’Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity\nShall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room\nEven in the eyes of all posterity\nThat wear this world out to the ending doom.\nSo, till the Judgement that yourself arise,\nYou live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nFrom fairest creatures we desire increase,\nThat thereby beauty’s rose might never die,\nBut as the riper should by time decease,\nHis tender heir might bear his memory:\nBut thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,\nFeed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,\nMaking a famine where abundance lies,\nThyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:\nThou that art now the world’s fresh ornament,\nAnd only herald to the gaudy spring,\nWithin thine own bud buriest thy content,\nAnd tender churl mak’st waste in niggarding:\nPity the world, or else this glutton be,\nTo eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAbout twilight we came to the whitewashed pub\nOn a knuckle of land above the bay\nWhere a log was riding and the slow\nBird-winged breakers cast up spray.\nOne of the drinkers round packing cases had\nThe worn face of a kumara god,\nOr so it struck me. Later on\nLying awake in the veranda bedroom\nIn great dryness of mind I heard the voice of the sea\nReverberating, and thought: As a man\nGrows older he does not want beer, bread, or the prancing flesh,\nBut the arms of the eater of life, Hine-nui-te-po,\nWith teeth of obsidian and hair like kelp\nFlashing and glimmering at the edge of the horizon."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nCan life be a blessing,\nOr worth the possessing,\nCan life be a blessing if love were away?\nAh no! though our love all night keep us waking,\nAnd though he torment us with cares all the day,\nYet he sweetens, he sweetens our pains in the taking,\nThere's an hour at the last, there's an hour to repay.\nIn ev'ry possessing,\nThe ravishing blessing,\nIn ev'ry possessing the fruit of our pain,\nPoor lovers forget long ages of anguish,\nWhate'er they have suffer'd and done to obtain;\n'Tis a pleasure, a pleasure to sigh and to languish,\nWhen we hope, when we hope to be happy again."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI dunno yer highfalutin' words, but here's th' way it seems\nWhen I'm peekin' out th' winder o' my little House o Dreams;\nI've been lookin' 'roun' this big ol' world, as bizzy as a hive,\nAn' I want t' tell ye, neighbor mine, it's good t' be alive.\nI've ben settin' here, a-thinkin' hard, an' say, it seems t' me\nThat this big ol' world is jest about as good as it kin be,\nWith its starvin' little babies, an' its battles, an' its strikes,\nAn' its profiteers, an' hold-up men—th' dawggone little tykes!\nAn' its hungry men that fought fer us, that nobody employs.\nAn' I think, \"Why, shucks, we're jest a lot o' grown-up little boys!\"\nAn' I settle back, an' light my pipe, an' reach fer Mother's hand,\nAn' I wouldn't swap my peace o' mind fer nothin' in the land;\nFer this world uv ours, that jest was made fer folks like me an' you\nIs a purty good ol' place t' live—say, neighbor, ain't it true?"} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSince brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea\nBut sad mortality o’er-sways their power,\nHow with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,\nWhose action is no stronger than a flower?\nO, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out\nAgainst the wrackful siege of batt’ring days,\nWhen rocks impregnable are not so stout,\nNor gates of steel so strong, but time decays?\nO fearful meditation! where, alack,\nShall time’s best jewel from time’s chest lie hid?\nOr what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?\nOr who his spoil of beauty can forbid?\nO, none, unless this miracle have might,\nThat in black ink my love may still shine bright."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nHighlight Actions\nEnable or disable annotations\nNobody heard him, the dead man,\nBut still he lay moaning:\nI was much further out than you thought\nAnd not waving but drowning.\nPoor chap, he always loved larkinglarking Playing tricks, kidding, fooling around.\nAnd now he’s dead\nIt must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,\nThey said.\nOh, no no no, it was too cold always\n(Still the dead one lay moaning)\nI was much too far out all my life\nAnd not waving but drowning."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nNo longer mourn for me when I am dead\nThan you shall hear the surly sullen bell\nGive warning to the world that I am fled\nFrom this vile world with vilest worms to dwell:\nNay, if you read this line, remember not\nThe hand that writ it, for I love you so,\nThat I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,\nIf thinking on me then should make you woe.\nO if, I say, you look upon this verse,\nWhen I perhaps compounded am with clay,\nDo not so much as my poor name rehearse;\nBut let your love even with my life decay;\nLest the wise world should look into your moan,\nAnd mock you with me after I am gone."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhen I consider everything that grows\nHolds in perfection but a little moment,\nThat this huge stage presenteth nought but shows\nWhereon the stars in secret influence comment;\nWhen I perceive that men as plants increase,\nCheered and check'd even by the selfsame sky,\nVaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,\nAnd wear their brave state out of memory;\nThen the conceit of this inconstant stay\nSets you most rich in youth before my sight,\nWhere wasteful Time debateth with Decay\nTo change your day of youth to sullied night;\nAnd all in war with Time for love of you,\nAs he takes from you, I engraft you new."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nFrom you have I been absent in the spring,\nWhen proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,\nHath put a spirit of youth in everything,\nThat heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him.\nYet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell\nOf different flowers in odour and in hue,\nCould make me any summer’s story tell,\nOr from their proud lap pluck them where they grew:\nNor did I wonder at the lily’s white,\nNor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;\nThey were but sweet, but figures of delight\nDrawn after you, – you pattern of all those.\nYet seem’d it winter still, and, you away,\nAs with your shadow I with these did play."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nA lexicon of words that were not\nsaid in childhood, and all of those\nthat were, were said beside\nan upturned boat, lapped\nplanking of the creosoted shed,\nwere said into the wind on\ntussocky ground, by farm-rust vehicles.\nThe buildings I could not complete\nwithout my father’s help, the wind\nin which I was at sea. Rain blooming\nin August that moved the land\nand over land toward the autumn,\nsliding through the gates of summer,\nfeeling for the bone inside the wrist."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe young Endymion sleeps Endymion's sleep;\nThe shepherd-boy whose tale was left half told!\nThe solemn grove uplifts its shield of gold\nTo the red rising moon, and loud and deep The nightingale is singing from the steep;\nIt is midsummer, but the air is cold;\nCan it be death?\nAlas, beside the fold\nA shepherd's pipe lies shattered near his sheep.\nLo! in the moonlight gleams a marble white,\nOn which I read: \"Here lieth one whose name\nWas writ in water.\" And was this the meed Of his sweet singing?\nRather let me write:\n\"The smoking flax before it burst to flame\nWas quenched by death, and broken the bruised reed.\""} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nAnd then when you stand where it is quiet so that\nyou notice when thought ends and\nlistening begins when listening ends\nand seeing begins when a bird\nflies when you glide as a black bird\nand scream when you start to speak\nin the clear air and can speak of nothing\nbut the light as if it were the first\nlight when you cast a shadow\non the rock and say my shadow stays\nand the rock passes away when at this moment\nit is true that it is good to attempt the entire mission\nyou can call the desert by its name\nTranslated from the German"} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI like how the mallard ducklings\ngoofy and weak\nwaddle up the cement incline\nthen slide into this runoff\nof lawn sprinklers and car washes\nand how the great blue heron\nseems to be teleported here\nfrom the Jurassic\nto look for extinct species of fish\nbut mostly I like the way\nthe little birds\nfly in and out of the barbed wire\nwith only a smear of water\nto keep them singing."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nPassing the shop after school, he would look up at the sign\nand go on, glad that his own life had to do with books.\nNow at night when he saw the grey in his parents’ hair and\nheard their talk of that day’s worries and the next:\nlack of orders, if orders, lack of workers, if workers, lack of\ngoods, if there were workers and goods, lack of orders\nagain,\nfor the tenth time he said, “I’m going in with you: there’s more\nmoney in business.”\nHis father answered, “Since when do you care about money?\nYou don’t know what kind of a life you’re going into—\nbut you have always had your own way.”\nHe went out selling: in the morning he read the Arrival of\nBuyers"} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nOr I shall live your epitaph to make,\nOr you survive when I in earth am rotten;\nFrom hence your memory death cannot take,\nAlthough in me each part will be forgotten.\nYour name from hence immortal life shall have,\nThough I, once gone, to all the world must die:\nThe earth can yield me but a common grave,\nWhen you entombed in men’s eyes shall lie.\nYour monument shall be my gentle verse,\nWhich eyes not yet created shall o’er-read;\nAnd tongues to be, your being shall rehearse,\nWhen all the breathers of this world are dead;\nYou still shall live, such virtue hath my pen,\nWhere breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nTo celebrate his final Pride, in June,\nmy friend, lymphatic, thin, and in distress,\nmanaged to dress in drag. He shot the moon:\noutstretched, he’d used his dying to think—obsess—\nabout the Prada pumps, their skin a snake;\nthe heavy pantyhose, two pair; the moot\nbut lacy underthings; the makeup, cake,\nto overlay his pain. I called him beaut-\ni-ful; he said he felt like Greta Garbo\nin Queen Christina (our campy interplay);\nI countered that he looked more like a hobo-\nsexual in heels. We howled. That day,\nwe never left his Castro flat. His rhinestone\nglittered, and everywhere, the smell of cologne."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLet me not to the marriage of true minds\nAdmit impediments. Love is not love\nWhich alters when it alteration finds,\nOr bends with the remover to remove:\nO, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,\nThat looks on tempests and is never shaken;\nIt is the star to every wandering bark,\nWhose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.\nLove’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks\nWithin his bending sickle’s compass come;\nLove alters not with his brief hours and weeks,\nBut bears it out even to the edge of doom.\nIf this be error and upon me prov’d,\nI never writ, nor no man ever lov’d."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nNot even the cops who can do anything could do this—\nwork on Sunday picking up dirty and delivering clean\nlaundry in Philadelphia. Rambling with my father, get this,\nin a truck that wasn’t even our own,\npart ambulance, part bullet, there wasn’t anything\nwe couldn’t do. Sheets of stigmata, macula of love,\nvomit and shit and the stains of pissing\nanother week’s salary away, we picked up and drove\nto the stick men in shirt sleeves, the thin\nBolshevik Jews who laughed out the sheets like the empty\nspeech in cartoons. They smelled better than sin,\nbetter than decadent capitalism. And oh, we\ncould deliver, couldn’t we, the lawless bags through the city\nthat said in his yawn, get money, get money, get money."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWe unstave the winter’s tangle.\nSad tomatoes, sullen sky.\nWe unplay the summer’s blight.\nRotted on the vine, black fruit\nswings free of the strings that bound it.\nIn the compost, ghost melon; in the fields(,)\ngrotesque extruded peppers.\nWe prod half-thawed mucky things.\nIn the sky, starlings eddying.\nTomorrow, snow again, old silence.\nToday, the creaking icy puller.\nLast night I woke\nto wild unfrozen prattle.\nRain on the roof— a foreign liquid tongue."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\n\"A cradle thief,\" my mother called the man\nwe'd see in shops, cafes, parks, even church,\nwith \"that poor girl\" beside him. Hand in hand,\nthey'd walk as if they didn't feel the scorch\nof people's stares. The day we saw him press\nhis lips to hers, my mother blocked my eyes\nas if his mouth (I longed for my first kiss)\nagainst her mouth was smothering her cries.\nAll week, I ran a fever that wouldn't break.\n\"A cradle thief\"—a voice I only half\nknew as my own surprised me in the dark,\nmy sick-bed wet with shivers. \"A cradle thief,\"\nI said again, as if the words could will\nmy window broken, footprint on the sill."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nbeside the grave\nthe ties gave\nwas she there\neverywhere\nin the fern\nor return\nwhen he called her\nof black alder\non her lips\nthe fresh chips\nor felled tree\nshe was free\nand no child\nand too wild"} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThree sang of love together: one with lips\nCrimson, with cheeks and bosom in a glow,\nFlushed to the yellow hair and finger tips;\nAnd one there sang who soft and smooth as snow\nBloomed like a tinted hyacinth at a show;\nAnd one was blue with famine after love,\nWho like a harpstring snapped rang harsh and low\nThe burden of what those were singing of.\nOne shamed herself in love; one temperately\nGrew gross in soulless love, a sluggish wife;\nOne famished died for love. Thus two of three\nTook death for love and won him after strife;\nOne droned in sweetness like a fattened bee:\nAll on the threshold, yet all short of life."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nYou perished, in a toyland, of surprise;\nand only I am here to bury you\nin dessicated tulip tips and eyes\nof broken diadie-dolls. Poor pink, poor blue!\nWill you be grown when I’m in Heaven too?\nWill length of death have turned you Classical\nlike old Bisque faces, keen and sainted view,\npearl on your breast, pearl-pointed linen shawl?\nNo, you’ll still have your flowers with no stem,\nand harp, clear stringed, the blur of La Boheme.\nYou’ll heap upon that Mansion’s mantlepiece\nimpossible plush animal creations,\nand pout the pillared City’s aberrations.\nYou rest a Classic, but of Wedgewood’s Greece."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI'm used to the emperor's bitterness\nI can't find the sweet place unless you make me\nThis face that is not my face I may\nlook made but when you touch me you make me\nMake the oak say blossom The stripped say swell\nThe avenue pavement say river Make me\nThis shirt I can't take off The one\nthe nights without you gathered to make me\nThe new day The sweet place Tomorrow\nwhispering from tonight's last light Make me\nKissing you without authorization\nIf you want me to stop you'll have to make me\nThe ruined city Or is it a woman\ninterrupting your sleep to say Now To say Make me"} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIf but some vengeful god would call to me\nFrom up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,\nKnow that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,\nThat thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!”\nThen would I bear it, clench myself, and die,\nSteeled by the sense of ire unmerited;\nHalf-eased in that a Powerfuller than I\nHad willed and meted me the tears I shed.\nBut not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,\nAnd why unblooms the best hope ever sown?\n—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,\nAnd dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . .\nThese purblind Doomsters had as readily strown\nBlisses about my pilgrimage as pain."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThat time of year thou mayst in me behold\nWhen yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang\nUpon those boughs which shake against the cold,\nBare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.\nIn me thou see’st the twilight of such day\nAs after sunset fadeth in the west;\nWhich by and by black night doth take away,\nDeath’s second self, that seals up all in rest.\nIn me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,\nThat on the ashes of his youth doth lie,\nAs the death-bed, whereon it must expire,\nConsum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.\nThis thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,\nTo love that well, which thou must leave ere long."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhen I ran, it rained. Late in the afternoon—\nmidsummer, upstate New York, mornings I wrote,\nread Polish history, and there was a woman\nwhom I thought about; outside the moody, humid\nAmerican sublime—late in the afternoon,\ntoward sundown, just as the sky was darkening,\nthe light came up and redwings settled in the cattails.\nThey were death's idea of twilight, the whole notes\nof a requiem the massed clouds croaked\nabove the somber fields. Lady of eyelashes,\ndo you hear me? Whiteness, otter's body,\ncoolness of the morning, rubbed amber\nand the skin's salt, do you hear me? This is Poland speaking,\n“era of the dawn of freedom,” nineteen twenty-two."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nDrunk on the Umbrian hills at dusk and drunk\nOn one pink cloud that stood beside the moon,\nDrunk on the moon, a marble smile, and drunk,\nTwo young Americans, on one another,\nFar from home and wanting this forever—\nWho needed God? We had our bodies, bread,\nAnd glasses of a raw, green, local wine,\nAnd watched our Godless perfect darkness breed\nEnormous softly burning ancient stars.\nWho needed God? And why do I ask now?\nBecause I’m older and I think God stirs\nIn details that keep bringing back that time,\nDetails that are just as vivid now—\nOur bodies, bread, a sharp Umbrian wine."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe Chinese concubine feeling has left and the\nsky hovers like the preparation of a revolutionary speech.\nYou, my long walk with all that expectation\nthe sexy lunches, thousands of them,\nand then all that religion of eroticism.\nBeneath the squeeze on my heart is a stranglehold.\nYou, like a little Italian porcelain village that’s all over the\nshop window saying admire this image of foreverness.\nThe red scarf is factory-made but silky\nand it’s what I’d flutter over your face if you were here\nand it would be cheap greasy hypnotism, my own malarkey\nand we’d be on the southside, at the boat docks, and\nI’d kiss you beside the stretch of a Russian grain ship, its\nhammer and sickle like the sending out of rescue choppers."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nBecause I feel that, in the Heavens above,\nThe angels, whispering to one another,\nCan find, among their burning terms of love,\nNone so devotional as that of “Mother,”\nTherefore by that dear name I long have called you—\nYou who are more than mother unto me,\nAnd fill my heart of hearts, where Death installed you\nIn setting my Virginia's spirit free.\nMy mother—my own mother, who died early,\nWas but the mother of myself; but you\nAre mother to the one I loved so dearly,\nAnd thus are dearer than the mother I knew\nBy that infinity with which my wife\nWas dearer to my soul than its soul-life."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSin of self-love possesseth all mine eye\nAnd all my soul, and all my every part;\nAnd for this sin there is no remedy,\nIt is so grounded inward in my heart.\nMethinks no face so gracious is as mine,\nNo shape so true, no truth of such account;\nAnd for myself mine own worth do define,\nAs I all other in all worths surmount.\nBut when my glass shows me myself indeed\nBeated and chopp’d with tanned antiquity,\nMine own self-love quite contrary I read;\nSelf so self-loving were iniquity.\n’Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise,\nPainting my age with beauty of thy days."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nNow that you too must shortly go the way\nWhich in these bloodshot years uncounted men\nHave gone in vanishing armies day by day,\nAnd in their numbers will not come again:\nI must not strain the moments of our meeting\nStriving for each look, each accent, not to miss,\nOr question of our parting and our greeting,\nIs this the last of all? is this—or this?\nLast sight of all it may be with these eyes,\nLast touch, last hearing, since eyes, hands, and ears,\nEven serving love, are our mortalities,\nAnd cling to what they own in mortal fears:— But oh, let end what will,\nI hold you fast\nBy immortal love, which has no first or last."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nThere it was, word for word,\nThe poem that took the place of a mountain.\nHe breathed its oxygen,\nEven when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.\nIt reminded him how he had needed\nA place to go to in his own direction,\nHow he had recomposed the pines,\nShifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,\nFor the outlook that would be right,\nWhere he would be complete in an unexplained completion:\nThe exact rock where his inexactnesses\nWould discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,\nWhere he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,\nRecognize his unique and solitary home."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe aftermath always happening like an airplane falling, or a man\nmidair falling from a horse, and an arrow, a gun, many guns\npointing away, at us, our all bull’s-eye-on-the-mark. This is what he\nsees when he sees. Maybe Wrong or not, the appropriation, the film\nclip, chase, pressed lips over lips, photo moment on the minute-drawn\nbreath in, the over, the under, bodies in black and white cut to pose,\nthe way a kiss can pose, dispose of everything around it for another,\ndispose of thinking. It’s like waving good-bye. Mouth to mouth seeing\nas saying. Inside. Resuscitation back to the brain saying yes as the mouth\nmakes an O. Circles for the digital age, colored dots for faces already\nmade for erasing. Hurry, come, he, 6’7”, sees fifteen minutes from the\nMexican border, cremates his old paintings up close. But the ashes were\nkept in a book urn, not so afloat in the ocean with my parents, Above,\nOn, and Under (with Mermaid)"} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nStanding in front of a mirror, my mother tells me she is ugly\nsays the medication is making her fat. I laugh & walk her\nback to the bed. My mother tells me she is ugly in the same voice\nshe used to say no woman could love you & I watch her\npull at her body & it is mine. My heavy breast.\nMy disappointing shape. She asks for a bowl of plain broth\n& it becomes the cup of vinegar she would pour down my throat.\nEveryday after school, I would kneel before her.\nI would remove my clothes & ask her to mark the progress.\nIt’s important that I mention, I truly wanted to be beautiful\nfor her. In my dreams I am thin & if not thin, something better.\nI tell my mother she is still beautiful & she laughs. The room fills\nwith flies. They gather in the shape of a small boy. They lead her\nback to the mirror, but my reflection is still there."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThere’s nothing dandier than threadbare threads\nworn by a discerning shabby dresser.\nA collar’s fret or subtle fray is not lesser\nbecause it’s worn away but models instead\nthe bespoke tailoring of time itself.\nDone poorly—the gentleman farmer’s\npiecemeal pastoral, that NoHo charmer’s\nduct-taped boots—it’s like an unread bookshelf\nof secondhand prose: a too-studied pose.\nDone well, it draws you in to draw you near,\nreveals the intricate pattern in the years’\ninexorable ravel. Between decompose\nand deconstruct, what seemed a foppish quirk\ngrows wise. Design undone. We wear time’s work."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLord of my love, to whom in vassalage\nThy merit hath my duty strongly knit,\nTo thee I send this written embassage,\nTo witness duty, not to show my wit:\nDuty so great, which wit so poor as mine\nMay make seem bare, in wanting words to show it,\nBut that I hope some good conceit of thine\nIn thy soul’s thought, all naked, will bestow it:\nTill whatsoever star that guides my moving,\nPoints on me graciously with fair aspect,\nAnd puts apparel on my tatter’d loving,\nTo show me worthy of thy sweet respect:\nThen may I dare to boast how I do love thee;\nTill then, not show my head where thou mayst prove me."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThose parts of thee that the world’s eye doth view\nWant nothing that the thought of hearts can mend;\nAll tongues, the voice of souls, give thee that due,\nUttering bare truth, even so as foes commend.\nThy outward thus with outward praise is crown’d;\nBut those same tongues, that give thee so thine own,\nIn other accents do this praise confound\nBy seeing farther than the eye hath shown.\nThey look into the beauty of thy mind,\nAnd that in guess they measure by thy deeds;\nThen churls their thoughts, although their eyes were kind,\nTo thy fair flower add the rank smell of weeds:\nBut why thy odour matcheth not thy show,\nThe soil is this, that thou dost common grow."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nNow, in a breath, we’ll burst those gates of gold,\nAnd ransack heaven before our moment fails.\nNow, in a breath, before we, too, grow old,\nWe’ll mount and sing and spread immortal sails.\nIt is not time that makes eternity.\nLove and an hour may quite out-span the years,\nAnd give us more to hear and more to see\nThan life can wash away with all its tears.\nDear, when we part, at last, that sunset sky\nShall not be touched with deeper hues than this;\nBut we shall ride the lightning ere we die\nAnd seize our brief infinitude of bliss,\nWith time to spare for all that heaven can tell,\nWhile eyes meet eyes, and look their last farewell."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhen I have seen by Time's fell hand defac'd\nThe rich proud cost of outworn buried age;\nWhen sometime lofty towers I see down-ras'd\nAnd brass eternal slave to mortal rage;\nWhen I have seen the hungry ocean gain\nAdvantage on the kingdom of the shore,\nAnd the firm soil win of the wat'ry main,\nIncreasing store with loss and loss with store;\nWhen I have seen such interchange of state,\nOr state itself confounded to decay;\nRuin hath taught me thus to ruminate,\nThat Time will come and take my love away.\nThis thought is as a death, which cannot choose\nBut weep to have that which it fears to lose."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nYes, call me by my pet-name! let me hear\nThe name I used to run at, when a child,\nFrom innocent play, and leave the cowslips plied,\nTo glance up in some face that proved me dear\nWith the look of its eyes. I miss the clear\nFond voices which, being drawn and reconciled\nInto the music of Heaven’s undefiled,\nCall me no longer. Silence on the bier,\nWhile I call God—call God!—so let thy mouth\nBe heir to those who are now exanimate.\nGather the north flowers to complete the south,\nAnd catch the early love up in the late.\nYes, call me by that name,—and I, in truth,\nWith the same heart, will answer and not wait."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nWhen to the sessions of sweet silent thought\nI summon up remembrance of things past,\nI sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,\nAnd with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:\nThen can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,\nFor precious friends hid in death's dateless night,\nAnd weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,\nAnd moan th' expense of many a vanish'd sight;\nThen can I grieve at grievances foregone,\nAnd heavily from woe to woe tell o'er\nThe sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,\nWhich I new pay as if not paid before.\nBut if the while I think on thee, dear friend,\nAll losses are restor'd, and sorrows end."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI wake to money, and take my money slow\nI watched for money, lights turned low\nOne must have a mind of money . . .\nMoney that is not there and the money that is\nThe art of money isn't hard to master\n. . . The money surrounds us . . .\nSweet sweet sweet sweet sweet money\nMoney on a wet, black bough\nDo not go gentle into that good money\nThe pure products of money go crazy\nMoney sweeping out from us to disappear\nOh Money! My Money! our fearful trip is done\nI myself will die without money\nMoney, Money, you bastard, I'm through."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIs it for fear to wet a widow’s eye,\nThat thou consum’st thyself in single life?\nAh! if thou issueless shalt hap to die,\nThe world will wail thee like a makeless wife;\nThe world will be thy widow and still weep\nThat thou no form of thee hast left behind,\nWhen every private widow well may keep\nBy children’s eyes, her husband’s shape in mind:\nLook! what an unthrift in the world doth spend\nShifts but his place, for still the world enjoys it;\nBut beauty’s waste hath in the world an end,\nAnd kept unused the user so destroys it.\nNo love toward others in that bosom sits\nThat on himself such murd’rous shame commits."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThis sonnet is your personal amulet\nTo be worn in instance of need\nOr constantly held in the mind\nOccurring here and elsewhere at this moment\nThis sonnet is sent without cunning\nTo cull a particular phrase from your lips\nTo enlist another protector\nIn this age of malcontent benefactors\nAgainst an ironclad schooner\nFeudal kingdom\nDismemberment by jubilant crowds\nStrangely indifferent faces\nHeat and dust besides\nSuicide implicating others"} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMethought I saw my late espoused saint\nBrought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave,\nWhom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,\nRescu'd from death by force, though pale and faint.\nMine, as whom wash'd from spot of child-bed taint\nPurification in the old Law did save,\nAnd such as yet once more I trust to have\nFull sight of her in Heaven without restraint,\nCame vested all in white, pure as her mind;\nHer face was veil'd, yet to my fancied sight\nLove, sweetness, goodness, in her person shin'd\nSo clear as in no face with more delight.\nBut Oh! as to embrace me she inclin'd,\nI wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nWhile summer roses all their glory yield\nTo crown the votary of love and joy,\nMisfortune’s victim hails, with many a sigh,\nThee, scarlet Poppy of the pathless field,\nGaudy, yet wild and lone; no leaf to shield\nThy flaccid vest that, as the gale blows high,\nFlaps, and alternate folds around thy head.\nSo stands in the long grass a love-crazed maid,\nSmiling aghast; while stream to every wind\nHer garish ribbons, smeared with dust and rain;\nBut brain-sick visions cheat her tortured mind,\nAnd bring false peace. Thus, lulling grief and pain,\nKind dreams oblivious from thy juice proceed,\nThou flimsy, showy, melancholy weed."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nO me! what eyes hath Love put in my head,\nWhich have no correspondence with true sight;\nOr, if they have, where is my judgement fled,\nThat censures falsely what they see aright?\nIf that be fair whereon my false eyes dote,\nWhat means the world to say it is not so?\nIf it be not, then love doth well denote\nLove’s eye is not so true as all men’s: no,\nHow can it? O! how can Love’s eye be true,\nThat is so vexed with watching and with tears?\nNo marvel then, though I mistake my view;\nThe sun itself sees not, till heaven clears.\nO cunning Love! with tears thou keep’st me blind,\nLest eyes well-seeing thy foul faults should find."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nUnthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend\nUpon thyself thy beauty’s legacy?\nNature’s bequest gives nothing, but doth lend,\nAnd being frank she lends to those are free:\nThen, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse\nThe bounteous largess given thee to give?\nProfitless usurer, why dost thou use\nSo great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?\nFor having traffic with thyself alone,\nThou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive:\nThen how when nature calls thee to be gone,\nWhat acceptable audit canst thou leave?\nThy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,\nWhich, used, lives th’ executor to be."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nTo me, fair friend, you never can be old,\nFor as you were when first your eye I ey’d,\nSuch seems your beauty still. Three winters cold,\nHave from the forests shook three summers’ pride,\nThree beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn’d,\nIn process of the seasons have I seen,\nThree April perfumes in three hot Junes burn’d,\nSince first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.\nAh! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand,\nSteal from his figure, and no pace perceiv’d;\nSo your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,\nHath motion, and mine eye may be deceiv’d:\nFor fear of which, hear this thou age unbred:\nEre you were born was beauty’s summer dead."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThus can my love excuse the slow offence\nOf my dull bearer when from thee I speed:\nFrom where thou art why should I haste me thence?\nTill I return, of posting is no need.\nO! what excuse will my poor beast then find,\nWhen swift extremity can seem but slow?\nThen should I spur, though mounted on the wind,\nIn winged speed no motion shall I know,\nThen can no horse with my desire keep pace;\nTherefore desire, of perfect’st love being made,\nShall neigh no dull flesh in his fiery race,\nBut love, for love, thus shall excuse my jade:\n‘Since from thee going, he went wilful-slow,\nTowards thee I’ll run, and give him leave to go.’"} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nA cigarette kiss in the desert. The wind-proof arc\nof flame sparks inside the speeding Buick. Menthol:\na break from the monotony of highway nicotine—\nmost intimate of drugs. Make this mean sorrow\nor thermodynamics, whatever small gesture\nthere is time for. Light another one, the vainglorious\ninterstate dusk and ash—the long, silver tooth.\nThis shirtless abandon, this ninety-mile-an-hour\nelectric laugh. The edges of windshield, haphazard\nchatter. The clatter of the hubcap and the thunderclap:\nthe white-hot retinal memory of your life as a Joshua tree.\nPermanence in the passenger seat. This long haul,\nthis first drag—nothing like cinnamon, nothing\nlike the iron taste on the back of your mortal tongue."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhat’s in the brain, that ink may character,\nWhich hath not figur’d to thee my true spirit?\nWhat’s new to speak, what now to register,\nThat may express my love, or thy dear merit?\nNothing, sweet boy; but yet, like prayers divine,\nI must each day say o’er the very same;\nCounting no old thing old, thou mine, I thine,\nEven as when first I hallow’d thy fair name.\nSo that eternal love in love’s fresh case,\nWeighs not the dust and injury of age,\nNor gives to necessary wrinkles place,\nBut makes antiquity for aye his page;\nFinding the first conceit of love there bred,\nWhere time and outward form would show it dead."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nTired with all these, for restful death I cry:\nAs to behold desert a beggar born,\nAnd needy nothing trimm’d in jollity,\nAnd purest faith unhappily forsworn,\nAnd gilded honour shamefully misplac’d,\nAnd maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,\nAnd right perfection wrongfully disgrac’d,\nAnd strength by limping sway disabled\nAnd art made tongue-tied by authority,\nAnd folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,\nAnd simple truth miscall’d simplicity,\nAnd captive good attending captain ill:\nTir’d with all these, from these would I be gone,\nSave that, to die, I leave my love alone."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nHans Richter\nWhat if the moon was essence of quinine\nAnd high heels were a time of day\nWhen certain birds bled\nThe chauffeur is telling the cook\nThe antler would pry into ice floes\nSwim with a lamp\nAnd we’d be shivering in a ditch\nBiting through a black wing\nThere would be boats\nThere would be a dream country\nThe great quiet humming of the soul at night\nThe only sound is a shovel\nClearing a place for a mailbox"} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe old cupola glinted above the clouds, shone\namong fir trees, but it took him an hour\nfor the half mile all the way up the hill. As he trailed,\nthe village passed him by, greeted him,\nasked about his health, but everybody hurried\nto catch the mass, left him leaning against fences,\nmeasuring the road with the walking stick he sculpted.\nHe yearned for the day when the new church\nwould be built—right across the road. Now\nit rises above the moon: saints in frescoes\nmeet the eye, and only the rain has started to cut\nthrough the shingles on the roof of his empty\nhouse. The apple trees have taken over the sky,\nsequestered the gate, sidled over the porch."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nExtreme exertion\nisolates a person\nfrom help,\ndiscovered Atlas.\nOnce a certain\nshoulder-to-burden\nratio collapses,\nthere is so little\nothers can do:\nthey can’t\nlend a hand\nwith Brazil\nand not stand\non Peru."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhat did they desire, the dead who had returned?\nThe sons who had inherited their estates\npretended not to know them. The iron gates\nwere welded shut, but soon the dead had learned\nto hire lawyers practiced in the laws\nthat bound the afterlife to lesser gods.\nThe angels thundered on like piston rods,\ndenying their gold wings to either cause.\nThe city streetlamps flared like learnèd ghosts.\nThe moon turned red. Beneath a scrim of clouds,\nSpanish moss draped the myrtle trees like shrouds—\nin politics the guests became the hosts.\nThose days made angels of the better sort.\nThe cases languished in a lower court."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nA heavy heart, Belovëd, have I borne\nFrom year to year until I saw thy face,\nAnd sorrow after sorrow took the place\nOf all those natural joys as lightly worn\nAs the stringed pearls, each lifted in its turn\nBy a beating heart at dance-time. Hopes apace\nWere changed to long despairs, till God’s own grace\nCould scarcely lift above the world forlorn\nMy heavy heart. Then thou didst bid me bring\nAnd let it drop adown thy calmly great\nDeep being! Fast it sinketh, as a thing\nWhich its own nature does precipitate,\nWhile thine doth close above it, mediating\nBetwixt the stars and the unaccomplished fate."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nTho’ lack of laurels and of wreaths not one\nProve you our lives abortive, shall we yet\nVaunt us our single aim, our hearts full set\nTo win the guerdon which is never won.\nWitness, a purpose never is undone.\nAnd tho’ fate drain our seas of violet\nTo gather round our lives her wide-hung net,\nMemories of hopes that are not shall atone.\nNot wholly starless is the ill-starred life,\nNot all is night in failure, and the shield\nSometimes well grasped, tho’ shattered in the strife.\nAnd here while all the lowering heaven is ringed\nWith our loud death-shouts echoed, on the field\nStands forth our Nikè, proud, tho’ broken-winged."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nTo tell the truth, those brick Housing Authority buildings\nFor whose loveliness no soul had planned,\nLike random dominoes stood, worn out and facing each other,\nCreating the enclosure that was our home.\nLong basement corridors connected one house to another\nAnd had a special smell, from old bicycles and baby carriages\nIn the storage rooms. The elevators\nWere used by kissing teenagers.\nThe playground—iron swingchains, fences, iron monkey bars,\nIron seesaw handles, doubtless now rusted—\nLeft a strong iron smell on my hands and in the autumn air\nAnd rang with cries. To me it is even precious\nWhere they chased the local Mongoloid, yelling “Stupid Joey! Stupid Joey!”\nNow I’ve said everything nice I can about this."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nThe ship, solid and black,\nenters the clear blackness\nof the great harbor.\nQuiet and cold.\n—The people waiting\nare still asleep, dreaming,\nand warm, far away and still stretched out in this\ndream, perhaps . . .\nHow real our watch is, beside the dream\nof doubt the others had! How sure it is, compared\nto their troubled dream about us!\nQuiet. Silence.\nSilence which in breaking up at dawn\nwill speak differently."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nOnce & could-be-future girl, believe we’re not like you. Sure,\nthe pickup was tucked in dusk, shed all carefree w/ its sunburn\nshimmer. Still nothing new to say about the creek, how reeds\nget moony, or when we saw pelicans hold hands & gossip.\nBut y’all must wanna get this close to soft, so here goes: spool\nheels, silver sleeves w/ pink accents, kind to stifle the trailer\nstatic, same color Dot says Granny passed in. Past since good\n& we did keep her pearls for you, kissed the hems holy, darned\nthe moth marks back to true. Goes: none of it imitation. Goes:\nwe are her barefoot bloodline, butter in the salt pan. Trust\nyou’re not from this sweat but still a goodness. You once most\nonly boy in the yard, laugh into your born polish. Step-joy,\nuncousin: home is a name you bless in silk & cinch. Believe\nwe’re all alive here. Come hum this lace blood-warm. Glisten."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nO golden-tongued Romance with serene lute!\nFair plumed Syren!\nQueen of far away!\nLeave melodizing on this wintry day,\nShut up thine olden pages, and be mute:\nAdieu! for once again the fierce dispute,\nBetwixt damnation and impassion'd clay\nMust I burn through; once more humbly assay The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit.\nChief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion,\nBegetters of our deep eternal theme,\nWhen through the old oak forest I am gone,\nLet me not wander in a barren dream,\nBut when I am consumed in the fire,\nGive me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nTake all my loves, my love, yea, take them all:\nWhat hast thou then more than thou hadst before?\nNo love, my love, that thou mayst true love call—\nAll mine was thine before thou hadst this more.\nThen if for my love thou my love receivest,\nI cannot blame thee for my love thou usest;\nBut yet be blamed if thou this self deceivest\nBy wilful taste of what thyself refusest.\nI do forgive thy robb’ry, gentle thief,\nAlthough thou steal thee all my poverty;\nAnd yet love knows it is a greater grief\nTo bear love’s wrong than hate’s known injury.\nLascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,\nKill me with spites, yet we must not be foes."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nMost happy letters, fram'd by skilful trade,\nWith which that happy name was first design'd:\nThe which three times thrice happy hath me made,\nWith gifts of body, fortune, and of mind.\nThe first my being to me gave by kind,\nFrom mother's womb deriv'd by due descent,\nThe second is my sovereign Queen most kind,\nThat honour and large richesse to me lent.\nThe third my love, my life's last ornament,\nBy whom my spirit out of dust was raised:\nTo speak her praise and glory excellent,\nOf all alive most worthy to be praised.\nYe three Elizabeths for ever live,\nThat three such graces did unto me give."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAccuse me thus: that I have scanted all,\nWherein I should your great deserts repay,\nForgot upon your dearest love to call,\nWhereto all bonds do tie me day by day;\nThat I have frequent been with unknown minds,\nAnd given to time your own dear-purchas’d right;\nThat I have hoisted sail to all the winds\nWhich should transport me farthest from your sight.\nBook both my wilfulness and errors down,\nAnd on just proof surmise, accumulate;\nBring me within the level of your frown,\nBut shoot not at me in your waken’d hate;\nSince my appeal says I did strive to prove\nThe constancy and virtue of your love."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe day is gone, and all its sweets are gone!\nSweet voice, sweet lips, soft hand, and softer breast,\nWarm breath, light whisper, tender semi-tone,\nBright eyes, accomplish’d shape, and lang’rous waist!\nFaded the flower and all its budded charms,\nFaded the sight of beauty from my eyes,\nFaded the shape of beauty from my arms,\nFaded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise –\nVanish’d unseasonably at shut of eve,\nWhen the dusk holiday – or holinight\nOf fragrant-curtain’d love begins to weave\nThe woof of darkness thick, for hid delight,\nBut, as I’ve read love’s missal through to-day,\nHe’ll let me sleep, seeing I fast and pray."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nPoor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,\nMy sinful earth these rebel powers array,\nWhy dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,\nPainting thy outward walls so costly gay?\nWhy so large cost, having so short a lease,\nDost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?\nShall worms, inheritors of this excess,\nEat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end?\nThen soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss,\nAnd let that pine to aggravate thy store;\nBuy terms divine in selling hours of dross;\nWithin be fed, without be rich no more:\nSo shall thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,\nAnd Death once dead, there’s no more dying then."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nWhen thou shalt be dispos’d to set me light,\nAnd place my merit in the eye of scorn,\nUpon thy side, against myself I’ll fight,\nAnd prove thee virtuous, though thou art forsworn.\nWith mine own weakness, being best acquainted,\nUpon thy part I can set down a story\nOf faults conceal’d, wherein I am attainted;\nThat thou in losing me shalt win much glory:\nAnd I by this will be a gainer too;\nFor bending all my loving thoughts on thee,\nThe injuries that to myself I do,\nDoing thee vantage, double-vantage me.\nSuch is my love, to thee I so belong,\nThat for thy right, myself will bear all wrong."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhen I consider how my light is spent,\nEre half my days, in this dark world and wide,\nAnd that one Talent which is death to hide\nLodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present\nMy true account, lest he returning chide;\n“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”\nI fondly ask.\nBut patience, to prevent That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need\nEither man’s work or his own gifts; who best\nBear his mild yoke, they serve him best.\nHis state Is Kingly.\nThousands at his bidding speed\nAnd post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:\nThey also serve who only stand and wait.”"} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nAnd have we done with War at last?\nWell, we've been lucky devils both,\nAnd there's no need of pledge or oath To bind our lovely friendship fast,\nBy firmer stuff Close bound enough.\nBy wire and wood and stake we're bound,\nBy Fricourt and by Festubert,\nBy whipping rain, by the sun's glare,\nBy all the misery and loud sound,\nBy a Spring day,\nBy Picard clay.\nShow me the two so closely bound As we, by the wet bond of blood,\nBy friendship blossoming from mud,\nBy Death: we faced him, and we found Beauty in Death,\nIn dead men, breath."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIf there be nothing new, but that which is\nHath been before, how are our brains beguil’d,\nWhich labouring for invention bear amiss\nThe second burthen of a former child!\nO! that record could with a backward look,\nEven of five hundred courses of the sun,\nShow me your image in some antique book,\nSince mind at first in character was done!\nThat I might see what the old world could say\nTo this composed wonder of your frame;\nWh’r we are mended, or wh’r better they,\nOr whether revolution be the same.\nO! sure I am the wits of former days,\nTo subjects worse have given admiring praise."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAfter Lucille Clifton\nVulture, follow me up: here is the arm\nmy mother held me aloft with (as\nwell as she could, until she couldn’t), it\nis cut free of her body now, pulled\naway from her shoulder, away\nfrom her breath, as you, Vulture, point\nyour wing toward her offered heart, toward me —\nlet’s pound her fingers into paste, pound the hand\nopen, come down, I chant, each word opens\nthe sky, the clouds need to be warned — once\nshe was hand & now she is wing, once she was dirt &\nnow she is air, she was food & now she is bird, she was\nlifted & now she is gone."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLet not my love be call’d idolatry,\nNor my beloved as an idol show,\nSince all alike my songs and praises be\nTo one, of one, still such, and ever so.\nKind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind,\nStill constant in a wondrous excellence;\nTherefore my verse to constancy confin’d,\nOne thing expressing, leaves out difference.\n‘Fair, kind, and true,’ is all my argument,\n‘Fair, kind, and true,’ varying to other words;\nAnd in this change is my invention spent,\nThree themes in one, which wondrous scope affords.\nFair, kind, and true, have often liv’d alone,\nWhich three till now, never kept seat in one."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nYou wanted to be so hungry, you would break into branches,\nand have to choose between the starving month’s\nnineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-third evenings.\nThe liturgy begins to echo itself and why does it matter?\nIf the ground-water is too scarce one can stretch nets\ninto the air and harvest the fog.\nHunger opens you to illiteracy,\nthirst makes clear the starving pattern,\nthe thick night is so quiet, the spinning spider pauses,\nthe angel stops whispering for a moment—\nThe secret night could already be over,\nyou will have to listen very carefully—\nYou are never going to know which night’s mouth is sacredly reciting\nand which night’s recitation is secretly mere wind—"} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nCover me with your everlasting arms,\nYe guardian giants of this solitude!\nFrom the ill-sight of men, and from the rude,\nTumultuous din of yon wild world’s alarms!\nOh, knit your mighty limbs around, above,\nAnd close me in for ever! let me dwell\nWith the wood spirits, in the darkest cell\nThat ever with your verdant locks ye wove.\nThe air is full of countless voices, joined\nIn one eternal hymn; the whispering wind,\nThe shuddering leaves, the hidden water springs,\nThe work-song of the bees, whose honeyed wings\nHang in the golden tresses of the lime,\nOr buried lie in purple beds of thyme."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe wind of night is mighty on the deep—\nA presence haunting sea and land again.\nThat wind upon the watery waste hath been;\nThat wind upon the desert soon shall sweep.\nO vast and mournful spirit, wherefore keep\nThy vigil at the fleeting homes of men,\nWho need no voice of thine to tell them when\nIs come the hour to labor or to sleep?\nFrom waste to waste thou goest, and art dumb\nBefore the morning. Patient in her tree\nThe bird awaits until thy strength hath passed,\nForgetting darkness when the day is come.\nWith other tidings hast thou burdened me,\nWhom desolations harbor at the last."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\n“I know kung fu.” It won’t bring back the world.\n5:15 a.m.: I wake from another dream,\nthe same as every dream. A man builds a ship\nin my chest. Each of the sailors\ncarries by her breast a picture of her sister.\nThe ship is not the image of a ship.\nBeyond its sails there are no stars.\nThe water is only water because it’s black.\n5:15 a.m. Perhaps you’ve seen me\npracticing my moves in the empty prison yard\nand wondered whether you were the dreamer\nconjuring me into existence from the bare\ndesire to caress a phantom ship\nand my death the death of your desire."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLook in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest\nNow is the time that face should form another;\nWhose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,\nThou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.\nFor where is she so fair whose unear’d womb\nDisdains the tillage of thy husbandry?\nOr who is he so fond will be the tomb,\nOf his self-love to stop posterity?\nThou art thy mother’s glass and she in thee\nCalls back the lovely April of her prime;\nSo thou through windows of thine age shalt see,\nDespite of wrinkles this thy golden time.\nBut if thou live, remember’d not to be,\nDie single and thine image dies with thee."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLet me die on the prairie! and o’er my rude grave,\nIn the soft breeze of summer the tall grass shall wave;\nI would breathe my last sigh as the bright hues of even Are melting away in the blue arch of Heaven.\nLet me die on the prairie! unwept and unknown,\nI would pass from this fair Earth forgotten, alone;—Yet no! – there are hearts I have learned to revere,\nAnd methinks there is bliss in affection’s warm tear.\nOh, speak not to me of the green cypress shade;\nI would sleep where the bones of the Indian are laid,\nAnd the deer will bound o’er me with step light and free,\nAnd the carol of birds will my requiem be.\nLet me die on the prairie!\nI have wished for it long;\nThere floats in wild numbers the bold hunter’s song; ’Tis the spot of all others the dearest to me,\nAnd how sweet in its bosom my slumber will be!"} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nO! how thy worth with manners may I sing,\nWhen thou art all the better part of me?\nWhat can mine own praise to mine own self bring?\nAnd what is’t but mine own when I praise thee?\nEven for this, let us divided live,\nAnd our dear love lose name of single one,\nThat by this separation I may give\nThat due to thee which thou deserv’st alone.\nO absence! what a torment wouldst thou prove,\nWere it not thy sour leisure gave sweet leave,\nTo entertain the time with thoughts of love,\nWhich time and thoughts so sweetly doth deceive,\nAnd that thou teachest how to make one twain,\nBy praising him here who doth hence remain."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nHe sits beside his wife who takes the wheel.\nClutching coupons, he wanders the aisles of Stop & Save.\nThere’s no place he must be, no clock to punch.\nSure, there are bass in the lake, a balsa model in the garage, the par-three back nine.\nBut it’s not the same.\nTime the enemy then, the enemy now.\nAs he points the remote at the screen\nor pauses at the window, staring\ninto the neighbor’s fence but not really seeing it,\nhe listens to his wife in the kitchen, more amazed\nthan ever—how women seem to know\nwhat to do.\nHow, with their cycles and timers, their rolling boils and three-minute eggs, they wait for something to start.\nOr stop."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nDidn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?\nBefore a face suddenly numinous,\nher eyes watered, knees melted. Did she lactate\nagain, milk brought down by a girl’s kiss?\nIt’s documented torrents are unloosed\nby such events as recently produced\nnot the wish, but the need, to consume, in us,\none pint of Maalox, one of Kaopectate.\nMy eyes and groin are permanently swollen,\nI’m alternatingly brilliant and witless\n—and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in.\nAlthough I’d cream my jeans touching your breast,\nsweetheart, it isn’t lust; it’s all the rest\nof what I want with you that scares me shitless."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nthe place of consequence, the station of his embrace.\nOr else I’m not son enough to see\nthe innocence and the spiritual fiddlings\nin the uneven floorboards and joists,\nin the guttural speech of the pipes,\nin the limp and the lack of heat.\nAll we need, all we really need is light!\nAnd let there be a roof with no leaks.\nOh father landlord, fill up all our breaches.\nHe gives himself to the cracks; into the chinks\nmy father lowers his bone,\nthe do-it-yourself funeral. He holds the wires\nin his teeth. He strips the insulation back.\nIf it’s black, it’s juiceless; if it’s red, elegiac."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nEaster was the old North Goddess of the dawn.\nShe rises daily in the East And yearly in spring for the great Paschal candle of the sun.\nHer name lingers like a spot Of gravy in the figured vestment Of the language of the Britains.\nHer totem the randy bunny.\nOur very Thursdays and Wednesdays Are stained by syllables of thunder And Woden's frenzy.\nO my fellow-patriots loyal to this Our modern world of high heels,\nVaccination, brain surgery— May they pass over us, the old Jovial raptors,\nApollonian flayers,\nEmbodiments.\nEgg-hunt,\nCrucifixion.\nSupper of encrypted Dishes: bitter, unrisen, a platter Compass of martyrdom,\nGround-up apples and walnuts In sweet wine to embody mortar Of affliction, babies for bricks.\nLegible traces of the species That devises the angel of death Sailing over our doorpost Smeared with sacrifice."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nGo wailing verse, the infants of my love,\nMinerva-like, brought forth without a Mother:\nPresent the image of the cares I prove,\nWitness your Father’s grief exceeds all other.\nSigh out a story of her cruel deeds,\nWith interrupted accents of despair:\nA monument that whosoever reads,\nMay justly praise, and blame my loveless Fair.\nSay her disdain hath dried up my blood,\nAnd starved you, in succours still denying:\nPress to her eyes, importune me some good;\nWaken her sleeping pity with your crying.\nKnock at that hard heart, beg till you have moved her;\nAnd tell th’unkind, how dearly I have loved her."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nNot marble, nor the gilded monuments\nOf princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;\nBut you shall shine more bright in these contents\nThan unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.\nWhen wasteful war shall statues overturn,\nAnd broils root out the work of masonry,\nNor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire shall burn\nThe living record of your memory.\n’Gainst death, and all-oblivious enmity\nShall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room\nEven in the eyes of all posterity\nThat wear this world out to the ending doom.\nSo, till the judgement that yourself arise,\nYou live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nUnlike are we, unlike, O princely Heart!\nUnlike our uses and our destinies.\nOur ministering two angels look surprise\nOn one another, as they strike athwart\nTheir wings in passing. Thou, bethink thee, art\nA guest for queens to social pageantries,\nWith gages from a hundred brighter eyes\nThan tears even can make mine, to play thy part\nOf chief musician. What hast thou to do\nWith looking from the lattice-lights at me,\nA poor, tired, wandering singer, singing through\nThe dark, and leaning up a cypress tree?\nThe chrism is on thine head,—on mine, the dew,—\nAnd Death must dig the level where these agree."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nWhen ocean-clouds over inland hills\nSweep storming in late autumn brown,\nAnd horror the sodden valley fills,\nAnd the spire falls crashing in the town,\nI muse upon my country’s ills—\nThe tempest bursting from the waste of Time\nOn the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime.\nNature’s dark side is heeded now—\n(Ah! optimist-cheer disheartened flown)—\nA child may read the moody brow\nOf yon black mountain lone.\nWith shouts the torrents down the gorges go,\nAnd storms are formed behind the storm we feel:\nThe hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI have no Brother,—they who meet me now\nOffer a hand with their own wills defiled,\nAnd, while they wear a smooth unwrinkled brow,\nKnow not that Truth can never be beguiled;\nGo wash the hand that still betrays thy guilt;\nBefore the spirit’s gaze what stain can hide?\nAbel’s red blood upon the earth is spilt,\nAnd by thy tongue it cannot be denied;\nI hear not with my ear,—the heart doth tell\nIts secret deeds to me untold before;\nGo, all its hidden plunder quickly sell,\nThen shalt thou cleanse thee from thy brother’s gore,\nThen will I take thy gift; that bloody stain\nShall not be seen upon thy hand again."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI would imagine underneath those warming bear hugs\nwas a kinda kind of soul\nas your many poems attest. Those summer breezes.\nThose many hazy sunsets nature’s voices echoing afar.\nA life continually fulfilled bordering on the empty\nand those inexplicable tragedies,\nthose bad timings unreconciled, then reconciled with time.\nYou had no answer that would satisfy your curiosity\nand the why, the wherewithal just round the bend.\nThe morning mists descending in an angled quietude.\nA birdcall here and there.\nA rising wind unfurled and furling at the top-most branches of a conifer.\nThose wetlands mysterioso.\nA last-known address unknown at last."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nFull many a glorious morning have I seen\nFlatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,\nKissing with golden face the meadows green,\nGilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;\nAnon permit the basest clouds to ride\nWith ugly rack on his celestial face,\nAnd from the forlorn world his visage hide,\nStealing unseen to west with this disgrace:\nEven so my sun one early morn did shine,\nWith all triumphant splendour on my brow;\nBut out! alack! he was but one hour mine,\nThe region cloud hath mask’d him from me now.\nYet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;\nSuns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI saw the racer coming to the jump,\nStaring with fiery eyeballs as he rusht,\nI heard the blood within his body thump,\nI saw him launch, I heard the toppings crusht.\nAnd as he landed I beheld his soul\nKindle, because, in front, he saw the Straight\nWith all its thousands roaring at the goal,\nHe laughed, he took the moment for his mate.\nWould that the passionate moods on which we ride\nMight kindle thus to oneness with the will;\nWould we might see the end to which we stride,\nAnd feel, not strain in struggle, only thrill,\nAnd laugh like him and know in all our nerves\nBeauty, the spirit, scattering dust and turves."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhat is so pure as grief? A wreck\nset sail just to be wrecked again.\nTo lose what’s lost–it’s all born lost\nand we just fetch it for a little while,\na dandelion span, a quarter-note.\nEach day an envelope gummed shut\nwith honey and mud. Foolish\nto think you can build a house\nfrom suffering. Even the hinges will be\nbitter. There will be no books\nin that house, only transfusions.\nAnd all the lemon and cedar\nin the world won't rid the walls\nof that hospital smell."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIf thy soul check thee that I come so near,\nSwear to thy blind soul that I was thy ‘Will’,\nAnd will, thy soul knows, is admitted there;\nThus far for love, my love-suit, sweet, fulfil.\n‘Will’, will fulfil the treasure of thy love,\nAy, fill it full with wills, and my will one.\nIn things of great receipt with ease we prove\nAmong a number one is reckon’d none:\nThen in the number let me pass untold,\nThough in thy store’s account I one must be;\nFor nothing hold me, so it please thee hold\nThat nothing me, a something sweet to thee:\nMake but my name thy love, and love that still,\nAnd then thou lov’st me for my name is ‘Will.’"} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIt doesn't\nmatter\nto me\nif\npoems mean\nnothing:\nthere's no\nfloor\nto the\nuniverse\nand yet\none\nwalks the\nfloor."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWho will believe my verse in time to come,\nIf it were fill’d with your most high deserts?\nThough yet heaven knows it is but as a tomb\nWhich hides your life, and shows not half your parts.\nIf I could write the beauty of your eyes,\nAnd in fresh numbers number all your graces,\nThe age to come would say ‘This poet lies;\nSuch heavenly touches ne’er touch’d earthly faces.’\nSo should my papers, yellow’d with their age,\nBe scorn’d, like old men of less truth than tongue,\nAnd your true rights be term’d a poet’s rage\nAnd stretched metre of an antique song:\nBut were some child of yours alive that time,\nYou should live twice,—in it, and in my rhyme."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAt one friend's home whole arsenals of guns\nlitter the lawn—bright plastic shapes my sons\npick their ways between to take proffered\npopsicles. Later, on evening news, words\nlike \"ambush,\" \"strike,\" and \"friendly fire\"\npunctuate glowing clips of wreckage in far\nfields where other mother's children kneel to\naim and pray. And though it's clichéd, truth\nbe told, I wish one could keep her boys\nfrom growing old and going off to die. Toys\nneed not rush us there. Instinct? No harm?\nAn urge to hoist whatever's there, hard-\nwired within? Perhaps ignoble, I'm still glad\nwhen one spits on his own: They're bad."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nDazzling emptiness of the black green end of summer no one\nrunning in the yard pulse pulse the absence.\nLeave them not to the empty yards.\nThey resembled a family. Long quiet hours. Sometimes\none was angry sometimes someone called her \"wife\"\nsomeone's hair receding.\nAn uptick in the hormone canopy embodied a restlessness\nand oh what to do with it.\n(How she arrived in a hush in a looking away and not looking.)\nIt had been some time since richness intangible\nand then they made a whole coat of it.\nMeanwhile August moved toward its impervious finale.\nA mood by the river. Gone. One lucid rush carrying them along.\nBorderless and open the days go on—"} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nsimplicity\nsay sleep\nor\nshall we\nshower\nhave an apple\nyou are\nas I need\nwater\nshall I move?\ndo you dream?\nshallow snow\nflesh\nmelt this"} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMy tongue-tied Muse in manners holds her still,\nWhile comments of your praise richly compil’d,\nReserve their character with golden quill,\nAnd precious phrase by all the Muses fil’d.\nI think good thoughts, whilst others write good words,\nAnd like unlettered clerk still cry ‘Amen’\nTo every hymn that able spirit affords,\nIn polish’d form of well-refined pen.\nHearing you praised, I say ‘’tis so, ’tis true,’\nAnd to the most of praise add something more;\nBut that is in my thought, whose love to you,\nThough words come hindmost, holds his rank before.\nThen others, for the breath of words respect,\nMe for my dumb thoughts, speaking in effect."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThy gift, thy tables, are within my brain\nFull character’d with lasting memory,\nWhich shall above that idle rank remain,\nBeyond all date; even to eternity:\nOr, at the least, so long as brain and heart\nHave faculty by nature to subsist;\nTill each to raz’d oblivion yield his part\nOf thee, thy record never can be miss’d.\nThat poor retention could not so much hold,\nNor need I tallies thy dear love to score;\nTherefore to give them from me was I bold,\nTo trust those tables that receive thee more:\nTo keep an adjunct to remember thee\nWere to import forgetfulness in me."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nFather’s opinion of savages\nAnd dogs, a gay Bloomsbury epigram:\n‘The brutes may possibly have souls,’ he says,\n‘But reason, no. Nevertheless, I am\nPrepared not to extend this to my spouse\nAnd children.’ This demands a careful pity:\nPoor Father! Whooping and romping in their house,\nA holiday from ruin in the City.\nHis wit falls flat, his tie just will not tie.\nThe dog’s in chains, the reasonable books\nGrazed by his children as they learn to fly.\nHe takes his dear wife’s arm (his hands grow hooks).\nPirates and pudding! Come, such cruelty!\nHis beard is branching like a burning tree."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe sun time of the year died out and never might return.\nWe made fires big as coffee tables to approximate the sun.\nI wanted to be a mountain.\nI wanted us all countless mountains in a detailed painting.\nBlood is everywhere as always.\nBut now it is blown further and oxygenated for longer.\nYet more sad word has come digitally.\nWe contain no blood with which to soften and warm the sad word.\nCold wind placed and places the house in its mouth.\nWe met the end numb and almost still.\nNumber meant less motion meant even number meant totally still.\nThe buildings stand still.\nThe buildings still stand.\nThe buildings like the builders take each other by the hand."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThose lines that I before have writ do lie,\nEven those that said I could not love you dearer:\nYet then my judgement knew no reason why\nMy most full flame should afterwards burn clearer.\nBut reckoning Time, whose million’d accidents\nCreep in ’twixt vows, and change decrees of kings,\nTan sacred beauty, blunt the sharp’st intents,\nDivert strong minds to the course of altering things;\nAlas! why fearing of Time’s tyranny,\nMight I not then say, ‘Now I love you best,’\nWhen I was certain o’er incertainty,\nCrowning the present, doubting of the rest?\nLove is a babe, then might I not say so,\nTo give full growth to that which still doth grow?"} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSo oft as I her beauty do behold,\nAnd therewith do her cruelty compare,\nI marvel of what substance was the mould\nThe which her made at once so cruel-fair.\nNot earth; for her high thoughts more heavenly are:\nNot water; for her love doth burn like fire:\nNot air; for she is not so light or rare:\nNot fire; for she doth freeze with faint desire.\nThen needs another element inquire\nWhereof she might be made; that is, the sky.\nFor to the heaven her haughty looks aspire,\nAnd eke her love is pure immortal high.\nThen since to heaven ye likened are the best,\nBe like in mercy as in all the rest."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nHow like a winter hath my absence been\nFrom thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!\nWhat freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!\nWhat old December's bareness everywhere!\nAnd yet this time remov'd was summer's time,\nThe teeming autumn, big with rich increase,\nBearing the wanton burthen of the prime,\nLike widow'd wombs after their lords' decease:\nYet this abundant issue seem'd to me\nBut hope of orphans and unfather'd fruit;\nFor summer and his pleasures wait on thee,\nAnd thou away, the very birds are mute;\nOr if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer\nThat leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nYet, love, mere love, is beautiful indeed\nAnd worthy of acceptation. Fire is bright,\nLet temple burn, or flax; an equal light\nLeaps in the flame from cedar-plank or weed:\nAnd love is fire. And when I say at need\nI love thee . . . mark! . . . I love thee—in thy sight\nI stand transfigured, glorified aright,\nWith conscience of the new rays that proceed\nOut of my face toward thine. There’s nothing low\nIn love, when love the lowest: meanest creatures\nWho love God, God accepts while loving so.\nAnd what I feel, across the inferior features\nOf what I am, doth flash itself, and show\nHow that great work of Love enhances Nature’s."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nImmortal Heat, O let Thy greater flame\nAttract the lesser to it; let those fires\nWhich shall consume the world first make it tame,\nAnd kindle in our hearts such true desires.\nAs may consume our lusts, and make Thee way:\nThen shall our hearts pant Thee, then shall our brain\nAll her invention on Thine altar lay,\nAnd there in hymns send back Thy fire again.\nOur eyes shall see Thee, which before saw dust,\nDust blown by wit, till that they both were blind:\nThou shalt recover all Thy goods in kind,\nWho wert disseized by usurping lust:\nAll knees shall bow to Thee; all wits shall rise,\nAnd praise Him Who did make and mend our eyes."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nBeside a humble stone, a tree\nFloats in the cemetery’s air,\nNot planted in memoriam there,\nBut growing wild, uncultured, free.\nA bird comes perching there to sing,\nWinter and summer, proffering\nIts faithful song—sad, bittersweet.\nThat tree, that bird are you and I:\nYou, memory; absence, me, that tide\nAnd time record. Ah, by your side\nTo live again, undying! Aye,\nTo live again! But ma petite,\nNow nothingness, cold, owns my flesh. . .\nWill your love keep my memory fresh?"} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI see you shuffle up Washington Street\nwhenever I am driving much too fast:\nyou, chub & bug-eyed, jaw like a loaf\nhands in your pockets, a smoke dangling slack\nfrom the slit of your pumpkin mouth,\nhumped over like the eel-man or geek,\nthe dummy paid to sweep out gutters,\ndrown the cats. Where are you going now?\nThough someday you'll turn your gaze\nupon my shadow in this tinted glass\nI know for now you only look ahead\nat sidewalks cracked & paved with trash\nbut what are you slouching toward—knee-locked,\nhippity, a hitch in your zombie walk, Bighead?"} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSo oft have I invoked thee for my Muse,\nAnd found such fair assistance in my verse\nAs every alien pen hath got my use\nAnd under thee their poesy disperse.\nThine eyes, that taught the dumb on high to sing\nAnd heavy ignorance aloft to fly,\nHave added feathers to the learned’s wing\nAnd given grace a double majesty.\nYet be most proud of that which I compile,\nWhose influence is thine, and born of thee:\nIn others’ works thou dost but mend the style,\nAnd arts with thy sweet graces graced be;\nBut thou art all my art, and dost advance\nAs high as learning, my rude ignorance."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nGetting the child to bed is awful work,\nCommitting that rage to sleep that will not sleep.\nThe lie rots in my throat saying, “O.K.\nThere is balm in Gilead. Go to bed.\nHoney of generation has betrayed us both.”\nAnd truly it is no wild surmise of darkness\nNor Pisgah purview of Canaan drowned in blood\nBut only my child saying its say in bed.\nIf madness ever covers me, the caul contract\nThat now but loosely insinuates a shroud\nI shall go howling into the conscious grave\n(God keep children from the power of the dog)\nFollow that note into the uttering horn\nAwake in the womb from which I was born."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI\nOne day as she rinsed her wash from the jetty,\nthe bay's cold grave rose up through her arms\nand into her life.\nHer tears froze into spectacles.\nThe island raised itself by its grass\nand the herring-flag waved in the deep.\nII\nAnd the swarm of small pox caught up with him,\nsettled down onto his face.\nHe lies and stares at the ceiling.\nHow it had rowed up through the silence.\nThe now's eternally flowing stain,\nthe now's eternally bleeding end-point."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe trouble with paradise is you never want to be away from home.\nI make what calls me out.\nAll gone before you know it.\nWords may drop passing color yet seeing you here now are born again, and again.\nClosing a word in the mouth feels the sound until the tongue can't stay still.\nTo unmask is to go silent.\nLanguage makes no promise to communicate.\nAn articulated sound has its own dream in the ear.\nHer presence in the room gives aroma to the syllables I voice.\nNow she's ready to draw eros from foreign bodies.\nIt starts by focusing on the sounds beyond hearing, still felt.\nBy she I mean who speaking animate configures.\nThis is the time of alternative obscurities to see through.\nThrough thoroughly, as a word weighs."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nNot your ordinary ice cream, though the glaze\nof these skeletal figures affects\nthe disposition of those grinning candies\none finds in Mexico, say, at the start of November,\nthough here, each face is troublingly familiar,\nexhibits the style adopted just as one declines\nany further style—nectar one sips just as he\ndraws his last, dispassionate breath, becomes\ncitizen of a less earnest electorate. One learns\nin that city finally how to enjoy a confection,\neven if a genuine taste for this circumstance\nhas yet to be acquired, even if it is oneself\nwhose sugars and oils now avail a composure\nwhich promises never to end, nor to alter."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nEven before I saw the chambered nautilus\nI wanted to sail not in the us navy\nTonight I'm waiting for you, your letter\nAt the same time his letter, the view of you\nBy him and then by me in the park, no rhymes\nI saw you, this is in prose, no it's not\nSitting with the molluscs & anemones in an\nEmpty autumn enterprise baby you look pretty\nWith your long eventual hair, is love king?\nWhat's this? A sonnet? Love's a babe we know that\nI'm coming up, I'm coming, Shakespeare only stuck\nTo one subject but I'll mention nobody said\nYou have to get young Americans some ice cream\nIn the artificial light in which she woke"} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAlas, so all things now do hold their peace!\nHeaven and earth disturbèd in no thing;\nThe beasts, the air, the birds their song do cease,\nThe nightès car the stars about doth bring;\nCalm is the sea; the waves work less and less:\nSo am not I, whom love, alas! doth wring,\nBringing before my face the great increase\nOf my desires, whereat I weep and sing,\nIn joy and woe, as in a doubtful case.\nFor my sweet thoughts sometime do pleasure bring:\nBut by and by, the cause of my disease\nGives me a pang that inwardly doth sting,\nWhen that I think what grief it is again\nTo live and lack the thing should rid my pain."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nShe had turned her face up into\na rain of light, and came on smiling.\nThe light trickled down her forehead\nand into her eyes. It ran down\ninto the neck of her sweatshirt\nand wet the white tops of her breasts.\nHer brown shoes splashed on\ninto the light. The moment was like\na circus wagon rolling before her\nthrough puddles of light, a cage on wheels,\nand she walked fast behind it,\nexuberant, curious, pushing her cane\nthrough the bars, poking and prodding,\nwhile the world cowered back in a corner."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIn the aftermath of calculus\nyour toast fell butter-side down.\nSquirrels swarmed the lawns\nin flight patterns. The hovercraft\nhelped the waves along. From\nevery corner there was perspective.\nOn the billboards the diamonds\nwere real, in the stores, only zirconia.\nI cc’ed you. I let you know.\nSat down to write the Black Ice Memo.\nDinner would be meager &\nreminiscent of next week’s lunch.\nSo what if I sat on the sectional?\nAs always I was beside myself."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI spied everything. The North Dakota license,\nthe “Baby on Board” signs, dead raccoons, and deer carcasses.\nThe Garfields clinging to car windows—the musky traces of old coffee.\nI was single-minded in the buzz saw tour I took through\nthe flatlands of the country to get home. I just wanted to get there.\nNever mind the antecedent. I had lost stations miles ago\nand was living on cassettes and caffeine. Ahead, brushstrokes\nof smoke from annual fires. Only ahead to the last days of summer\nand to the dying theme of youth. How pitch-perfect\nthe tire-on-shoulder sound was to mask the hiss of the tape deck ribbons.\nEverything. Perfect. As Wyoming collapses over the car\nlike a wave. And then another mile marker. Another.\nHow can I say this more clearly? It was like opening a heavy book,\nletting the pages feather themselves and finding a dried flower."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI remember them saying,\nthese poems, their something\nfor someone at sometime\nfor me too, at one time.\nThat got in the way;\nso I sent them away\nback into history—\njust temporarily.\nThey won’t come back now.\nI can’t remember how\nthe words spoke, or what\nthey said,\nexcept:\nWe are all dead"} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThou art as tyrannous, so as thou art,\nAs those whose beauties proudly make them cruel;\nFor well thou know’st to my dear doting heart\nThou art the fairest and most precious jewel.\nYet, in good faith, some say that thee behold,\nThy face hath not the power to make love groan;\nTo say they err I dare not be so bold,\nAlthough I swear it to myself alone.\nAnd to be sure that is not false I swear,\nA thousand groans, but thinking on thy face,\nOne on another’s neck, do witness bear\nThy black is fairest in my judgement’s place.\nIn nothing art thou black save in thy deeds,\nAnd thence this slander, as I think, proceeds."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nCome, fallen angel, and your pink wings close;\nDoff your white robe, your rays that gild the skies;\nYou must—from heaven, where once you used to rise—\nStreak, like a shooting star, fall into prose.\nYour bird’s feet now must strike an earthly pose.\nIt is no time to fly: walk! Lock your prize—\nYour harp’s fair harmonies—in resting wise,\nWithin your heart: vain, worthless treasures those!\nPoor child of heaven, but vainly would you sing:\nTo them your tongue divine means not a thing!\nTheir ear is closed to your sweet chords! But this\nI beg: O blue-eyed angel, first, before\nYou leave, find my pale love, whom I adore,\nAnd give her brow one long, last farewell kiss."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSome say thy fault is youth, some wantonness;\nSome say thy grace is youth and gentle sport;\nBoth grace and faults are lov’d of more and less:\nThou mak’st faults graces that to thee resort.\nAs on the finger of a throned queen\nThe basest jewel will be well esteem’d,\nSo are those errors that in thee are seen\nTo truths translated, and for true things deem’d.\nHow many lambs might the stern wolf betray,\nIf like a lamb he could his looks translate!\nHow many gazers mightst thou lead away,\nIf thou wouldst use the strength of all thy state!\nBut do not so; I love thee in such sort,\nAs, thou being mine, mine is thy good report."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI lift my heavy heart up solemnly,\nAs once Electra her sepulchral urn,\nAnd, looking in thine eyes, I over-turn\nThe ashes at thy feet. Behold and see\nWhat a great heap of grief lay hid in me,\nAnd how the red wild sparkles dimly burn\nThrough the ashen greyness. If thy foot in scorn\nCould tread them out to darkness utterly,\nIt might be well perhaps. But if instead\nThou wait beside me for the wind to blow\nThe grey dust up, . . . those laurels on thine head,\nO my Belovëd, will not shield thee so,\nThat none of all the fires shall scorch and shred\nThe hair beneath. Stand further off then! go!"} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhy is my verse so barren of new pride,\nSo far from variation or quick change?\nWhy with the time do I not glance aside\nTo new-found methods, and to compounds strange?\nWhy write I still all one, ever the same,\nAnd keep invention in a noted weed,\nThat every word doth almost tell my name,\nShowing their birth, and where they did proceed?\nO know, sweet love, I always write of you,\nAnd you and love are still my argument,\nSo all my best is dressing old words new,\nSpending again what is already spent:\nFor as the sun is daily new and old,\nSo is my love still telling what is told."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nPrayer the church's banquet, angel's age,\nGod's breath in man returning to his birth,\nThe soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,\nThe Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth\nEngine against th' Almighty, sinner's tow'r,\nReversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,\nThe six-days world transposing in an hour,\nA kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;\nSoftness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,\nExalted manna, gladness of the best,\nHeaven in ordinary, man well drest,\nThe milky way, the bird of Paradise,\nChurch-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,\nThe land of spices; something understood."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nPardon, oh, pardon, that my soul should make\nOf all that strong divineness which I know\nFor thine and thee, an image only so\nFormed of the sand, and fit to shift and break.\nIt is that distant years which did not take\nThy sovranty, recoiling with a blow,\nHave forced my swimming brain to undergo\nTheir doubt and dread, and blindly to forsake\nThy purity of likeness and distort\nThy worthiest love to a worthless counterfeit.\nAs if a shipwrecked Pagan, safe in port,\nHis guardian sea-god to commemorate,\nShould set a sculptured porpoise, gills a-snort\nAnd vibrant tail, within the temple-gate."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI would have been as great as George Eliot But for an untoward fate.\nFor look at the photograph of me made by Peniwit,\nChin resting on hand, and deep-set eyes i Gray, too, and far-searching.\nBut there was the old, old problem:\nShould it be celibacy, matrimony or unchastity?\nThen John Slack, the rich druggist, wooed me,\nLuring me with the promise of leisure for my novel,\nAnd I married him, giving birth to eight children,\nAnd had no time to write.\nIt was all over with me, anyway,\nWhen I ran the needle in my hand While washing the baby's things,\nAnd died from lock-jaw, an ironical death.\nHear me, ambitious souls,\nSex is the curse of life!"} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nOr whether doth my mind, being crown’d with you,\nDrink up the monarch’s plague, this flattery?\nOr whether shall I say, mine eye saith true,\nAnd that your love taught it this alchemy,\nTo make of monsters and things indigest\nSuch cherubins as your sweet self resemble,\nCreating every bad a perfect best,\nAs fast as objects to his beams assemble?\nO! ’tis the first, ’tis flattery in my seeing,\nAnd my great mind most kingly drinks it up:\nMine eye well knows what with his gust is ’greeing,\nAnd to his palate doth prepare the cup:\nIf it be poison’d, ’tis the lesser sin\nThat mine eye loves it and doth first begin."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\n’Tis to yourself I speak; you cannot know\nHim whom I call in speaking such an one,\nFor thou beneath the earth lie buried low,\nWhich he alone as living walks upon;\nThou mayst at times have heard him speak to you,\nAnd often wished perchance that you were he;\nAnd I must ever wish that it were true,\nFor then thou couldst hold fellowship with me;\nBut now thou hear’st us talk as strangers, met\nAbove the room wherein thou liest abed;\nA word perhaps loud spoken thou mayst get,\nOr hear our feet when heavily they tread;\nBut he who speaks, or him who’s spoken to,\nMust both remain as strangers still to you."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSeveral of my cousins lean up against the house, taking long drags\nfrom the pack of Marlboros we share. We have always been this way\n—addicted and generous. A pow wow tape plays from inside the open\ngarage where two old uncles are thinking to themselves in the safety\nof its shadows. Our aunties are in the kitchen, preparing the boiled meat\nand chokecherry soup and laughing about old jokes they still hang onto\nbecause these things are a matter of survival. Outside, we ask about\nwho was driving around with who last night, where so-and-so got beat\nup, whose girlfriend left him for someone else. (But she’ll go back to\nhim, we all think to ourselves.) Aunties carry the full pots and pans to the\npicnic table, an uncle prays over our food in Assiniboine. We all want to\nforget that we don’t understand this language, we spend lots of time\ntrying to forget in different ways. No one notices that the wild turnips\nare still simmering in a pot on the stove."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nPenelope for her Ulisses sake,\nDeviz’d a Web her wooers to deceave:\nIn which the worke that she all day did make\nThe same at night she did again unreave:\nSuch subtile craft my Damzell doth conceave,\nTh’ importune suit of my desire to shonne:\nFor all that I in many dayes doo weave,\nIn one short houre I find by her undonne.\nSo when I thinke to end that I begonne,\nI must begin and never bring to end:\nFor with one looke she spils that long I sponne,\nAnd with one word my whole years work doth rend.\nSuch labour like the Spyders web I fynd,\nWhose fruitless worke is broken with least wynd."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSince there’s no help, come let us kiss and part.\nNay,\nI have done, you get no more of me;\nAnd I am glad, yea glad with all my heart,\nThat thus so cleanly I myself can free.\nShake hands for ever, cancel all our vows,\nAnd when we meet at any time again,\nBe it not seen in either of our brows That we one jot of former love retain.\nNow at the last gasp of Love’s latest breath,\nWhen, his pulse failing,\nPassion speechless lies;\nWhen Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,\nAnd Innocence is closing up his eyes— Now, if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,\nFrom death to life thou might’st him yet recover!"} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMute is thy wild harp, now,\nO Bard sublime!\nWho, amid Scotia’s mountain solitude,\nGreat Nature taught to “build the lofty rhyme,”\nAnd even beneath the daily pressure, rude,\nOf laboring Poverty, thy generous blood,\nFired with the love of freedom—Not subdued\nWert thou by thy low fortune:\nBut a time\nLike this we live in, when the abject chime Of echoing Parasite is best approved,\nWas not for thee—Indignantly is fled Thy noble Spirit; and no longer moved\nBy all the ills o’er which thine heart has bled,\nAssociate worthy of the illustrious dead,\nEnjoys with them “the Liberty it loved.”"} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhen in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes\nI all alone beweep my outcast state,\nAnd trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,\nAnd look upon myself, and curse my fate,\nWishing me like to one more rich in hope,\nFeatur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,\nDesiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,\nWith what I most enjoy contented least;\nYet in these thoughts my self almost despising,\nHaply I think on thee, and then my state,\nLike to the lark at break of day arising\nFrom sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;\nFor thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings\nThat then I scorn to change my state with kings."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nOh fairest of the rural maids!\nThy birth was in the forest shades;\nGreen boughs, and glimpses of the sky,\nWere all that met thine infant eye.\nThy sports, thy wanderings, when a child,\nWere even in the sylvan wild;\nAnd all the beauty of the place Is in thy heart and on thy face.\nThe twilight of the trees and rocks Is in the light shade of thy locks;\nThy step is as the wind, that weaves Its playful way among the leaves.\nThine eyes are springs, in whose serene And silent waters heaven is seen;\nTheir lashes are the herbs that look On their young figures in the brook.\nThe forest depths, by foot unpressed,\nAre not more sinless than thy breast;\nThe holy peace, that fills the air Of those calm solitudes, is there."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI have hidden your lost teeth in the net of all my famous hair\nAnd with foresight promised your umbilicus\nTo several minor gods. I paid your fee in fawn skin\n& the lightest fringe of tissue, all the quiet noons assembled,\nIn yard stars & the light of phosphorescent pens,\nThe dioramas that it takes to fill lacunae, in ancestral knots\nThat tell the story of our humble people: watchmakers,\nMainly, ventriloquists & scholars of quintessence,\nAmateur lifeguards I meant to surpass. How I loved\nMy green & distant futures! But I love you more\nFrom late Holocene out to the farthest buoy, unto\nBlackmail & a verb that means renouncing Christ\nOr else describes the path of sap before it’s amber,\nBefore it dimples, just a little, to collect —"} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nPlows have piled a whitened range—\nfaux mountains at the end of our street,\nslopes shrinking, glazed, grayed. Fog\nrules the day. In woolly air, shapes\nstir—slow cars leave a trace\nof exhaust, careful walkers share\nloud intimacies. My mother's birth\nslides across a calendar. Like\na stranger who jumps off a bus,\ncrosses tracks and strides toward us,\nmemory parts the sodden gloom\nof our winter, as though, today,\nonly she can see where she\ngoes and track where she's been."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIf thou survive my well-contented day,\nWhen that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover,\nAnd shalt by fortune once more re-survey\nThese poor rude lines of thy deceased lover,\nCompare them with the bettering of the time,\nAnd though they be outstripp'd by every pen,\nReserve them for my love, not for their rhyme,\nExceeded by the height of happier men.\nO then vouchsafe me but this loving thought:\n\"Had my friend's Muse grown with this growing age\nA dearer birth than this his love had brought,\nTo march in ranks of better equipage:\nBut since he died and poets better prove,\nTheirs for their style I'll read, his for his love.\""} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nI once carried my mollusk tune\nAll the way to the lottery of gods.\nRain was the old funeral choir\nThat keened of a hemisphere\nMoored under lampwings.\nClouds never left. I knew\nThe lights would shine clearer\nIf I closed my eyes, just as\nI knew the Pacific would teach\nMe to sleep before tying my\nName to the flaming. Here I\nAm now at the end of amethyst,\nDrizzling another lost sunrise\nInside the quilt of your hand."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nfor Jim Schley\nThe umbrella, in this case;\nEarlier, the stool, the\nWooden pillars that hold up\nthe roof.\nThis guy, you realize,\nWill dance with anything—\n—He likes the idea.\nThen he picks up some lady’s discarded sandals,\nHolds them next to his head like sea shells,\nDonkey ears.\nNothing,\nhis body states,\nIs safe from the dance of ideas!"} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nAlack! what poverty my Muse brings forth,\nThat having such a scope to show her pride,\nThe argument, all bare, is of more worth\nThan when it hath my added praise beside!\nO! blame me not, if I no more can write!\nLook in your glass, and there appears a face\nThat over-goes my blunt invention quite,\nDulling my lines, and doing me disgrace.\nWere it not sinful then, striving to mend,\nTo mar the subject that before was well?\nFor to no other pass my verses tend\nThan of your graces and your gifts to tell;\nAnd more, much more, than in my verse can sit,\nYour own glass shows you when you look in it."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe giant world\nis no damned genius\nwith its basket of latitude,\nits schedule for wanting\nto be touched.\nNow, slow asleep\nI’m song\nto break in on,\na strength less lost\nthan gone.\nI borrow minute, hour,\nday, day.\nThe waves as cruel replacements pass\nfor crutches."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhy Brownlee left, and where he went,\nIs a mystery even now.\nFor if a man should have been content\nIt was him; two acres of barley,\nOne of potatoes, four bullocks,\nA milker, a slated farmhouse.\nHe was last seen going out to plough\nOn a March morning, bright and early.\nBy noon Brownlee was famous;\nThey had found all abandoned, with\nThe last rig unbroken, his pair of black\nHorses, like man and wife,\nShifting their weight from foot to\nFoot, and gazing into the future."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nEuclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.\nLet all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,\nAnd lay them prone upon the earth and cease\nTo ponder on themselves, the while they stare\nAt nothing, intricately drawn nowhere\nIn shapes of shifting lineage; let geese\nGabble and hiss, but heroes seek release\nFrom dusty bondage into luminous air.\nO blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,\nWhen first the shaft into his vision shone\nOf light anatomized! Euclid alone\nHas looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they\nWho, though once only and then but far away,\nHave heard her massive sandal set on stone."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLike people\nemerging from a steambath,\nbending over,\nsteaming from their heads\nand shoulders,\nthe ring of the mountains\nfrom the Chilkat Range\nto the Juneau ice field\nas if in steambath towels\nof snow flurries;\nat their feet\nare foaming white caps of sea\nlike water thrown on rocks\nsteaming from the heat."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhat was it like, God of mine, what was it like?\n—Oh unfaithful heart, indecisive intelligence!\nWas it like the going by of the wind?\nLike the disappearance of the spring?\nAs nimble, as changeable, as weightless\nas milkweed seeds in summer . . . Yes! Indefinite\nas a smile which is lost forever in a laugh . . .\nArrogant in the air, just like a flag!\nFlag, smile, milkweed pod, swift\nspring in June, clear wind! . . .\nYour celebration was so wild, so sad!\nAll of your changes ended up in nothing—\nremembrance, a blind bee of bitter things!—\nI don’t know what you were like, but you were!"} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nthe winged thang built her dream palace\namid the fine green eyes of a sheltering bough\nshe did not know it was urban turf\ndisguised as serenely delusionally rural\nnor did she know the neighborhood was rife\nwith slant-mawed felines and those long-taloned\nswoopers of prey. she was ignorant of the acidity & oil\nthat slowly polluted the earth, and was never\nto detect the serpent coiled one strong limb below\nfollowing her nature she flitted and dove\nfor whatever blades twigs and mud\ncould be found under the humming blue\nand created a hatchery for her spawn\nnot knowing all were doomed"} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nO my Love sent me a lusty list,\nDid not compare me to a summer's day\nWrote not the beauty of mine eyes\nBut catalogued in a pretty detailed\nAnd comprehensive way the way(s)\nIn which he was better than me.\n\"More capable of extra- and inter-\nPolation. More well-traveled -rounded multi-\nLingual! More practiced in so many matters\nMore: physical, artistic, musical,\nPolitic(al) academic (I dare say!) social\n(In many ways!) and (ditto!) sexual!”\nAnd yet these mores undid but his own plea(s)(e)\nAnd left, none-the-less, the Greater Moor of me."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nPity me not because the light of day\nAt close of day no longer walks the sky;\nPity me not for beauties passed away\nFrom field and thicket as the year goes by;\nPity me not the waning of the moon,\nNor that the ebbing tide goes out to sea,\nNor that a man’s desire is hushed so soon,\nAnd you no longer look with love on me.\nThis have I known always: Love is no more\nThan the wide blossom which the wind assails,\nThan the great tide that treads the shifting shore,\nStrewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales:\nPity me that the heart is slow to learn\nWhat the swift mind beholds at every turn."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMusic of Japan. Parsimoniously\nfrom the water clock the drops unfold\nin lazy honey or ethereal gold\nthat over time reiterates a weave\neternal, fragile, enigmatic, bright.\nI fear that every one will be the last.\nThey are a yesterday come from the past.\nBut from what shrine, from what mountain’s slight\ngarden, what vigils by an unknown sea,\nand from what modest melancholy, from\nwhat lost and rediscovered afternoon\ndo they arrive at their far future: me?\nWho knows? No matter. When I hear it play\nI am. I want to be. I bleed away."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMy mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;\nCoral is far more red, than her lips red:\nIf snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;\nIf hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.\nI have seen roses damask’d, red and white,\nBut no such roses see I in her cheeks;\nAnd in some perfumes is there more delight\nThan in the breath that from my mistress reeks.\nI love to hear her speak, yet well I know\nThat music hath a far more pleasing sound:\nI grant I never saw a goddess go;\nMy mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:\nAnd yet by heaven, I think my love as rare,\nAs any she belied with false compare."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nWhen I do count the clock that tells the time,\nAnd see the brave day sunk in hideous night;\nWhen I behold the violet past prime,\nAnd sable curls, all silvered o’er with white;\nWhen lofty trees I see barren of leaves,\nWhich erst from heat did canopy the herd,\nAnd summer’s green all girded up in sheaves,\nBorne on the bier with white and bristly beard,\nThen of thy beauty do I question make,\nThat thou among the wastes of time must go,\nSince sweets and beauties do themselves forsake\nAnd die as fast as they see others grow;\nAnd nothing ’gainst Time’s scythe can make defence\nSave breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAlas! ’tis true, I have gone here and there,\nAnd made my self a motley to the view,\nGor’d mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,\nMade old offences of affections new;\nMost true it is, that I have look’d on truth\nAskance and strangely; but, by all above,\nThese blenches gave my heart another youth,\nAnd worse essays prov’d thee my best of love.\nNow all is done, save what shall have no end:\nMine appetite I never more will grind\nOn newer proof, to try an older friend,\nA god in love, to whom I am confin’d.\nThen give me welcome, next my heaven the best,\nEven to thy pure and most most loving breast."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nin the beginning\nthere was no end\nthe ground we\nwalked on was\na memory\nour shadows\nfalse stories\nour clothing\nspace without time\ndarkness was the\ncolor of angels\nand the stars did\nnot weep\n2.25.98"} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nOne day I wrote her name upon the strand,\nBut came the waves and washed it away:\nAgain I wrote it with a second hand,\nBut came the tide, and made my pains his prey.\n\"Vain man,\" said she, \"that dost in vain assay,\nA mortal thing so to immortalize;\nFor I myself shall like to this decay,\nAnd eke my name be wiped out likewise.\"\n\"Not so,\" (quod I) \"let baser things devise\nTo die in dust, but you shall live by fame:\nMy verse your vertues rare shall eternize,\nAnd in the heavens write your glorious name:\nWhere whenas death shall all the world subdue,\nOur love shall live, and later life renew.\""} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nNot for that city of the level sun,\nIts golden streets and glittering gates ablaze—\nThe shadeless, sleepless city of white days,\nWhite nights, or nights and days that are as one—\nWe weary, when all is said , all thought, all done.\nWe strain our eyes beyond this dusk to see\nWhat, from the threshold of eternity\nWe shall step into. No, I think we shun\nThe splendour of that everlasting glare,\nThe clamour of that never-ending song.\nAnd if for anything we greatly long,\nIt is for some remote and quiet stair\nWhich winds to silence and a space for sleep\nToo sound for waking and for dreams too deep."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAh! wherefore with infection should he live,\nAnd with his presence grace impiety,\nThat sin by him advantage should achieve,\nAnd lace itself with his society?\nWhy should false painting imitate his cheek,\nAnd steel dead seeming of his living hue?\nWhy should poor beauty indirectly seek\nRoses of shadow, since his rose is true?\nWhy should he live, now Nature bankrupt is,\nBeggar’d of blood to blush through lively veins?\nFor she hath no exchequer now but his,\nAnd proud of many, lives upon his gains.\nO! him she stores, to show what wealth she had\nIn days long since, before these last so bad."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nTurn,\nFortune, turn thy wheel, and lower the proud;\nTurn thy wild wheel thro' sunshine, storm, and cloud;\nThy wheel and thee we neither love nor hate.\nTurn,\nFortune, turn thy wheel with smile or frown;\nWith that wild wheel we go not up or down;\nOur hoard is little, but our hearts are great.\nSmile and we smile, the lords of many lands;\nFrown and we smile, the lords of our own hands;\nFor man is man and master of his fate.\nTurn, turn thy wheel above the staring crowd;\nThy wheel and thou are shadows in the cloud;\nThy wheel and thee we neither love nor hate."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nBetwixt mine eye and heart a league is took,\nAnd each doth good turns now unto the other:\nWhen that mine eye is famish’d for a look,\nOr heart in love with sighs himself doth smother,\nWith my love’s picture then my eye doth feast,\nAnd to the painted banquet bids my heart;\nAnother time mine eye is my heart’s guest,\nAnd in his thoughts of love doth share a part:\nSo, either by thy picture or my love,\nThyself away, art present still with me;\nFor thou not farther than my thoughts canst move,\nAnd I am still with them, and they with thee;\nOr, if they sleep, thy picture in my sight\nAwakes my heart, to heart’s and eye’s delight."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAfter her pills the girl slept and counted\nPellet on pellet the regress of life.\nDead to the world, the world's count yet counted\nPellet on pill the antinomies of life.\nRefused to turn, the way's back, she counted\nHer several stones across the mire of life.\nAnd stones away and sticks away she counted\nTo keep herself out of the country of life.\nLost tally. How the sheep return to home\nIs the story she will retrieve\nAnd the only story believe\nOf one and one the sheep returning home\nTo take the shapes of life,\nComing and being counted."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIn the past we listened to photographs. They heard our voice speak.\nAlive, active. What had been distance was memory. Dusk came,\nPushed us forward, emptying the laboratory each night undisturbed by\nErasure.\nIn the city of X, they lived together. Always morose, her lips\nsoothed him. The piano was arranged in the old manner, light entered the\nwindow, street lamps at the single tree.\nEmotion evoked by a single light on a subject is not transferable to\nphotographs of the improved city. The camera, once\ncommented freely amid rivering and lost gutters of treeless parks or avenue.\nThe old camera refused to penetrate the unknown. Its heart was soft,\nunreliable.\nNow distributed is photography of new government building. We are\nforbidden to observe despair silent in old photographs."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nbecause we know distance too well\nbecause the blood bank didn’t have enough blood for nana & her new knee\nbecause I see your car a car like yours parked across the street from my apartment\nbecause the same night awaits us all\nbecause arizona & the drought & I was seven when it started\nbecause nana used to sleep with a belt tied around her waist so tight to wake like an hourglass\nbecause I wait on you\nbecause I want to know the antonym to every word\nbecause we speak to each other in our sleep\nbecause I do my best thinking in the shower so I take long showers\nbecause you kiss the parts of my body I hate most\nbecause you can love someone & not remember their birthday\nbecause sometimes I want the wind & it is impossible\nbecause from the airplane I can see both oceans & where they meet"} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nDear one, the sea smells of nostalgia. We’re beached and bloated, lie\non shell sand, oil rigs nowhere seen. It’s Long Island, and the weather\nis fine. What to disturb in the heart of a man?\nA boy is not a body. A boy is a walk.\nShed the machine.\nMust be entirely flesh to fight.\nMust be strategy instead of filling.\nWhat to disrobe, there, centrifugal logic, as in here is a slice of my\nfinger. Tell me the circumstance of your dick extension. When we\nslip into imprecision, we lose control, windowless walls close in.\nAwareness of being in a female body is a tinge of regret. “The human\nframe to adapt itself to convention though she herself was a woman.”\nTo receive, to be entered, to fret around upon entry. It’s grand. I’m a\nsystem. Plants tall as wheat to hide in."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSo, now I have confess’d that he is thine,\nAnd I my self am mortgag’d to thy will,\nMyself I’ll forfeit, so that other mine\nThou wilt restore to be my comfort still:\nBut thou wilt not, nor he will not be free,\nFor thou art covetous, and he is kind;\nHe learn’d but surety-like to write for me,\nUnder that bond that him as fast doth bind.\nThe statute of thy beauty thou wilt take,\nThou usurer, that putt’st forth all to use,\nAnd sue a friend came debtor for my sake;\nSo him I lose through my unkind abuse.\nHim have I lost; thou hast both him and me:\nHe pays the whole, and yet am I not free."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAt the market today, I look for Piñata\napples, their soft-blush-yellow. My husband\nbrought them home last week, made me guess at\nthe name of this new strain, held one in his hand\nlike a gift and laughed as I tried all\nthe names I knew: Gala, Fuji, Honey\nCrisp—watched his face for clues—what to call\nsomething new? It's winter, only tawny\nhues and frozen ground, but that apple bride\nwas sweet, and I want to bring it back to him,\nthat new. When he cut it, the star inside\nheld seeds of other stars, the way within\na life are all the lives you might live,\neach unnamed, until you name it."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhat length of verse can serve brave Mopsa’s good to show,\nWhose virtues strange, and beauties such, as no man them may know?\nThus shrewdly burden, then, how can my Muse escape?\nThe gods must help, and precious things must serve to show her shape.\nLike great god Saturn, fair, and like fair Venus, chaste;\nAs smooth as Pan, as Juno mild, like goddess Iris fast.\nWith Cupid she foresees, and goes god Vulcan’s pace;\nAnd for a taste of all these gifts, she borrows Momus’ grace.\nHer forehead jacinth-like, her cheeks of opal hue,\nHer twinkling eyes bedecked with pearl, her lips of sapphire blue,\nHer hair pure crapall stone, her mouth, O heavenly wide,\nHer skin like burnished gold, her hands like silver ore untried.\nAs for those parts unknown, which hidden sure are best,\nHappy be they which believe, and never seek the rest."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\n(at St. Mary's)\nmay the tide\nthat is entering even now\nthe lip of our understanding\ncarry you out\nbeyond the face of fear\nmay you kiss\nthe wind then turn from it\ncertain that it will\nlove your back may you\nopen your eyes to water\nwater waving forever\nand may you in your innocence\nsail through this to that"} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\ndis suit of clothes jus as empty\nas a sky wid no stars\ntwo years a workin savin money\nden john drop out my heart\ni dont want ta see his wife\ni knows dat she is me\ni’se could go in shootin de rifle\nlet my angry run free\nbes not just my temper risin\nno use stoking dead fire\nbut ta see his face one mo time\nnow lord jus you on high\nif he make do widout me now\ni can make do lord i can make do"} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nHard to picture, but these Goliath trees\nare taller still than Robeson. Outside\nvast plate windows in this lecture hall,\nI imagine him running down autumn fields,\nsee his black thighs pumping that machinery\nacross chalk-painted lines.\nHe loved the woman\nin the lab, Eslanda, who saw order\nin swimming circles on inch-wide slides, who\nmade photographs. I picture her standing\nin darkness, led by red light, bathing paper\nin broth, extracting images. Did this woman smile\nto watch white paper darken, to pull wet\nfrom the chemicals Paul Robeson’s totem face?"} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nEmotion scoops the footpath’s velvet edges,\nestate agents’ bluster calibrates the street’s\nlivability, treeless, ajar with fridges\nbunked out. Investors wave sheets\nof sums to air, a tiny computer chalked\non glass, loving the artist’s marble noose\nin adjacent pop-up gallery they might’ve forked\nout for, but didn’t. It was no use\ncrying now though her vale of tears candies\na conquest, with stuck name tag and good insurance\nthat barely cost a sou. A countdown into space\nechoes, blue lorikeets flit the race\nand pigeons chew the eaves for reassurance\nover suckling locals and tourist dandies."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nHaving been tenant long to a rich lord,\nNot thriving,\nI resolvèd to be bold,\nAnd make a suit unto him, to afford A new small-rented lease, and cancel th’ old.\nIn heaven at his manor I him sought;\nThey told me there that he was lately gone\nAbout some land, which he had dearly bought Long since on earth, to take possessiòn.\nI straight returned, and knowing his great birth,\nSought him accordingly in great resorts;\nIn cities, theaters, gardens, parks, and courts;\nAt length I heard a ragged noise and mirth\nOf thieves and murderers; there I him espied,\nWho straight,\nYour suit is granted, said, and died."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMy glass shall not persuade me I am old,\nSo long as youth and thou are of one date;\nBut when in thee time’s furrows I behold,\nThen look I death my days should expiate.\nFor all that beauty that doth cover thee,\nIs but the seemly raiment of my heart,\nWhich in thy breast doth live, as thine in me:\nHow can I then be elder than thou art?\nO! therefore love, be of thyself so wary\nAs I, not for myself, but for thee will;\nBearing thy heart, which I will keep so chary\nAs tender nurse her babe from faring ill.\nPresume not on thy heart when mine is slain,\nThou gav’st me thine not to give back again."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nDemain! Not much of a glass.\nSo-called legerdemain padded by you know who\nin the direction of Argentina: a #3 pencil implacable\nas a first aid kit. War or pine trees.\nThus nothing is spotted with Futurism\nand hillsides, the idiom we skulk in\nin honor of which differential diagnoses\ntake a nap in November worrisomeness.\nReliquary dreams. Frangipani!\nIf you leave without controlled faddishness,\nshoulder to shoulder like butter, the\ntruculence is on the stargazer side.\nWhat godsend fiddles with sadness. Careful\nabout cheekbones, songs including the Atlantic."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nTheir singer suffered breakdowns. In their work\nthere was a sense of what it was to live there at that time.\nOne song described the dark around the military\nvehicles between them and the cocaine waiting\nin Gramercy. It was about the sepsis that followed love\nor love repeated as farce, the neck neck neck\ndamaged by an anonymous hand unstringing guitars.\nThey got away with it and worked to abolish youth\nby knitting and paying half-attention. I thought I was\nin love because my sentiments were matched\nby a generic, abiding sense of unfreedom. Nothing\nsurvives lovers descrying the red flags of old flames.\nNothing is more relatable than an unreasonable person\noperating subtractively, indulgently, out of exasperation."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI am being paraded through the streets with my head shaved,\nwith no memory of what I have done to deserve this.\nI run a gauntlet of women who call me slut and whore,\nstaggering under their fusillade of accusation:\nWhat stories did I tell, what lies? What names did I reveal?\nWhat men did I sleep with? What did I do? For what reward?\nOr in a catacomb deep under Paris they press gloves\nof barbed wire on to my bare hands, and when the wounds have healed\nthey point to the brambles left on my palms, saying, Surely\nthese lines of head and heart and mind are those of a traitor.\nWhen you wake I hold you tight, saying, It’s only a dream,\nthe language of dream has nothing to do with that of life.\nAnd as eventually you sink back into the deep well\nof sleep, I wonder if by my words I have betrayed you."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nNow the god of rainy August hangs his mask\namong the city’s spires and balustrades\nand stone clocktowers half-effaced in clouds.\nOn Park the first reflecting pool dims\nwith a thousand smelted-silver circle-rims,\nwhile west on Fifth a modiste scatters leaves\nin fall vitrines, and felt-browed mannequins\nresign the world with gestures of disdain.\nNow in the Cloister’s high parterres the rain\nfloods copper gutterings, boxwood, terraced urns\nand mottoes. “The weather turns.” Clamped to their pier,\nthe smiling Gaul, the murderer Clotaire,\nand Isaiah, green-throned, water-cowled, exchange\ntheir fine-lit ironies for rotes of pain."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIt was like soul-kissing, the way the words\nfilled my mouth as Mrs. Purdy read from her desk.\nAll the other kids zoned an hour ahead to 3:15,\nbut Mrs. Purdy and I wandered lonely as clouds borne\nby a breeze off Mount Parnassus. She must have seen\nthe darkest eyes in the room brim: The next day\nshe gave me a poem she’d chosen especially for me\nto read to the all except for me white class.\nShe smiled when she told me to read it, smiled harder,\nsaid oh yes I could. She smiled harder and harder\nuntil I stood and opened my mouth to banjo playing\ndarkies, pickaninnies, disses and dats. When I finished\nmy classmates stared at the floor. We walked silent\nto the buses, awed by the power of words."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nMy true-love hath my heart and I have his,\nBy just exchange one for the other given:\nI hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss;\nThere never was a bargain better driven.\nHis heart in me keeps me and him in one;\nMy heart in him his thoughts and senses guides:\nHe loves my heart, for once it was his own;\nI cherish his because in me it bides.\nHis heart his wound received from my sight;\nMy heart was wounded with his wounded heart;\nFor as from me on him his hurt did light,\nSo still, methought, in me his hurt did smart:\nBoth equal hurt, in this change sought our bliss,\nMy true love hath my heart and I have his."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nFor shame! deny that thou bear’st love to any,\nWho for thyself art so unprovident.\nGrant, if thou wilt, thou art belov’d of many,\nBut that thou none lov’st is most evident:\nFor thou art so possess’d with murderous hate,\nThat ’gainst thyself thou stick’st not to conspire,\nSeeking that beauteous roof to ruinate\nWhich to repair should be thy chief desire.\nO! change thy thought, that I may change my mind:\nShall hate be fairer lodg’d than gentle love?\nBe, as thy presence is, gracious and kind,\nOr to thyself at least kind-hearted prove:\nMake thee another self for love of me,\nThat beauty still may live in thine or thee."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWithin this black hive to-night\nThere swarm a million bees;\nBees passing in and out the moon,\nBees escaping out the moon,\nBees returning through the moon,\nSilver bees intently buzzing,\nSilver honey dripping from the swarm of bees\nEarth is a waxen cell of the world comb,\nAnd I, a drone,\nLying on my back,\nLipping honey,\nGetting drunk with that silver honey,\nWish that I might fly out past the moon\nAnd curl forever in some far-off farmyard flower."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nImmortal Love, author of this great frame,\nSprung from that beauty which can never fade,\nHow hath man parcel'd out Thy glorious name,\nAnd thrown it on that dust which Thou hast made,\nWhile mortal love doth all the title gain!\nWhich siding with Invention, they together\nBear all the sway, possessing heart and brain,\n(Thy workmanship) and give Thee share in neither.\nWit fancies beauty, beauty raiseth wit;\nThe world is theirs, they two play out the game,\nThou standing by: and though Thy glorious name\nWrought our deliverance from th' infernal pit,\nWho sings Thy praise? Only a scarf or glove\nDoth warm our hands, and make them write of love."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI would I might forget that I am I,\nAnd break the heavy chain that binds me fast,\nWhose links about myself my deeds have cast.\nWhat in the body’s tomb doth buried lie\nIs boundless; ’tis the spirit of the sky,\nLord of the future, guardian of the past,\nAnd soon must forth, to know his own at last.\nIn his large life to live, I fain would die.\nHappy the dumb beast, hungering for food,\nBut calling not his suffering his own;\nBlessèd the angel, gazing on all good,\nBut knowing not he sits upon a throne;\nWretched the mortal, pondering his mood,\nAnd doomed to know his aching heart alone."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhoever hath her wish, thou hast thy ‘Will,’\nAnd ‘Will’ to boot, and ‘Will’ in over-plus;\nMore than enough am I that vex’d thee still,\nTo thy sweet will making addition thus.\nWilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,\nNot once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?\nShall will in others seem right gracious,\nAnd in my will no fair acceptance shine?\nThe sea, all water, yet receives rain still,\nAnd in abundance addeth to his store;\nSo thou, being rich in ‘Will,’ add to thy ‘Will’\nOne will of mine, to make thy large will more.\nLet no unkind ‘No’ fair beseechers kill;\nThink all but one, and me in that one ‘Will.’"} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe battle rent a cobweb diamond-strung\nAnd cut a flower beside a ground bird's nest\nBefore it stained a single human breast.\nThe stricken flower bent double and so hung.\nAnd still the bird revisited her young.\nA butterfly its fall had dispossessed\nA moment sought in air his flower of rest,\nThen lightly stooped to it and fluttering clung.\nOn the bare upland pasture there had spread\nO'ernight 'twixt mullein stalks a wheel of thread\nAnd straining cables wet with silver dew.\nA sudden passing bullet shook it dry.\nThe indwelling spider ran to greet the fly,\nBut finding nothing, sullenly withdrew."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWe have almost nothing left,\nno ground in common.\nAt best, a brand\nor maybe a miniseries.\nNo campfire to gather around.\nThe big stories—peckish news\ngets told in tweets,\ngets old so quickly.\nIn place of one place\na billion tiny customized versions\nappear targeted specifically\nto your tastes.\nYou see only what you want to see.\nMaybe you always did."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nHalf asleep in prayer I said the right thing\nAnd felt a sudden pleasure come into\nThe room or my own body. In the dark,\nCharged with a change of atmosphere, at first\nI couldn’t tell my body from the room.\nAnd I was wide awake, full of this feeling,\nAlert as though I’d heard a doorknob twist,\nA drawer pulled, and instead of terror knew\nThe intrusion of an overwhelming joy.\nI had said thanks and this was the response.\nBut how I said it or what I said it for\nI still cannot recall and I have tried\nAll sorts of ways all hours of the night.\nOnce was enough to be dissatisfied."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSummer’s sweet theatrum! The boy lunges through\nThe kitchen without comment, slams the door. An\nElaborate evening drama. I lug his forlorn weight\nFrom floor to bed. Beatific lips and gap-\nToothed. Who stayed late to mope and swim, then\nBreach chimneys of lake like a hooked gar\nPressing his wet totality against me. Iridescent\nLaughter and depraved. Chromatic his constant state. At\nTen, childhood took off like a scorched dog. Turned\nHis head to see my hand wave from a window, and I too saw\nThe hand untouching, distant from. What fathering-\nFear slaked the impulse to embrace him? Duration!\nAn indefinite continuation of life. I whirled out wings. Going\nToward. And Lord Child claimed now, climbing loose."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nCyriack, whose grandsire on the royal bench\nOf British Themis, with no mean applause,\nPronounced, and in his volumes taught, our laws,\nWhich others at their bar so often wrench,\nToday deep thoughts resolve with me to drench\nIn mirth that after no repenting draws;\nLet Euclid rest, and Archimedes pause,\nAnd what the Swede intend, and what the French.\nTo measure life learn thou betimes, and know\nToward solid good what leads the nearest way;\nFor other things mild Heaven a time ordains,\nAnd disapproves that care, though wise in show,\nThat with superfluous burden loads the day,\nAnd, when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIn the dining room there is a brown fish\nhanging on the wall who swims along\nin his frame while we are eating dinner.\nHe swims in candlelight for all to see,\nas if he has been swimming forever, even\nin the darkness of the ink before someone thought\nto draw him and the thin reeds waving in his stream\nand the clear pebbles strewn upon the sand.\nNo wonder he continues his swimming\ndeep into the night, long after we have\nblown out the candles and gone upstairs to bed.\nNo wonder I find him in the pale morning\nlight, still swimming, still looking out at me\nwith his one, small, spellbound eye."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nmary is an old woman without shoes.\nshe doesn’t believe it.\nnot when her belly starts to bubble\nand leave the print of a finger where\nno man touches.\nnot when the snow in her hair melts away.\nnot when the stranger she used to wait for\nappears dressed in lights at her\nkitchen table.\nshe is an old woman and\ndoesn’t believe it.\nwhen Something drops onto her toes one night\nshe calls it a fox\nbut she feeds it."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe moon shears up on Tahoe now:\nA panther leaps to a tamarack bough.\nShe crouches, hugging the crooked limb:\nShe hears the nearing steps of him\nWho sent the little puff of smoke\nThat stretched her mate beneath the oak.\nHer eyes burn beryl, two yellow balls,\nAs Fate counts out his last footfalls.\nA sudden spring, a demon cry,\nCarnivorous laughter to the sky.\nHer teeth are fastened in his throat\n(The moon rides in her silver boat.)\nAnd now one scream of long delight\nAcross the caverns of the night!"} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nTwo loves I have of comfort and despair,\nWhich like two spirits do suggest me still:\nThe better angel is a man right fair,\nThe worser spirit a woman colour’d ill.\nTo win me soon to hell, my female evil,\nTempteth my better angel from my side,\nAnd would corrupt my saint to be a devil,\nWooing his purity with her foul pride.\nAnd whether that my angel be turn’d fiend,\nSuspect I may, yet not directly tell;\nBut being both from me, both to each friend,\nI guess one angel in another’s hell:\nYet this shall I ne’er know, but live in doubt,\nTill my bad angel fire my good one out."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIn faith I do not love thee with mine eyes,\nFor they in thee a thousand errors note;\nBut ’tis my heart that loves what they despise,\nWho, in despite of view, is pleased to dote.\nNor are mine ears with thy tongue’s tune delighted;\nNor tender feeling, to base touches prone,\nNor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited\nTo any sensual feast with thee alone:\nBut my five wits nor my five senses can\nDissuade one foolish heart from serving thee,\nWho leaves unsway’d the likeness of a man,\nThy proud heart’s slave and vassal wretch to be:\nOnly my plague thus far I count my gain,\nThat she that makes me sin awards me pain."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAlone it stands in Poesy’s fair land,\nA temple by the muses set apart;\nA perfect structure of consummate art,\nBy artists builded and by genius planned.\nBeyond the reach of the apprentice hand,\nBeyond the ken of the unturtored heart,\nLike a fine carving in a common mart,\nOnly the favored few will understand.\nA chef-d’oeuvre toiled over with great care,\nYet which the unseeing careless crowd goes by,\nA plainly set, but well-cut solitaire,\nAn ancient bit of pottery, too rare\nTo please or hold aught save the special eye,\nThese only with the sonnet can compare."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nBut wherefore do not you a mightier way\nMake war upon this bloody tyrant, Time?\nAnd fortify yourself in your decay\nWith means more blessed than my barren rhyme?\nNow stand you on the top of happy hours,\nAnd many maiden gardens, yet unset,\nWith virtuous wish would bear you living flowers,\nMuch liker than your painted counterfeit:\nSo should the lines of life that life repair,\nWhich this, Time’s pencil, or my pupil pen,\nNeither in inward worth nor outward fair,\nCan make you live yourself in eyes of men.\nTo give away yourself, keeps yourself still,\nAnd you must live, drawn by your own sweet skill."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThat it was shy when alive goes without saying.\nWe know it vanished at the sound of voices\nOr footsteps. It took wing at the slightest noises,\nThough it could be approached by someone praying.\nWe have no recordings of it, though of course\nIn the basement of the Museum, we have some stuffed\nMoth-eaten specimens—the Lesser Ruffed\nAnd Yellow Spotted—filed in narrow drawers.\nBut its song is lost. If it was related to\nA species of Quiet, or of another feather,\nNo researcher can know. Not even whether\nA breeding pair still nests deep in the bayou,\nWhere legend has it some once common bird\nDecades ago was first not seen, not heard."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nO what a strange parcel of creatures are we,\nScarce ever to quarrel, or even agree;\nWe all are alone, though at home altogether,\nExcept to the fire constrained by the weather;\nThen one says, ‘’Tis cold’, which we all of us know,\nAnd with unanimity answer, ‘’Tis so’:\nWith shrugs and with shivers all look at the fire,\nAnd shuffle ourselves and our chairs a bit nigher;\nThen quickly, preceded by silence profound,\nA yawn epidemical catches around:\nLike social companions we never fall out,\nNor ever care what one another’s about;\nTo comfort each other is never our plan,\nFor to please ourselves, truly, is more than we can."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nI sit with my thermos of coffee on the mall:\na mile-long promenade, arcades of elms\nflanking a generous aliquot of benches.\nBut at this early hour it starts to dawn:\nI am the only one without a dog.\nSo, a witness to an ancient symbiosis,\nas it's evolved within a modern city:\nThe dogs, I note, are smaller, the owners\nless ferocious. The former sniff then poop,\nthe latter, like potty-training parents, pat their heads,\ngather it in plastic doggy-bags.\nIt's no longer for the hunt or for protection;\nboth species have adapted to survive\nhard loneliness inside a small apartment."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLate in November, on a single night\nNot even near to freezing, the ginkgo trees\nThat stand along the walk drop all their leaves\nIn one consent, and neither to rain nor to wind\nBut as though to time alone: the golden and green\nLeaves litter the lawn today, that yesterday\nHad spread aloft their fluttering fans of light.\nWhat signal from the stars? What senses took it in?\nWhat in those wooden motives so decided\nTo strike their leaves, to down their leaves,\nRebellion or surrender? and if this\nCan happen thus, what race shall be exempt?\nWhat use to learn the lessons taught by time.\nIf a star at any time may tell us: Now."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nFrom the tawny light\nfrom the rainy nights\nfrom the imagination finding\nitself and more than itself\nalone and more than alone\nat the bottom of the well where the moon lives,\ncan you pull me\ninto December? a lowland\nof space, perception of space\ntowering of shadows of clouds blown upon\nclouds over\nnew ground, new made\nunder heavy December footsteps? the only\nway to live?"} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIt was so simple: you came back to me\nAnd I was happy. Nothing seemed to matter\nBut that. That you had gone away from me\nAnd lived for days with him—it didn’t matter.\nThat I had been left to care for our old dog\nAnd house alone—couldn’t have mattered less!\nOn all this, you and I and our happy dog\nAgreed. We slept. The world was worriless.\nI woke in the morning, brimming with old joys\nTill the fact-checker showed up, late, for work\nAnd started in: Item: it’s years, not days.\nItem: you had no dog. Item: she isn’t back,\nIn fact, she just remarried. And oh yes, item: you\nLeft her, remember?"} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nShall I compare thee to a summer’s day?\nThou art more lovely and more temperate:\nRough winds do shake the darling buds of May,\nAnd summer’s lease hath all too short a date;\nSometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,\nAnd often is his gold complexion dimm'd;\nAnd every fair from fair sometime declines,\nBy chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;\nBut thy eternal summer shall not fade,\nNor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;\nNor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,\nWhen in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:\nSo long as men can breathe or eyes can see,\nSo long lives this, and this gives life to thee."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nOwl small be enough\nThe child for all his feathers was a cold.\nOh wow the owl.\nThe poem the vowels\nThe owl, look its vowels\nThat branch for you\nOwl, are you an armature vector\nAnd a large step for mankind?\nOwl astronaut burgeoning owl is a gift\nYou give to me give to you\nTerrible other things happen.\nWe stay on our branch.\nA hundred eyes\nTwo will do"} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nShe recognizes its crest in the way he looks at her.\nThe wave is as vast as the roiling mass in the Japanese\nPrint they had paused in front of at the museum,\nCapped with ringlets of foam, all surging sinew.\nThat little village along the shore would be\nTotally lost. There is no escaping this.\nThe wave is flooding his heart,\nAnd he is sending the flood\nHer way. It rushes\nOver her.\nCan you look at one face\nFor the whole of a life?\nDoes the moon peer down\nAt the tides and hunger for home?"} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhen you, that at this moment are to me\nDearer than words on paper, shall depart,\nAnd be no more the warder of my heart,\nWhereof again myself shall hold the key;\nAnd be no more—what now you seem to be—\nThe sun, from which all excellences start\nIn a round nimbus, nor a broken dart\nOf moonlight, even, splintered on the sea;\nI shall remember only of this hour—\nAnd weep somewhat, as now you see me weep—\nThe pathos of your love, that, like a flower,\nFearful of death yet amorous of sleep,\nDroops for a moment and beholds, dismayed,\nThe wind whereon its petals shall be laid."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThen I was sealed, and like the wintering tree\nI stood me locked upon a summer core;\nLiving, had died a death, and asked no more.\nAnd I lived then, but as enduringly,\nAnd my heart beat, but only as to be.\nIll weathers well, hail, gust and cold I bore,\nI held my life as hid, at root, in store:\nThus I lived then, till this air breathed on me.\nTill this kind air breathed kindness everywhere,\nThere where my times had left me I would stay.\nThen I was staunch, I knew nor yes nor no;\nBut now the wishful leaves have thronged the air.\nMy every leaf leans forth upon the day;\nAlas, kind element! which comes to go."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWait.\nWait.\nWait.\nWait. Wait.\nWait.\nWait.\nW a i t.\nWait.\nWait.\nWait.\nWait.\nWait.\nWait.\nNOW."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWith favoring winds, o'er sunlit seas,\nWe sailed for the Hesperides,\nThe land where golden apples grow;\nBut that, ah! that was long ago.\nHow far, since then, the ocean streams Have swept us from that land of dreams,\nThat land of fiction and of truth,\nThe lost Atlantis of our youth!\nWhither, ah, whither?\nAre not these The tempest-haunted Orcades,\nWhere sea-gulls scream, and breakers roar,\nAnd wreck and sea-weed line the shore?\nUltima Thule!\nUtmost Isle!\nHere in thy harbors for a while We lower our sails; a while we rest From the unending, endless quest."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nWatch thou and fear; to-morrow thou shalt die.\nOr art thou sure thou shalt have time for death?\nIs not the day which God's word promiseth\nTo come man knows not when? In yonder sky,\nNow while we speak, the sun speeds forth: can I\nOr thou assure him of his goal? God's breath\nEven at this moment haply quickeneth\nThe air to a flame; till spirits, always nigh\nThough screen'd and hid, shall walk the daylight here.\nAnd dost thou prate of all that man shall do?\nCanst thou, who hast but plagues, presume to be\nGlad in his gladness that comes after thee?\nWill his strength slay thy worm in Hell? Go to:\nCover thy countenance, and watch, and fear."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSuddenly, I stopped thinking about Love,\nafter so many years of only that,\nafter thinking that nothing else mattered.\nAnd what was I thinking of when I stopped\nthinking about Love? Death, of course—what else\ncould take Love’s place? What else could hold such force?\nI thought about how far away Death once\nhad seemed, how unexpected that it could\nhappen to someone I knew quite well,\nhow impossible that this should be the\nnormal thing, as natural as frost and\nwinter. I thought about the way we’d aged,\nhow skin fell into wrinkles, how eyes grew\ndim; then (of course) my love, I thought of you."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIn the long, sleepless watches of the night,\nA gentle face — the face of one long dead —\nLooks at me from the wall, where round its head\nThe night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.\nHere in this room she died; and soul more white\nNever through martyrdom of fire was led\nTo its repose; nor can in books be read\nThe legend of a life more benedight.\nThere is a mountain in the distant West\nThat, sun-defying, in its deep ravines\nDisplays a cross of snow upon its side.\nSuch is the cross I wear upon my breast\nThese eighteen years, through all the changing scenes\nAnd seasons, changeless since the day she died."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMen call you fair, and you do credit it,\nFor that your self ye daily such do see:\nBut the true fair, that is the gentle wit,\nAnd vertuous mind, is much more prais'd of me.\nFor all the rest, how ever fair it be,\nShall turn to naught and lose that glorious hue:\nBut only that is permanent and free\nFrom frail corruption, that doth flesh ensue.\nThat is true beauty: that doth argue you\nTo be divine, and born of heavenly seed:\nDeriv'd from that fair Spirit, from whom all true\nAnd perfect beauty did at first proceed.\nHe only fair, and what he fair hath made,\nAll other fair, like flowers untimely fade."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThus is his cheek the map of days outworn,\nWhen beauty lived and died as flowers do now,\nBefore these bastard signs of fair were born,\nOr durst inhabit on a living brow;\nBefore the golden tresses of the dead,\nThe right of sepulchres, were shorn away,\nTo live a second life on second head;\nEre beauty’s dead fleece made another gay:\nIn him those holy antique hours are seen,\nWithout all ornament, itself and true,\nMaking no summer of another’s green,\nRobbing no old to dress his beauty new;\nAnd him as for a map doth Nature store,\nTo show false Art what beauty was of yore."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe wooden horses\nare tired of their courses\nand plead from head to hoof\nto be fed to a stove—\nIn leaping lunging flames\nthey’d rise again, flared manes\nsnapping like chains behind them.\nThe smoke would not blind them\nas do these children’s hands:\nbeyond our cruel commands\nthe fire will free them then\nas once the artisan when\nout of the tree they\nwere nagged to this neigh."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nThe other two, slight air, and purging fire\nAre both with thee, wherever I abide;\nThe first my thought, the other my desire,\nThese present-absent with swift motion slide.\nFor when these quicker elements are gone\nIn tender embassy of love to thee,\nMy life, being made of four, with two alone\nSinks down to death, oppress’d with melancholy;\nUntil life’s composition be recur’d\nBy those swift messengers return’d from thee,\nWho even but now come back again, assur’d,\nOf thy fair health, recounting it to me:\nThis told, I joy; but then no longer glad,\nI send them back again, and straight grow sad."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI steal your mailbox, leave\ngum on your sidewalk. I\nseduce your sister, ignore your wife.\nI tear one page from each of your books.\nI convince you that I am your friend.\n*\nWhen people ask about you,\nI shake my head. When they\ntell about you, I nod.\n*\nToday, I hang myself\nfrom a greased flagpole\noutside your picture window.\nYesterday, I stole your curtains."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLet those who are in favour with their stars\nOf public honour and proud titles boast,\nWhilst I, whom fortune of such triumph bars\nUnlook’d for joy in that I honour most.\nGreat princes’ favourites their fair leaves spread\nBut as the marigold at the sun’s eye,\nAnd in themselves their pride lies buried,\nFor at a frown they in their glory die.\nThe painful warrior famoused for fight,\nAfter a thousand victories once foil’d,\nIs from the book of honour razed quite,\nAnd all the rest forgot for which he toil’d:\nThen happy I, that love and am belov’d,\nWhere I may not remove nor be remov’d."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIf thou must love me, let it be for nought\nExcept for love’s sake only. Do not say\n“I love her for her smile—her look—her way\nOf speaking gently,—for a trick of thought\nThat falls in well with mine, and certes brought\nA sense of pleasant ease on such a day”—\nFor these things in themselves, Belovëd, may\nBe changed, or change for thee,—and love, so wrought,\nMay be unwrought so. Neither love me for\nThine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry,—\nA creature might forget to weep, who bore\nThy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!\nBut love me for love’s sake, that evermore\nThou may’st love on, through love’s eternity."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSorrento, at night the long fingers of your orange lights\nPrick me in the sizzling streets, where the pinnacles\nOf other people ring tinny and papier-mâché. Is this the way\nUp to the murderous cliff? It’s most important that I get there\nAnd leave no witness. Ah, is this the majolica medallion\nWhich marks the grave of girl abducted by a stallion\nWhom she gave a lump of maple sugar?\nFor that was in an autumn,\nThe time of year when young girls get hopeless and feel like\nGiving it all away, the way a matronly merchant\nMight brush off her lap, at the iron end of the market day:\nIt’s over, it’s worthless, without deserving and without\nPurpose have I nourished this hope in my small patch of earth,\nA sickly weed whose nodding sun’s gone nova."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMusic to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?\nSweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy:\nWhy lov’st thou that which thou receiv’st not gladly,\nOr else receiv’st with pleasure thine annoy?\nIf the true concord of well-tuned sounds,\nBy unions married, do offend thine ear,\nThey do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds\nIn singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.\nMark how one string, sweet husband to another,\nStrikes each in each by mutual ordering;\nResembling sire and child and happy mother,\nWho, all in one, one pleasing note do sing:\nWhose speechless song being many, seeming one,\nSings this to thee: ‘Thou single wilt prove none.’"} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\n“and then looks at\nthe stars” from the\nbed in the ambulance\nlooks up at boughs of\ntrees shifting quickly\nlit in blackness\nblackening soft, deep\nsiren’s song—she died\nseveral times that night\nand only in the weeks\nto come started and\nstarted to come back\nthen forward which is\nreal life"} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nBoll-weevil’s coming, and the winter’s cold,\nMade cotton-stalks look rusty, seasons old,\nAnd cotton, scarce as any southern snow,\nWas vanishing; the branch, so pinched and slow,\nFailed in its function as the autumn rake;\nDrouth fighting soil had caused the soil to take\nAll water from the streams; dead birds were found\nIn wells a hundred feet below the ground—\nSuch was the season when the flower bloomed.\nOld folks were startled, and it soon assumed\nSignificance. Superstition saw\nSomething it had never seen before:\nBrown eyes that loved without a trace of fear,\nBeauty so sudden for that time of year."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe Visconti put you on their flag: a snake\ndevouring a child, or are you throwing up a man\nfeet first? Some snakes hunt frogs, some freedom of will.\nThere’s good in you: a man can count years on your skin.\nGenerously, you mother and father a stolen boy,\nto the chosen you offer your cake of figs.\nA goiter on my neck, you lick my ear with lies,\nyet I must listen, smile and kiss your cheek\nor you may swallow the child completely. In Milan\nthere is a triptych, the throned Virgin in glory,\nplaced on the marble below, a dead naked man\nand a giant dead frog of human scale on its back.\nThere’s hope! My eyes look into the top of my head\nat the wreath of snakes that sometimes crowns me."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMy love is as a fever longing still,\nFor that which longer nurseth the disease;\nFeeding on that which doth preserve the ill,\nThe uncertain sickly appetite to please.\nMy reason, the physician to my love,\nAngry that his prescriptions are not kept,\nHath left me, and I desperate now approve\nDesire is death, which physic did except.\nPast cure I am, now Reason is past care,\nAnd frantic-mad with evermore unrest;\nMy thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,\nAt random from the truth vainly express’d;\nFor I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,\nWho art as black as hell, as dark as night."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nPuerto Rico was created when the pumpkin on top of\nThe turtle burst and its teeming waters poured out\nWith all mankind and beastkind riding on the waves\nUntil the water drained leaving a tropical paradise.\nPuerto Rico was stumbled on by lost vampires bearing\nCrucifix in one hand, arquebus in the other, sucking\nThe veins of land and men, tossing the pulp into the\nCompost heap which they used as the foundation for\nTheir fortifications and other vainglorious temples.\nPuerto Rico was arrested just as it broke out of the\nSpanish jail and, renamed a trusty, it was put in an\nAmerican cell. When the prisoner hollered, \"Yankee, Go\nHome,\" Puerto Rico was referred to the United Nations.\nPuerto Rico, to get to paradise now, you have to ride blood."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe fountains mingle with the river\nAnd the rivers with the ocean,\nThe winds of heaven mix for ever\nWith a sweet emotion;\nNothing in the world is single;\nAll things by a law divine In one spirit meet and mingle.\nWhy not I with thine?— See the mountains kiss high heaven\nAnd the waves clasp one another;\nNo sister-flower would be forgiven\nIf it disdained its brother;\nAnd the sunlight clasps the earth\nAnd the moonbeams kiss the sea:\nWhat is all this sweet work worth\nIf thou kiss not me?"} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\n“Is there no balm in Gilead?” So cries\ndour Jeremiah in granite tones.\n“There is a balm in Gilead,” replies\na Negro spiritual. The baritone\nwho chants it, leaning forward on the platform,\nlooks up, not knowing his voice is a rainstorm\nthat rinses air to reveal earth’s surprises.\nToday, the summer gone, four monarch butterflies,\ntheir breed’s survivors, sucked a flower’s last blooms,\nopened their wings, orange-and-black stained glass,\nand printed on the sky in zigzag lines,\nwatch bright things rise: winter moons, the white undersides\nof a California condor, once thought doomed,\nnow flapping wide like the first bird from ashes."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWe deemed the secret lost, the spirit gone,\nWhich spake in Greek simplicity of thought,\nAnd in the forms of gods and heroes wrought\nEternal beauty from the sculptured stone,—\nA higher charm than modern culture won\nWith all the wealth of metaphysic lore,\nGifted to analyze, dissect, explore.\nA many-colored light flows from one sun;\nArt, ’neath its beams, a motley thread has spun;\nThe prism modifies the perfect day;\nBut thou hast known such mediums to shun,\nAnd cast once more on life a pure, white ray.\nAbsorbed in the creations of thy mind,\nForgetting daily self, my truest self I find."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMy body is opaque to the soul.\nDriven of the spirit, long have I sought to temper it unto the spirit’s\nlonging,\nBut my mind, too, is opaque to the soul.\nO Spirits of whom my soul is but a little finger,\nDirect it to the lid of its flesh-eye.\nI am weak with much giving.\nI am weak the desire to give more.\n(How strong a thing is the little finger!)\nSo weak that I have confused the body with the soul,\nAnd the body with its little finger.\n(How frail is the little finger.)\nMy voice could not carry to you did you dwell in stars,\nO spirits of whom my soul is but a little finger . ."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSomething almost Flemish about that water,\na golden brown but clear into its depths,\nthe plank-ends of the dock a fading gray\nbeside it, and a boat moored at the end;\nsomething, it seems to me in looking back,\nabout a murky bullhead on a stringer,\none of those rope ones you can hardly see,\nso that the fish appeared to scull in place;\nsomething (the details start to widen now)\nabout white wooden clapboards on the side\nof that inn or tavern where my dad had stopped,\na neon beer sign staring out through glass—\nlate in the afternoon, I drinking deep\nof everything I saw, now mine to keep."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIt is their way to find the surface\nwhen they die.\nFish feed on fish\nand drop those beautiful bones\nto swim.\nI see them stretch the water to their need\nas I domesticate the separate air to be my\nbreath.\nThese fish die easily.\nI find my surface in the way they feed.\nTheir gathering hunger is a flash like death.\nNo agony\nas if\nmy mind had eaten death."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIn loving thee thou know’st I am forsworn,\nBut thou art twice forsworn, to me love swearing;\nIn act thy bed-vow broke, and new faith torn,\nIn vowing new hate after new love bearing:\nBut why of two oaths’ breach do I accuse thee,\nWhen I break twenty? I am perjur’d most;\nFor all my vows are oaths but to misuse thee,\nAnd all my honest faith in thee is lost:\nFor I have sworn deep oaths of thy deep kindness,\nOaths of thy love, thy truth, thy constancy;\nAnd, to enlighten thee, gave eyes to blindness,\nOr made them swear against the thing they see;\nFor I have sworn thee fair; more perjured I,\nbut I my mistress so foul a lie."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSo now I have confessed that he is thine,\nAnd I my self am mortgaged to thy will,\nMyself I’ll forfeit, so that other mine\nThou wilt restore to be my comfort still:\nBut thou wilt not, nor he will not be free,\nFor thou art covetous, and he is kind;\nHe learned but surety-like to write for me,\nUnder that bond that him as fast doth bind.\nThe statute of thy beauty thou wilt take,\nThou usurer, that put’st forth all to use,\nAnd sue a friend came debtor for my sake;\nSo him I lose through my unkind abuse.\nHim have I lost; thou hast both him and me:\nHe pays the whole, and yet am I not free."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhilst I alone did call upon thy aid,\nMy verse alone had all thy gentle grace;\nBut now my gracious numbers are decay’d,\nAnd my sick Muse doth give an other place.\nI grant, sweet love, thy lovely argument\nDeserves the travail of a worthier pen;\nYet what of thee thy poet doth invent\nHe robs thee of, and pays it thee again.\nHe lends thee virtue, and he stole that word\nFrom thy behaviour; beauty doth he give,\nAnd found it in thy cheek: he can afford\nNo praise to thee, but what in thee doth live.\nThen thank him not for that which he doth say,\nSince what he owes thee, thou thyself dost pay."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI should be happy with my lot:\nA wife and mother – is it not Enough for me to be content?\nWhat other blessing could be sent?\nA quiet house, and homely ways,\nThat make each day like other days;\nI only see Time’s shadow now Darken the hair on baby’s brow!\nNo world’s work ever comes to me,\nNo beggar brings his misery;\nI have no power, no healing art With bruised soul or broken heart.\nI read the poets of the age, ’Tis lotus-eating in a cage;\nI study Art, but Art is dead To one who clamors to be fed With milk from Nature’s rugged breast,\nWho longs for Labor’s lusty rest.\nO foolish wish!\nI still should pine If any other lot were mine."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMuch have I travell'd in the realms of gold,\nAnd many goodly states and kingdoms seen;\nRound many western islands have I been\nWhich bards in fealty to Apollo hold.\nOft of one wide expanse had I been told\nThat deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;\nYet did I never breathe its pure serene\nTill I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:\nThen felt I like some watcher of the skies\nWhen a new planet swims into his ken;\nOr like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes\nHe star'd at the Pacific—and all his men\nLook'd at each other with a wild surmise—\nSilent, upon a peak in Darien."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nNot in thy body is thy life at all\nBut in this lady's lips and hands and eyes;\nThrough these she yields thee life that vivifies\nWhat else were sorrow's servant and death's thrall.\nLook on thyself without her, and recall\nThe waste remembrance and forlorn surmise\nThat liv'd but in a dead-drawn breath of sighs\nO'er vanish'd hours and hours eventual.\nEven so much life hath the poor tress of hair\nWhich, stor'd apart, is all love hath to show\nFor heart-beats and for fire-heats long ago;\nEven so much life endures unknown, even where,\n'Mid change the changeless night environeth,\nLies all that golden hair undimm'd in death."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLooking into my daughter’s eyes I read\nBeneath the innocence of morning flesh\nConcealed, hintings of death she does not heed.\nColdest of winds have blown this hair, and mesh\nOf seaweed snarled these miniatures of hands;\nThe night’s slow poison, tolerant and bland,\nHas moved her blood. Parched years that I have seen\nThat may be hers appear: foul, lingering\nDeath in certain war, the slim legs green.\nOr, fed on hate, she relishes the sting\nOf others’ agony; perhaps the cruel\nBride of a syphilitic or a fool.\nThese speculations sour in the sun.\nI have no daughter. I desire none."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nChrist bore what suffering he could and died\na young man, but you waited years to learn\nhow to heal. Only when you could did you\ntouch the man whose body blistered for yours.\nYou posted him no news for sixteen terms,\nthen just a signed graduation notice.\nThe letter he wrote that week asked only,\nNow that your books are closed, can boys come in?\nAt your wedding, you buried the woman\nyou thought you knew inside a stranger’s name.\nThis is how you found yourself: thirty-three,\nnursing a son. Soon there was another.\nYour mind had already begun to walk.\nBut you were a mother. Those cribs held you."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nFor whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores,\nRuinous arms; being fired, and for good,\nTo sound the constitution of just wars,\nMen, in their eloquent fashion, understood.\nRelieved of soul, the dropping-back of dust,\nTheir usage, pride, admitted within doors;\nAt home, under caved chantries, set in trust,\nWith well-dressed alabaster and proved spurs\nThey lie; they lie; secure in the decay\nOf blood, blood-marks, crowns hacked and coveted,\nBefore the scouring fires of trial-day\nAlight on men; before sleeked groin, gored head,\nBudge through the clay and gravel, and the sea\nAcross daubed rock evacuates its dead."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nUnder a heavy wire milk case,\nA piece of concrete foundation\nOn top, in summer, in her backyard,\nMrs. Russo keeps the cat Nikita safe\nFrom birds, from dogs, from eating\nJohnson grass, which he throws up.\nNikita waits for ants to wander in\nAnd for the sun to leave.\nInstead, she comes to keep him\nCompany, saying You look fat\nAnd that her son died,\nRemember I told you?\nWalking thin in his uniform\nOn a road."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nCupid laid by his brand and fell asleep:\nA maid of Dian’s this advantage found,\nAnd his love-kindling fire did quickly steep\nIn a cold valley-fountain of that ground;\nWhich borrow’d from this holy fire of Love,\nA dateless lively heat, still to endure,\nAnd grew a seething bath, which yet men prove\nAgainst strange maladies a sovereign cure.\nBut at my mistress’ eye Love’s brand new-fired,\nThe boy for trial needs would touch my breast;\nI, sick withal, the help of bath desired,\nAnd thither hied, a sad distemper’d guest,\nBut found no cure, the bath for my help lies\nWhere Cupid got new fire; my mistress’ eyes."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nMy love looks like a girl to-night,\nBut she is old.\nThe plaits that lie along her pillow\nAre not gold,\nBut threaded with filigree silver,\nAnd uncanny cold.\nShe looks like a young maiden, since her brow\nIs smooth and fair,\nHer cheeks are very smooth, her eyes are closed.\nShe sleeps a rare Still winsome sleep, so still, and so composed.\nNay, but she sleeps like a bride, and dreams her dreams\nOf perfect things.\nShe lies at last, the darling, in the shape of her dream,\nAnd her dead mouth sings By its shape, like the thrushes in clear evenings."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe train moved me, clothes kept me seated.\nI watched the tunnel walls blur and my face appear, nicer on black plexiglass.\nThe people carried off like I almost was\nin the old childhood dream, my mother’s hand, the tornado in the parking lot.\nFlooring soda and rain, a humble poser, a composed consumer.\nCome back to me, I whispered to the purifying wind in a country I’d visited years earlier.\nCome get me, I said to imaginary John Lennon in the passenger seat of my 1984 Volvo.\nNothing grows anywhere, I noted in the slick urine grime connecting two underground stations.\nAs for my wallet, it was light in my hand, fictitious, I didn’t deserve it —\nI held it up in the crowded terminal like a magician’s pigeon.\nOr I hid it between my knees on the jerking seat.\nNobody wanted to touch me, or\nnobody who wanted to could reach me here,\nshaken like a screaming child under wet stairs."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nO! how much more doth beauty beauteous seem\nBy that sweet ornament which truth doth give.\nThe rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem\nFor that sweet odour, which doth in it live.\nThe canker blooms have full as deep a dye\nAs the perfumed tincture of the roses.\nHang on such thorns, and play as wantonly\nWhen summer’s breath their masked buds discloses:\nBut, for their virtue only is their show,\nThey live unwoo’d, and unrespected fade;\nDie to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;\nOf their sweet deaths, are sweetest odours made:\nAnd so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,\nWhen that shall vade, by verse distills your truth."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nFrom low to high doth dissolution climb,\nAnd sink from high to low, along a scale\nOf awful notes, whose concord shall not fail;\nA musical but melancholy chime,\nWhich they can hear who meddle not with crime,\nNor avarice, nor over-anxious care.\nTruth fails not; but her outward forms that bear\nThe longest date do melt like frosty rime,\nThat in the morning whitened hill and plain\nAnd is no more; drop like the tower sublime\nOf yesterday, which royally did wear\nHis crown of weeds, but could not even sustain\nSome casual shout that broke the silent air,\nOr the unimaginable touch of Time."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThen hate me when thou wilt; if ever, now;\nNow, while the world is bent my deeds to cross,\nJoin with the spite of fortune, make me bow,\nAnd do not drop in for an after-loss:\nAh! do not, when my heart hath ’scap’d this sorrow,\nCome in the rearward of a conquer’d woe;\nGive not a windy night a rainy morrow,\nTo linger out a purpos’d overthrow.\nIf thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last,\nWhen other petty griefs have done their spite,\nBut in the onset come: so shall I taste\nAt first the very worst of fortune’s might;\nAnd other strains of woe, which now seem woe,\nCompar’d with loss of thee, will not seem so."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nHow like a winter hath my absence been\nFrom thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!\nWhat freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!\nWhat old December’s bareness everywhere!\nAnd yet this time removed was summer’s time;\nThe teeming autumn, big with rich increase,\nBearing the wanton burden of the prime,\nLike widow’d wombs after their lords’ decease:\nYet this abundant issue seem’d to me\nBut hope of orphans, and unfather’d fruit;\nFor summer and his pleasures wait on thee,\nAnd, thou away, the very birds are mute:\nOr, if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer,\nThat leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nthere’s nothing in my face.\nThere is nothing in yours.\nWhat we have are called heads.\nThey are nothing unless we kiss.\nLips are wonderful.\nThey are full of mechanoreceptors.\nIn the Old World we all used to kiss and kiss.\nIt was then that we did have faces.\nWe had noses and cheeks and foreheads and soft, downy hair.\nIn the New World we stopped kissing.\nThose who were already here stopped.\nThose who came stopped.\nNow there are only four people who have heads that are also faces.\nThey are an artist and three children for whom I have a face other than my hands."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWho cares about the redbud tree, its flowers\nhalf-black, half-pink, from winter’s April freeze;\nwho cares who lives halfway or dies too soon,\nthe blue jay’s baby squirming on bare ground,\nthe agonies of blood, the frigid breeze\nshaking the fragile sense of April showers;\nwho cares who craves the heated pools of June,\nthe lake of boaters buzzing by or drowned.\nTwo vultures meet me at my open door,\nscanning for carrion, the stink of spasms,\nthe sky-gods pecking rotting flesh for food;\nwho cares if this strange order ends in good,\nor if the chickadee lands in the chasms\nof endless carelessness forevermore."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhen I was a child I knew red miners\ndressed raggedly and wearing carbide lamps.\nI saw them come down red hills to their camps\ndyed with red dust from old Ishkooda mines.\nNight after night I met them on the roads,\nor on the streets in town I caught their glance;\nthe swing of dinner buckets in their hands,\nand grumbling undermining all their words.\nI also lived in low cotton country\nwhere moonlight hovered over ripe haystacks,\nor stumps of trees, and croppers’ rotting shacks\nwith famine, terror, flood, and plague near by;\nwhere sentiment and hatred still held sway\nand only bitter land was washed away."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nMy dearest dust, could not thy hasty day\nAfford thy drowzy patience leave to stay\nOne hower longer: so that we might either\nSate up, or gone to bedd together?\nBut since thy finisht labor hath possest\nThy weary limbs with early rest,\nEnjoy it sweetly: and thy widdowe bride\nShall soone repose her by thy slumbring side.\nWhose business, now, is only to prepare\nMy nightly dress, and call to prayre:\nMine eyes wax heavy and ye day growes old.\nThe dew falls thick, my beloved growes cold.\nDraw, draw ye closed curtaynes: and make room:\nMy dear, my dearest dust; I come, I come."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMy heart be brave, and do not falter so,\nNor utter more that deep, despairing wail.\nThy way is very dark and drear I know,\nBut do not let thy strength and courage fail;\nFor certain as the raven-winged night\nIs followed by the bright and blushing morn,\nThy coming morrow will be clear and bright;\n’Tis darkest when the night is furthest worn.\nLook up, and out, beyond, surrounding clouds,\nAnd do not in thine own gross darkness grope,\nRise up, and casting off thy hind’ring shrouds,\nCling thou to this, and ever inspiring hope:\nTho’ thick the battle and tho’ fierce the fight,\nThere is a power making for the right."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nWho is it that says most, which can say more,\nThan this rich praise: that you alone are you,\nIn whose confine immured is the store\nWhich should example where your equal grew.\nLean penury within that pen doth dwell\nThat to his subject lends not some small glory;\nBut he that writes of you, if he can tell\nThat you are you, so dignifies his story,\nLet him but copy what in you is writ,\nNot making worse what nature made so clear,\nAnd such a counterpart shall fame his wit,\nMaking his style admired every where.\nYou to your beauteous blessings add a curse,\nBeing fond on praise, which makes your praises worse."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThou blind fool, Love, what dost thou to mine eyes,\nThat they behold, and see not what they see?\nThey know what beauty is, see where it lies,\nYet what the best is take the worst to be.\nIf eyes, corrupt by over-partial looks,\nBe anchor’d in the bay where all men ride,\nWhy of eyes’ falsehood hast thou forged hooks,\nWhereto the judgement of my heart is tied?\nWhy should my heart think that a several plot,\nWhich my heart knows the wide world’s common place?\nOr mine eyes, seeing this, say this is not,\nTo put fair truth upon so foul a face?\nIn things right true my heart and eyes have err’d,\nAnd to this false plague are they now transferr’d."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAnything can be a bird if you’re not careful.\nI should say something nice about the weather.\nI should be in awe of the living, but the world dulls\nwhen I step into it. The squirrels scatter, the branches\nlift. Sure, I’ve hurt the ones I’ve loved\nby not paying attention. Not alone — never alone\nis a lesson I need to understand. It was you who said that.\nIt’s you still. You who says, Look! You who points\nto the sky. You who tilts my chin toward the heron,\nwho cups the minnow in your hands,\nwho spots the deer miles ahead, who dulls\nthe world with your absence. You who says, Look!\n& when I look, you are gone, replaced\nby the whitetail’s hind legs, fading into the bush."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThere may be chaos still around the world,\nThis little world that in my thinking lies;\nFor mine own bosom is the paradise\nWhere all my life’s fair visions are unfurled.\nWithin my nature’s shell I slumber curled,\nUnmindful of the changing outer skies,\nWhere now, perchance, some new-born Eros flies,\nOr some old Cronos from his throne is hurled.\nI heed them not; or if the subtle night\nHaunt me with deities I never saw,\nI soon mine eyelid’s drowsy curtain draw\nTo hide their myriad faces from my sight.\nThey threat in vain; the whirlwind cannot awe\nA happy snow-flake dancing in the flaw."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIf my dear love were but the child of state,\nIt might for Fortune’s bastard be unfather’d,\nAs subject to Time’s love or to Time’s hate,\nWeeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gather’d.\nNo, it was builded far from accident;\nIt suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls\nUnder the blow of thralled discontent,\nWhereto th’ inviting time our fashion calls:\nIt fears not policy, that heretic,\nWhich works on leases of short-number’d hours,\nBut all alone stands hugely politic,\nThat it nor grows with heat, nor drowns with showers.\nTo this I witness call the fools of time,\nWhich die for goodness, who have lived for crime."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,\nor arrow of carnations that propagate fire:\nI love you as one loves certain obscure things,\nsecretly, between the shadow and the soul.\nI love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries\nthe light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,\nand thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose\nfrom the earth lives dimly in my body.\nI love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,\nI love you directly without problems or pride:\nI love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,\nexcept in this form in which I am not nor are you,\nso close that your hand upon my chest is mine,\nso close that your eyes close with my dreams."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSweet poet of the woods, a long adieu!\nFarewell soft mistrel of the early year!\nAh! ’twill be long ere thou shalt sing anew,\nAnd pour thy music on the night’s dull ear.\nWhether on spring thy wandering flights await,\nOr whether silent in our groves you dwell,\nThe pensive muse shall own thee for her mate,\nAnd still protect the song she loves so well.\nWith cautious step the love-lorn youth shall glide\nThrough the lone brake that shades thy mossy nest;\nAnd shepherd girls from eyes profane shall hide\nThe gentle bird who sings of pity best:\nFor still thy voice shall soft affections move,\nAnd still be dear to sorrow and to love!"} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAlthough she feeds me bread of bitterness,\nAnd sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,\nStealing my breath of life, I will confess\nI love this cultured hell that tests my youth.\nHer vigor flows like tides into my blood,\nGiving me strength erect against her hate,\nHer bigness sweeps my being like a flood.\nYet, as a rebel fronts a king in state,\nI stand within her walls with not a shred\nOf terror, malice, not a word of jeer.\nDarkly I gaze into the days ahead,\nAnd see her might and granite wonders there,\nBeneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,\nLike priceless treasures sinking in the sand."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMy love is strengthen’d, though more weak in seeming;\nI love not less, though less the show appear;\nThat love is merchandiz’d, whose rich esteeming,\nThe owner’s tongue doth publish every where.\nOur love was new, and then but in the spring,\nWhen I was wont to greet it with my lays;\nAs Philomel in summer’s front doth sing,\nAnd stops her pipe in growth of riper days:\nNot that the summer is less pleasant now\nThan when her mournful hymns did hush the night,\nBut that wild music burthens every bough,\nAnd sweets grown common lose their dear delight.\nTherefore like her, I sometime hold my tongue:\nBecause I would not dull you with my song."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThose hours, that with gentle work did frame\nThe lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,\nWill play the tyrants to the very same\nAnd that unfair which fairly doth excel;\nFor never-resting time leads summer on\nTo hideous winter, and confounds him there;\nSap checked with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone,\nBeauty o’er-snowed and bareness every where:\nThen were not summer’s distillation left,\nA liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,\nBeauty’s effect with beauty were bereft,\nNor it, nor no remembrance what it was:\nBut flowers distill’d, though they with winter meet,\nLeese but their show; their substance still lives sweet."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIt's snowing this afternoon and there are no flowers.\nThere is only this sound of falling, quiet and remote,\nLike the memory of scales descending the white keys\nOf a childhood piano—outside the window, palms!\nAnd the heavy head of the cereus, inclining,\nSoon to let down its white or yellow-white.\nNow, only these poor snow-flowers in a heap,\nLike the memory of a white dress cast down . . .\nSo much has fallen.\nAnd I, who have listened for a step\nAll afternoon, hear it now, but already falling away,\nAlready in memory. And the terrible scales descending\nOn the silent piano; the snow; and the absent flowers\nabounding."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nThe child I was came to me\nonce,\na strange face\nHe said nothing We walked\neach of us glancing at the other in silence, our steps\na strange river running in between\nWe were brought together by good manners\nand these sheets now flying in the wind\nthen we split,\na forest written by earth\nwatered by the seasons’ change.\nChild who once was, come forth—\nWhat brings us together now,\nand what do we have to say?"} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAmazement fills my heart to-night,\nAmaze and awful fears;\nI am a ship that sees no light,\nBut blindly onward steers.\nFlung toward heaven’s toppling rage,\nSunk between steep and steep,\nA lost and wondrous fight I wage With the embattled deep.\nI neither know nor care at length Where drives the storm about;\nOnly I summon all my strength And swear to ride it out.\nYet give I thanks; despite these wars.\nMy ship—though blindly blown,\nLong lost to sun or moon or stars— Still stands up alone.\nI need no trust in borrowed spars;\nMy strength is yet my own."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nAs I come down the hill from Toro Poutini’s house\nMy feet are sore, being bare, on the sharp stones\nAnd that is a suitable penance. The dust of the pa road\nIs cool, though, and I can see\nThe axe of the moon shift down behind the trees\nVery slowly. The red light from the windows\nOf the church has a ghostly look, and in\nThis place ghosts are real. The bees are humming loudly\nIn moonlight in their old hive above the church door\nWhere I go in to kneel, and come out to make my way\nUphill past a startled horse who plunges in the paddock\nAbove the nunnery. Now there are one or two\nOf the tribe back in the big house—What would you have me do,\nKing Jesus? Your games with me have turned me into a boulder."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nThe great gold apples of night\nHang from the street's long bough\nDripping their light\nOn the faces that drift below,\nOn the faces that drift and blow\nDown the night-time, out of sight\nIn the wind's sad sough.\nThe ripeness of these apples of night\nDistilling over me\nMakes sickening the white\nGhost-flux of faces that hie\nThem endlessly, endlessly by\nWithout meaning or reason why\nThey ever should be."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nGod washes clean the souls and hearts of you,\nHis favored ones, whose backs bend o’er the soil,\nWhich grudging gives to them requite for toil\nIn sober graces and in vision true.\nGod places in your hands the pow’r to do\nA service sweet. Your gift supreme to foil\nThe bare-fanged wolves of hunger in the moil\nOf Life’s activities. Yet all too few\nYour glorious band, clean sprung from Nature’s heart;\nThe hope of hungry thousands, in whose breast\nDwells fear that you should fail. God placed no dart\nOf war within your hands, but pow’r to start\nTears, praise, love, joy, enwoven in a crest\nTo crown you glorious, brave ones of the soil."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nFrom you have I been absent in the spring,\nWhen proud-pied April, dress’d in all his trim,\nHath put a spirit of youth in every thing,\nThat heavy Saturn laugh’d and leap’d with him.\nYet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell\nOf different flowers in odour and in hue,\nCould make me any summer’s story tell,\nOr from their proud lap pluck them where they grew:\nNor did I wonder at the lily’s white,\nNor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;\nThey were but sweet, but figures of delight,\nDrawn after you, you pattern of all those.\nYet seem’d it winter still, and you away,\nAs with your shadow I with these did play."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nPlum black & the blush white of an apple\nshoulder, melon & cream, in tones to list\nthe flesh; in light, washed colors off at last\n& textures sheer with damp I slowly pull\nfrom you with your quick help. Weekend's ample\nprocrastinations to forget the least\nof what we want to do. April, half a blast\nof cold, half new light, green & simple.\nNow dusk. Now fear. We pencil what we owe\non this short form, our numbers good enough.\nThe goose-neck glare undoes how we spent the day.\nEach bite each bee-sting kiss each bitten O\nall aftertaste. Later, at the drop-off,\npostmark queue, we joke: \"Now we can die!\""} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIndeed this very love which is my boast,\nAnd which, when rising up from breast to brow,\nDoth crown me with a ruby large enow\nTo draw men’s eyes and prove the inner cost,—\nThis love even, all my worth, to the uttermost,\nI should not love withal, unless that thou\nHadst set me an example, shown me how,\nWhen first thine earnest eyes with mine were crossed,\nAnd love called love. And thus, I cannot speak\nOf love even, as a good thing of my own:\nThy soul hath snatched up mine all faint and weak,\nAnd placed it by thee on a golden throne,—\nAnd that I love (O soul, we must be meek!)\nIs by thee only, whom I love alone."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nTerrace deep as the sky.\nStone bench where I sit and read,I wandered by myselfInto the heart of the mountains of Yoshino.\nIn one hand a book, in the other, a bag made of newsprint—\nNo weather-beaten bones here\nJust lychees bought in the market,\nThirty rupees per kilogram.\nStalks mottled red tied up with string,\nFlesh the color of pigeon wings—\nSweet simmering.\nSunlight bruises air\nPine trees blacken.\nWhere shall I go?\nThe Dhauladhar peaks\nAre covered in snow."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nA man talking to his ex-wife on the phone.\nHe has loved her voice and listens with attention\nto every modulation of its tone. Knowing\nit intimately. Not knowing what he wants\nfrom the sound of it, from the tendered civility.\nHe studies, out the window, the seed shapes\nof the broken pods of ornamental trees.\nThe kind that grow in everyone’s garden, that no one\nbut horticulturists can name. Four arched chambers\nof pale green, tiny vegetal proscenium arches,\na pair of black tapering seeds bedded in each chamber.\nA wish geometry, miniature, Indian or Persian,\nlovers or gods in their apartments. Outside, white,\npatient animals, and tangled vines, and rain."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nHow solitary\nand resolute you look in the morning.\nA stoic in your cotton sleeve.\nDo you dream of walking out\nrain or shine\na truffle balanced on your sternum\nand passing me on the sidewalk?\nOr is that a smile\nbecause you interpret nothing\nand statelessness is where you live?\nHow calmly you indulge my moods.\nSee you tonight, by the sovereign chartreuse\nceramics at the Met.\nLet's hear what you'd do differently."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nLet those who are in favour with their stars\nOf public honour and proud titles boast,\nWhilst I, whom fortune of such triumph bars,\nUnlook'd for joy in that I honour most.\nGreat princes' favourites their fair leaves spread\nBut as the marigold at the sun's eye,\nAnd in themselves their pride lies buried,\nFor at a frown they in their glory die.\nThe painful warrior famoused for fight,\nAfter a thousand victories once foil'd,\nIs from the book of honour razed quite,\nAnd all the rest forgot for which he toil'd:\nThen happy I, that love and am beloved\nWhere I may not remove nor be removed."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe doubt of future foes exiles my present joy,\nAnd wit me warns to shun such snares as threaten mine annoy;\nFor falsehood now doth flow, and subjects’ faith doth ebb,\nWhich should not be if reason ruled or wisdom weaved the web.\nBut clouds of joys untried do cloak aspiring minds,\nWhich turn to rain of late repent by changed course of winds.\nThe top of hope supposed the root upreared shall be,\nAnd fruitless all their grafted guile, as shortly ye shall see.\nThe dazzled eyes with pride, which great ambition blinds,\nShall be unsealed by worthy wights whose foresight falsehood finds.\nThe daughter of debate that discord aye doth sow Shall reap no gain where former rule still peace hath taught to know.\nNo foreign banished wight shall anchor in this port;\nOur realm brooks not seditious sects, let them elsewhere resort.\nMy rusty sword through rest shall first his edge employ To poll their tops that seek such change or gape for future joy."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI flew into Denver April.\nRock salt and sand peppered the asphalt\nreflecting myself on a downtown street\nwhere I’d paused on my route to smell lilacs.\nThe wanton winds chortled wickedly\nover remnant snows in gray clumps of doom\nand my heart soared gladly at winter’s death\nbut an hour later I had whiskey breath\nat a dead end bar full of Indians.\nA Winnebago woman waltzed with me\nand told me how handsome I truly was\nso I bought her drinks and felt her hips\nand somewhere between the grinds\nand dips she lifted my wallet and split."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThree dark buds for the Trinity\nOn one twig I found in the lining of my coat\nForgotten since I broke them from the tree\nThat grows opposite the RSA building\nAt the top of Vulcan Lane — there I would lay down my parka\nOn the grass and meditate, cross-legged; there was a girl\nWho sat beside me there;\nShe would hold a blue flower at the centre of the bullring\nWhile the twigs on the tree became black\nAnd then slowly green again — she was young — if I had said,\n‘Have my coat; have my money’ —\nShe would have gone away; but because I gave her nothing\nShe came again and again to share that nothing\nLike a bird that nest in the open hand."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nFor ten years I would not say the name.\nI said: episode. Said: setback, incident,\nexacerbation—anything but be specific\nin the way this is specific, not a theory\nor description, but a diagnosis.\nI said: muscle, weakness, numbness, fatigue.\nI said vertigo, neuritis, lesion, spasm.\nRemission. Progression. Recurrence. Deficit.\nBut the name, the ugly sound of it, I refused.\nThere are two words. The last one means: scarring.\nIt means what grows hard, and cannot be repaired.\nThe first one means: repeating, or myriad,\nconsisting of many parts, increasing in number,\nhappening over and over, without end."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSometimes she is a child within mine arms,\nCowering beneath dark wings that love must chase,—\nWith still tears showering and averted face,\nInexplicably fill'd with faint alarms:\nAnd oft from mine own spirit's hurtling harms\nI crave the refuge of her deep embrace,—\nAgainst all ills the fortified strong place\nAnd sweet reserve of sovereign counter-charms.\nAnd Love, our light at night and shade at noon,\nLulls us to rest with songs, and turns away\nAll shafts of shelterless tumultuous day.\nLike the moon's growth, his face gleams through his tune;\nAnd as soft waters warble to the moon,\nOur answering spirits chime one roundelay."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhy didst thou promise such a beauteous day,\nAnd make me travel forth without my cloak,\nTo let base clouds o’ertake me in my way,\nHiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke?\n‘Tis not enough that through the cloud thou break,\nTo dry the rain on my storm-beaten face,\nFor no man well of such a salve can speak\nThat heals the wound and cures not the disgrace:\nNor can thy shame give physic to my grief;\nThough thou repent, yet I have still the loss:\nThe offender’s sorrow lends but weak relief\nTo him that bears the strong offence’s cross.\nAh! but those tears are pearl which thy love sheds,\nAnd they are rich and ransom all ill deeds."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhite flabbiness goes brown and lean,\nDumpling arms are now brass bars,\nThey’ve learnt to suffer and live clean,\nAnd to think below the stars.\nThey’ve steeled a tender, girlish heart,\nTempered it with a man’s pride,\nLearning to play the butcher’s part\nThough the woman screams inside— Learning to leap the parapet,\nFace the open rush, and then To stab with the stark bayonet,\nSide by side with fighting men.\nOn Achi Baba’s rock their bones\nWhiten, and on Flanders’ plain,\nBut of their travailings and groans\nPoetry is born again."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nNot like the brazen giant of Greek fame,\nWith conquering limbs astride from land to land;\nHere at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand\nA mighty woman with a torch, whose flame\nIs the imprisoned lightning, and her name\nMother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand\nGlows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command\nThe air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.\n“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she\nWith silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,\nYour huddled masses yearning to breathe free,\nThe wretched refuse of your teeming shore.\nSend these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,\nI lift my lamp beside the golden door!”"} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLove is my sin, and thy dear virtue hate,\nHate of my sin, grounded on sinful loving:\nO! but with mine compare thou thine own state,\nAnd thou shalt find it merits not reproving;\nOr, if it do, not from those lips of thine,\nThat have profan’d their scarlet ornaments\nAnd seal’d false bonds of love as oft as mine,\nRobb’d others’ beds’ revenues of their rents.\nBe it lawful I love thee, as thou lov’st those\nWhom thine eyes woo as mine importune thee:\nRoot pity in thy heart, that, when it grows,\nThy pity may deserve to pitied be.\nIf thou dost seek to have what thou dost hide,\nBy self-example mayst thou be denied!"} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSince I left you, mine eye is in my mind;\nAnd that which governs me to go about\nDoth part his function and is partly blind,\nSeems seeing, but effectually is out;\nFor it no form delivers to the heart\nOf bird, of flower, or shape which it doth latch:\nOf his quick objects hath the mind no part,\nNor his own vision holds what it doth catch;\nFor if it see the rud’st or gentlest sight,\nThe most sweet favour or deformed’st creature,\nThe mountain or the sea, the day or night:\nThe crow, or dove, it shapes them to your feature.\nIncapable of more, replete with you,\nMy most true mind thus maketh mine untrue."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nNot long ago, or maybe I dreamt it\nOr made it up, or have suddenly lost\nTrack of its train in the hocus pocus\nOf the dissolving days; no, if I bend\nThe turn around the corner, come at it\nFrom all three sides at once, or bounce the ball\nAgainst all manner of bleary-eyed fortune\nTellers—well, you can see for yourselves there’s\nNothing up my sleeves, or notice even\nRocks occasionally break if enough\nPressure is applied. As far as you go\nIn one direction, all the further you’ll\nHave to go on before the way back has\nBecome totally indivisible."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThat scraping of iron on iron when the wind\nrises, what is it? Something the wind won’t\nquit with, but drags back and forth.\nSometimes faint, far, then suddenly, close, just\nbeyond the screened door, as if someone there\nsquats in the dark honing his wares against\nmy threshold. Half steel wire, half metal wing,\nnothing and anything might make this noise\nof saws and rasps, a creaking and groaning\nof bone-growth, or body-death, marriages of rust,\nor ore abraded. Tonight, something bows\nthat should not bend. Something stiffens that should\nslide. Something, loose and not right,\nrakes or forges itself all night."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\n—at Apollo Hospital, Dhaka\nLet me break\nfree of these lace-frail\nlilac fingers disrobing\nthe black sky\nfrom the windows of this\nroom, I sit helpless, waiting,\nsilent—sister,\nbecause you drew from me\nthe coil of red twine: loneliness—\nspooled inside—\nonce, I wanted to say one\ntrue thing, as in, I want more\nin this"} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIn the old age black was not counted fair,\nOr if it were, it bore not beauty’s name;\nBut now is black beauty’s successive heir,\nAnd beauty slander’d with a bastard shame:\nFor since each hand hath put on Nature’s power,\nFairing the foul with Art’s false borrowed face,\nSweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,\nBut is profan’d, if not lives in disgrace.\nTherefore my mistress’ eyes are raven black,\nHer eyes so suited, and they mourners seem\nAt such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,\nSland’ring creation with a false esteem:\nYet so they mourn becoming of their woe,\nThat every tongue says beauty should look so."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nYou are a seahorse unraveling.\nYou are the back of a landhorse looking backward.\nGotten away form have you thrown yourself racing.\nWho took what was not out of thunderous shade\nIn an all-knowing sycamore's branches.\nWhat who do you make of stone steps you stepped through.\nYou took the boat onto flattened waters.\nWhite wall of blue morning fog to slip into.\nYou withstood what is was that was wailing you through.\nThere you were standing on nothing, looking down at two\nBlackfeathered slashes your two hands held on to.\nOff were you going aloft would birds such as these take\nYou.\nWho leaned you and stood you and shook you and shook you."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nEarth has not any thing to show more fair:\nDull would he be of soul who could pass by\nA sight so touching in its majesty:\nThis City now doth, like a garment, wear\nThe beauty of the morning; silent, bare,\nShips, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie\nOpen unto the fields, and to the sky;\nAll bright and glittering in the smokeless air.\nNever did sun more beautifully steep\nIn his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;\nNe'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!\nThe river glideth at his own sweet will:\nDear God! the very houses seem asleep;\nAnd all that mighty heart is lying still!"} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nO! never say that I was false of heart,\nThough absence seem’d my flame to qualify,\nAs easy might I from my self depart\nAs from my soul which in thy breast doth lie:\nThat is my home of love: if I have rang’d,\nLike him that travels, I return again;\nJust to the time, not with the time exchang’d,\nSo that myself bring water for my stain.\nNever believe though in my nature reign’d,\nAll frailties that besiege all kinds of blood,\nThat it could so preposterously be stain’d,\nTo leave for nothing all thy sum of good;\nFor nothing this wide universe I call,\nSave thou, my rose, in it thou art my all."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nNude bodies like peeled logs\nsometimes give off a sweetest\nodor, man and woman\nunder the trees in full excess\nmatching the cushion of\naromatic pine-drift fallen\nthreaded with trailing woodbine\na sonnet might be made of it\nMight be made of it! odor of excess\nodor of pine needles, odor of\npeeled logs, odor of no odor\nother than trailing woodbine that\nhas no odor, odor of a nude woman\nsometimes, odor of a man."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nContent that now the bleeding bone be swept\nOut of her reach, she lay upon her side.\nIn a blonde void sunk deep, she slept, she slept\nBland as a child, slept, breathing like a bride.\nColor of noons that shimmer as they sing\nAbove the dunes, her sandy flanks heaved slow.\nBetween her paws curled inward, billowing\nWaves of desert silence seemed to flow.\nThe crowd was gone, the bars were gone, the cage\nThinned into air, the sawdust and the fleas\nWinnowed by sleep to nothing. After food,\nAbsence possessed her: bliss keener than rage,\nIf slumber’s prisoner at a bound could seize\nThis ghostly freedom, lapping it like blood."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe subtlest strain a great musician weaves,\nCannot attain in rhythmic harmony\nTo music in his soul. May it not be\nCelestial lyres send hints to him? He grieves\nThat half the sweetness of the song, he leaves\nUnheard in the transition. Thus do we\nYearn to translate the wondrous majesty\nOf some rare mood, when the rapt soul receives\nA vision exquisite. Yet who can match\nThe sunset’s iridescent hues? Who sing\nThe skylark’s ecstasy so seraph-fine?\nWe struggle vainly, still we fain would catch\nSuch rifts amid life’s shadows, for they bring\nGlimpses ineffable of things divine."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\n[we] are watching a documentary about home\nbirth when [you] first feel [neni] kick // embryo\nof hope // they say plastic is the perfect creation\nbecause it never dies // litters the beaches\nof o‘ahu, this “gathering place” // the doctor\nrecommends a c-section // in the sea, plastic multiplies\ninto smaller pieces, leaches estrogenic and toxic\nchemicals // if [we] cut open the bellies of whales\nand large fish, what fragments will [we] find, derived\nfrom oil, absorbed into tissue // because plastic\nnever dissolves, every product ever made still exists,\nsomewhere, today // i wish my daughter was made\nof plastic so that she will survive [our] wasteful\nhands // so that she, too, will have a great future"} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nStop playing. You do remember the card tables,\nSlick stick figures like men with low-cut fades,\nShort but standing straight\nBecause we bent them into weak display.\nWhat didn’t we want? What wouldn’t we claim?\nHow perfectly each surface was made\nFor throwing or dropping or slamming a necessary\nPortion of our pay.\nAnd how could any of us get by\nWith one in the way?\nDidn’t that bare square ask to be played\nOn, beaten in the head, then folded, then put away,\nAll so we could call ourselves safe\nNow that there was more room, a little more space?"} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nBut only three in all God’s universe\nHave heard this word thou hast said,—Himself, beside\nThee speaking, and me listening! and replied\nOne of us . . . that was God, . . . and laid the curse\nSo darkly on my eyelids, as to amerce\nMy sight from seeing thee,—that if I had died,\nThe death-weights, placed there, would have signified\nLess absolute exclusion. “Nay” is worse\nFrom God than from all others, O my friend!\nMen could not part us with their worldly jars,\nNor the seas change us, nor the tempests bend;\nOur hands would touch for all the mountain-bars:\nAnd, heaven being rolled between us at the end,\nWe should but vow the faster for the stars."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThy bosom is endeared with all hearts,\nWhich I by lacking have supposed dead;\nAnd there reigns Love, and all Love’s loving parts,\nAnd all those friends which I thought buried.\nHow many a holy and obsequious tear\nHath dear religious love stol’n from mine eye,\nAs interest of the dead, which now appear\nBut things remov’d that hidden in thee lie!\nThou art the grave where buried love doth live,\nHung with the trophies of my lovers gone,\nWho all their parts of me to thee did give,\nThat due of many now is thine alone:\nTheir images I lov’d, I view in thee,\nAnd thou, all they, hast all the all of me."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nwhat a saint you are, shining on everything,\ndrawn to the world like flames are to moths,\nlike honey to bees. So readily do you dole\nyourself out, and in such abundance so that\nwe might operate our otherwise redundant eyes.\nFor they’d be useless even as shiny bibelots\nthat studded the otherwise dull surfaces of faces.\nNo, in your absence, in that total darkness\nthe eyes wouldn’t see or even be seen. And they\nwould soon shrivel up and desiccate, die out\nfrom pointlessness like the little toe will\n(unless we can find a way to reverse its long\ndecline). Hey, plump eyes! Isn’t it time you put\nyour tiny wet hands together for the light!"} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nCyriack, this three years' day these eyes, though clear\nTo outward view of blemish or of spot,\nBereft of light, their seeing have forgot;\nNor to their idle orbs doth sight appear Of sun or moon or star throughout the year,\nOr man or woman.\nYet I argue not\nAgainst Heav'n's hand or will, not bate a jot\nOf heart or hope, but still bear up and steer Right onward.\nWhat supports me, dost thou ask?\nThe conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied\nIn liberty's defence, my noble task,\nOf which all Europe talks from side to side.\nThis thought might lead me through the world's vain mask\nContent, though blind, had I no better guide."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe maggot dreams of the ear and\nthe wound, that welcome dark between\ngauze and knee, cheek and skull, and\nany open moment in the\nbody that will have it. The child-\nfly wants a mouth to grow into,\na burn to salve, a heart to feed\non. It calls for sugar and Job\nand marrow. The maggot loves St.\nLazarus, though he walked away,\nloves the warm cutbanks of the chest.\nWhen the maggot asks for wings, we\nwill answer with painted hands, eyes\nbeneath coins, a promise of graves."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\ni must be careful about such things as these.\nthe thin-grained oak. the quiet grizzlies scared\ninto the hills by the constant tracks squeezing\nin behind them closer in the snow. the snared\nrigidity of the winter lake. deer after deer\ncrossing on the spines of fish who look up and stare\nwith their eyes pressed to the ice. in a sleep. hearing\nthe thin taps leading away to collapse like the bear\nin the high quiet. i must be careful not to shake\nanything in too wild an elation. not to jar\nthe fragile mountains against the paper far-\nness. nor avalanche the fog or the eagle from the air.\nof the gentle wilderness i must set the precarious\nwords. like rocks. without one snowcapped mistake."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nOur stone wall was built by slaves and my bones, my bones\nare paid for. We have two\nof everything, twice heavy\nin our pockets, warming\nour two big hands.\nThis is the story, as I know it. One morning:\nthe ships came, as foretold, and death\npearl-handled, almost\nand completely.\nHow cheap a date I turned out to be.\nEach finger weak with the memory:\nlost teeth, regret. Our ghosts\nwalk the shoulders of the road at night.\nI get the feeling you’ve been lying to me."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIn that proud port, which her so goodly graceth,\nWhiles her faire face she reares up to the skie:\nAnd to the ground her eie lids low embaseth\nMost goodly temperature ye may descry,\nMyld humblesse mixt with awfull majesty,\nFor looking on the earth whence she was borne:\nHer minde remembreth her mortalitie,\nWhat so is fayrest shall to earth returne.\nBut that same lofty countenance seemes to scorne\nBase thing, and thinke how she to heaven may clime:\nTreading downe earth as lothsome and forlorne,\nThat hinders heavenly thoughts with drossy slime.\nYet lowly still vouchsafe to looke on me,\nSuch lowlinesse shall make you lofty be."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIf Black History Month is not\nviable then wind does not\ncarry the seeds and drop them\non fertile ground\nrain does not\ndampen the land\nand encourage the seeds\nto root\nsun does not\nwarm the earth\nand kiss the seedlings\nand tell them plain:\nYou’re As Good As Anybody Else\nYou’ve Got A Place Here, Too"} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nHappy ye leaves when as those lilly hands,\nWhich hold my life in their dead doing might\nShall handle you and hold in loves soft bands,\nLyke captives trembling at the victors sight.\nAnd happy lines, on which with starry light,\nThose lamping eyes will deigne sometimes to look\nAnd reade the sorrowes of my dying spright,\nWritten with teares in harts close bleeding book.\nAnd happy rymes bath’d in the sacred brooke,\nOf Helicon whence she derived is,\nWhen ye behold that Angels blessed looke,\nMy soules long lacked foode, my heavens blis.\nLeaves, lines, and rymes, seeke her to please alone,\nWhom if ye please, I care for other none."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI live a small life, barely bigger than a speck,\nbarely more than a blip on the radar sweep\nthough it is not nothing, as the garter snake\nclimbs the rock rose shrub and the squirrel creeps\non bramble thorns. Not nothing to the crows\nwho heckle from the crowns of the last light’s trees\nwinterstripped of green, except for the boles\nthat ivy winds each hour round. See, the world is busy\nand the world is quick, barely time for a spider\nto suck the juice from a hawk moth’s head\nso it can use the moth as a spindle that it wraps in fiber\nwhile the moth constricts until it’s thin as a stick\nyou might think was nothing, a random bit\ncaught in a web coming loose from the window frame, in wind."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nHand trembling towards hand; the amazing lights\nOf heart and eye. They stood on supreme heights.\nAh, the delirious weeks of honeymoon!\nSoon they returned, and, after strange adventures,\nSettled at Balham by the end of June.\nTheir money was in Can. Pacs. B. Debentures,\nAnd in Antofagastas. Still he went\nCityward daily; still she did abide\nAt home. And both were really quite content\nWith work and social pleasures. Then they died.\nThey left three children (besides George, who drank):\nThe eldest Jane, who married Mr Bell,\nWilliam, the head-clerk in the County Bank,\nAnd Henry, a stock-broker, doing well."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nNo, no! Go from me. I have left her lately.\nI will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness,\nFor my surrounding air hath a new lightness;\nSlight are her arms, yet they have bound me straitly\nAnd left me cloaked as with a gauze of æther;\nAs with sweet leaves; as with subtle clearness.\nOh, I have picked up magic in her nearness\nTo sheathe me half in half the things that sheathe her.\nNo, no! Go from me. I have still the flavour,\nSoft as spring wind that’s come from birchen bowers.\nGreen come the shoots, aye April in the branches,\nAs winter’s wound with her sleight hand she staunches,\nHath of the trees a likeness of the savour:\nAs white their bark, so white this lady’s hours."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nFetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention\nseconds at a time. Catch? I don’t think so.\nBunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who’s—oh\njoy—actually scared. Sniff the wind, then\nI’m off again: muck, pond, ditch, residue\nof any thrillingly dead thing. And you?\nEither you’re sunk in the past, half our walk,\nthinking of what you never can bring back,\nor else you’re off in some fog concerning\n—tomorrow, is that what you call it? My work:\nto unsnare time’s warp (and woof!), retrieving,\nmy haze-headed friend, you. This shining bark,\na Zen master’s bronzy gong, calls you here,\nentirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nInto this net of leaves, green as old glass\nThat the sun fondles, trembling like images\nIn water, this live net, swung overhead\nFrom branch to branch, what swam? The spider’s thread\nIs less passive, where it appears to float\nLike a bright hair clinging to the wind’s coat.\nHot at work, history neither schemes nor grieves\nHere where the soaking dead are last year’s leaves,\nAnd over them slung, meshed with sun, a net\nNo creature wove, none frantically tried to fret.\nThe huge weight of time without its sting\nHangs in that greenly cradling woof. A wing\nHas caught there, held. Held. But not to stay,\nWe know, who, how slowly, walk away."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\ni be but i don’t is. i been & i\nam one who be on my own biz. i love\nnot a b____. but see know i been loved. i’m\none who been that & then not deserved much\ncuz i been on my own dirt. i don’t know\nlove. i been a lie but don’t be a lie\ni be fly sometimes but don’t be a fly\nsometimes i be addict-like but not high\nlike an addict’s like. just scratching low stones\nlike an addict might. stop? not an option.\ni be getting mine. been getting over.\nbeen over this but be caught in a cycle.\nbut you be what you be & it be good.\n& i be moved & making new habits."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe leaves had fallen in that sullen place,\nbut none around him knew just where they were.\nThe sky revealed no sun. A ragged blur\nremained where each man's face had been a face.\nTwo angels soon crept forth with trays of bread,\ncircling among the lost like prison guards.\nLove is not love, unless its will affords\nforgiveness for the words that are not said.\nStill he could not believe that this was Hell,\nthat others sent before him did not know;\nyet, once his name and memory grew faint,\nit was no worse, perhaps, than a cheap motel.\nIt is the love of failure makes a saint.\nHe stood up then, but did not try to go."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLet me confess that we two must be twain,\nAlthough our undivided loves are one:\nSo shall those blots that do with me remain,\nWithout thy help, by me be borne alone.\nIn our two loves there is but one respect,\nThough in our lives a separable spite,\nWhich though it alter not love’s sole effect,\nYet doth it steal sweet hours from love’s delight.\nI may not evermore acknowledge thee,\nLest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame,\nNor thou with public kindness honour me,\nUnless thou take that honour from thy name:\nBut do not so, I love thee in such sort,\nAs thou being mine, mine is thy good report."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThose lips that Love’s own hand did make,\nBreathed forth the sound that said ‘I hate’,\nTo me that languish’d for her sake:\nBut when she saw my woeful state,\nStraight in her heart did mercy come,\nChiding that tongue that ever sweet\nWas us’d in giving gentle doom;\nAnd taught it thus anew to greet;\n‘I hate’ she alter’d with an end,\nThat followed it as gentle day,\nDoth follow night, who like a fiend\nFrom heaven to hell is flown away.\n‘I hate’, from hate away she threw,\nAnd sav’d my life, saying ‘not you’."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLike the Idalian queen,\nHer hair about her eyne,\nWith neck and breast’s ripe apples to be seen,\nAt first glance of the morn\nIn Cyprus’ gardens gathering those fair flowers\nWhich of her blood were born,\nI saw, but fainting saw, my paramours.\nThe Graces naked danced about the place,\nThe winds and trees amazed\nWith silence on her gazed,\nThe flowers did smile, like those upon her face;\nAnd as their aspen stalks those fingers band,\nThat she might read my case,\nA hyacinth I wished me in her hand."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAll you violated ones with gentle hearts;\nYou violent dreamers whose cries shout heartbreak;\nWhose voices echo clamors of our cool capers,\nAnd whose black faces have hollowed pits for eyes.\nAll you gambling sons and hooked children and bowery bums\nHating white devils and black bourgeoisie,\nThumbing your noses at your burning red suns,\nGather round this coffin and mourn your dying swan.\nSnow-white moslem head-dress around a dead black face!\nBeautiful were your sand-papering words against our skins!\nOur blood and water pour from your flowing wounds.\nYou have cut open our breasts and dug scalpels in our brains.\nWhen and Where will another come to take your holy place?\nOld man mumbling in his dotage, crying child, unborn?"} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nname address date\nI cannot remember\nan eye for an eye\nthen and there my\nthis is\nyour se\ncond ch\nance to\nh i s t o r y\nr e p e a t s\ni t s s e l f\nand a tooth\nfor a tooth\nis a tooth:"} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI stand there under the high limbs of locust\nwatching my father point a black gun into the air\nhis arms steepled for the stillness\nrequired to split the proverbial hair\nwith a BB. I would like to throw a red hat\nto catch what will smack from the barrel\nbut instead the songbird drops fast—a warm\nstone through liquid swimming between us.\nThe stink of yellow sulfur thick. And the twist\nof his mouth, like tangled purple boughs\nor crossed legs of what he never dreamed he'd hit.\nYears after, I will admit only to so much. Blue\nmoon tomorrow. Do we ever get a second\nchance? It's what I don't say that speaks loudest."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nEat thou and drink; to-morrow thou shalt die.\nSurely the earth, that's wise being very old,\nNeeds not our help. Then loose me, love, and hold\nThy sultry hair up from my face; that I\nMay pour for thee this golden wine, brim-high,\nTill round the glass thy fingers glow like gold.\nWe'll drown all hours: thy song, while hours are toll'd,\nShall leap, as fountains veil the changing sky.\nNow kiss, and think that there are really those,\nMy own high-bosom'd beauty, who increase\nVain gold, vain lore, and yet might choose our way!\nThrough many years they toil; then on a day\nThey die not,—for their life was death,—but cease;\nAnd round their narrow lips the mould falls close."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe world is charged with the grandeur of God.\nIt will flame out, like shining from shook foil;\nIt gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil\nCrushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?\nGenerations have trod, have trod, have trod;\nAnd all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;\nAnd wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil\nIs bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.\nAnd for all this, nature is never spent;\nThere lives the dearest freshness deep down things;\nAnd though the last lights off the black West went\nOh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —\nBecause the Holy Ghost over the bent\nWorld broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nStronger than alcohol, more great than song,\ndeep in whose reeds great elephants decay,\nI, an island, sail, and my shoes toss\non a fragrant evening, fraught with sadness\nbristling hate.\nIt’s true, I weep too much. Dawns break\nslow kisses on the eyelids of the sea,\nwhat other men sometimes have thought they’ve seen.\nAnd since then I’ve been bathing in the poem\nlifting her shadowy flowers up for me,\nand hurled by hurricanes to a birdless place\nthe waving flags, nor pass by prison ships\nO let me burst, and I be lost at sea!\nand fall on my knees then, womanly."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nFire ran horrified\nfrom its ashes.\nIn the afterglow,\ncinematic shadows fled\nfrom flesh and blood.\nScars appeared,\nfollowed years later\nby their wounds.\nBlinks of red\ndinged relentlessly,\nbut there was\nnowhere to stop\nfor the train\npulling its wreckage."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhat lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,\nI have forgotten, and what arms have lain\nUnder my head till morning; but the rain\nIs full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh\nUpon the glass and listen for reply,\nAnd in my heart there stirs a quiet pain\nFor unremembered lads that not again\nWill turn to me at midnight with a cry.\nThus in the winter stands the lonely tree,\nNor knows what birds have vanished one by one,\nYet knows its boughs more silent than before:\nI cannot say what loves have come and gone,\nI only know that summer sang in me\nA little while, that in me sings no more."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nYou may think, passer-by, that Fate\nIs a pit-fall outside of yourself,\nAround which you may walk by the use of foresight\nAnd wisdom.\nThus you believe, viewing the lives of other men,\nAs one who in God-like fashion bends over an anthill,\nSeeing how their difficulties could be avoided.\nBut pass on into life:\nIn time you shall see Fate approach you\nIn the shape of your own image in the mirror;\nOr you shall sit alone by your own hearth,\nAnd suddenly the chair by you shall hold a guest,\nAnd you shall know that guest,\nAnd read the authentic message of his eyes."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLook in my face; my name is Might-have-been;\nI am also call'd No-more, Too-late, Farewell;\nUnto thine ear I hold the dead-sea shell\nCast up thy Life's foam-fretted feet between;\nUnto thine eyes the glass where that is seen\nWhich had Life's form and Love's, but by my spell\nIs now a shaken shadow intolerable,\nOf ultimate things unutter'd the frail screen.\nMark me, how still I am! But should there dart\nOne moment through thy soul the soft surprise\nOf that wing'd Peace which lulls the breath of sighs,—\nThen shalt thou see me smile, and turn apart\nThy visage to mine ambush at thy heart\nSleepless with cold commemorative eyes."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nYou remember the Incredible Shrinking Man? I said.\nWell, last night I dreamed I was him. It began the same way.\nThe shirt cuffs were the first thing that came to my attention,\ndrooping down over my knuckles in the bedroom mirror.\nAnd my waistband and shoes were getting looser by the day.\nWithin weeks you could perch me on your knee like a male doll.\nLater you would put me to bed in the empty matchbox.\nYou failed to watch for the spider that came to explore me.\nI fought her with a darning needle, a button my shield.\nShe retreated from me on a thread. I followed her down\nto the cellar. How I made my way back I’ll never know.\nIt took me days to travel over the quilt to your hand.\nNo longer a hand but an Alpine range of sleeping flesh.\nI crawled into an open pore and entered your bloodstream."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThat time of year thou mayst in me behold\nWhen yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang\nUpon those boughs which shake against the cold,\nBare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.\nIn me thou see'st the twilight of such day\nAs after sunset fadeth in the west,\nWhich by and by black night doth take away,\nDeath's second self, that seals up all in rest.\nIn me thou see'st the glowing of such fire\nThat on the ashes of his youth doth lie,\nAs the death-bed whereon it must expire,\nConsum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.\nThis thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,\nTo love that well which thou must leave ere long."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLike as, to make our appetite more keen,\nWith eager compounds we our palate urge;\nAs, to prevent our maladies unseen,\nWe sicken to shun sickness when we purge;\nEven so, being full of your ne’er-cloying sweetness,\nTo bitter sauces did I frame my feeding;\nAnd, sick of welfare, found a kind of meetness\nTo be diseas’d, ere that there was true needing.\nThus policy in love, to anticipate\nThe ills that were not, grew to faults assur’d,\nAnd brought to medicine a healthful state\nWhich, rank of goodness, would by ill be cur’d;\nBut thence I learn and find the lesson true,\nDrugs poison him that so fell sick of you."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLife, like a marble block, is given to all,\nA blank, inchoate mass of years and days,\nWhence one with ardent chisel swift essays\nSome shape of strength or symmetry to call;\nOne shatters it in bits to mend a wall;\nOne in a craftier hand the chisel lays,\nAnd one, to wake the mirth in Lesbia’s gaze,\nCarves it apace in toys fantastical.\nBut least is he who, with enchanted eyes\nFilled with high visions of fair shapes to be,\nMuses which god he shall immortalize\nIn the proud Parian’s perpetuity,\nTill twilight warns him from the punctual skies\nThat the night cometh wherein none shall see."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nOut of your whole life give but one moment!\nAll of your life that has gone before,\nAll to come after it, – so you ignore,\nSo you make perfect the present, – condense,\nIn a rapture of rage, for perfection’s endowment,\nThought and feeling and soul and sense –\nMerged in a moment which gives me at last\nYou around me for once, you beneath me, above me –\nMe – sure that despite of time future, time past, –\nThis tick of our life-time’s one moment you love me!\nHow long such suspension may linger? Ah, Sweet –\nThe moment eternal – just that and no more –\nWhen ecstasy’s utmost we clutch at the core\nWhile cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut and lips meet!"} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nPsychoanalysis always looks for the egg in a basket that has been lost. *\n*\n* I sample sin as if it were the beginning of well-being. *\n*\n* I don't like Paradise as they probably don't have obsessions there. *\n*\n* If God absolves me he always does so for insufficient evidence. *\n*\n* Everyone is a friend of his own pathology. *\n*\n* When I raise a toast to madness,\nI toast myself as well. *\n*\n* There are nights that don't ever happen."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nFor Síle\nI give thee the sun as guarantee\nand the Egyptian faience beads\nand the little silver oar that was gifted once\nto an English harbor master.\nI give thee the silk dress\nwith its triple-ruffled sleeves and\nthe cloaks with big hoods that fall full\nthough some are pulled in at a central button.\nI give thee the little colored goats\nthat go down on their knees as penitents.\nI give thee the death mask\nand the plaster hand of Seán Ó Riada,\nfor he is among the best loved of the musicians."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMy ghostly fader, I me confess,\nFirst to God and then to you,\nThat at a window, wot ye how,\nI stale a kosse of gret swetness,\nWhich don was out avisiness—\nBut it is doon, not undoon, now.\nMy ghostly fader, I me confess,\nFirst to God and then to you.\nBut I restore it shall, doutless,\nAgein, if so be that I mow;\nAnd that to God I make a vow,\nAnd elles I axe foryefness.\nMy ghostly fader, I me confesse,\nFirst to God and then to you."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\n\"F. . . the oven is an F\"\nSamantha Foggle, age 3\nOh, to hear the world with such clarity.\nSuch surety. To know the note\nof your breakfast chat is B-flat minor.\nThat the ’57 Chevy stalled outside the\ngarage is a D. To recognize the Apricot\nkitchen paint for what it is: F-sharp.\nTo understand the way you feel for him is G,definitely a G. And as you watch him\ndescend the scale of the front steps to his car\nfor work, the house quiets to an A.\nThe arpeggio of last night’s Every\nGood Boy Deserves Favor\nstill ringing in your ears."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nHis hand in hold so trigger-tight its blood\nbelieves in ghosts. It clings with finger set\non steel and waits inside a dream of ducks.\nThe twilight burns into a rising arc\nof eastern sky as sun reveals herself\ntoo proud and instantly receives full-face\na splash of mallard flock. A shotgun blasts\nthe yellow into streaming pinks and gives\nthe creek its new-day taste of echoed blood.\nTwo green head ghosts fly through the pulse of dawn\nupon a trigger’s touch. The creek empties\nof sound. In silence human fingers find\nwet feet of web and carry in each hand\na bird whose only cry comes in color."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWe walked through some heartache in '62.\nGary liked Teresa but Teresa\nasked Elizabeth to tell Peter that\nshe really wanted to go out with him\nbut Peter had been making out with Jane\nin the theater, celebrating their\none month anniversary, so that was\nout, and even though Jane broke up with Pete,\nPeter kept asking Gail to talk with Jane\nwhich Gail wouldn't do because she'd told\nBrenda that she thought that Peter was cute\nbut Brenda wasn't listening to a word,\nwrapped up in lonely teardrops shed for Greg.\nThe waters of 8th grade were never still."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIf we must die, let it not be like hogs\nHunted and penned in an inglorious spot,\nWhile round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,\nMaking their mock at our accursèd lot.\nIf we must die, O let us nobly die,\nSo that our precious blood may not be shed\nIn vain; then even the monsters we defy\nShall be constrained to honor us though dead!\nO kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!\nThough far outnumbered let us show us brave,\nAnd for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!\nWhat though before us lies the open grave?\nLike men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,\nPressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!"} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWeary with toil, I haste me to my bed,\nThe dear respose for limbs with travel tir’d;\nBut then begins a journey in my head\nTo work my mind, when body’s work’s expired:\nFor then my thoughts, from far where I abide,\nIntend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,\nAnd keep my drooping eyelids open wide,\nLooking on darkness which the blind do see:\nSave that my soul’s imaginary sight\nPresents thy shadow to my sightless view,\nWhich, like a jewel hung in ghastly night,\nMakes black night beauteous, and her old face new.\nLo! thus, by day my limbs, by night my mind,\nFor thee, and for myself, no quiet find."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nHow heavy do I journey on the way,\nWhen what I seek, my weary travel’s end,\nDoth teach that ease and that repose to say,\n‘Thus far the miles are measured from thy friend!’\nThe beast that bears me, tired with my woe,\nPlods dully on, to bear that weight in me,\nAs if by some instinct the wretch did know\nHis rider lov’d not speed, being made from thee:\nThe bloody spur cannot provoke him on,\nThat sometimes anger thrusts into his hide,\nWhich heavily he answers with a groan,\nMore sharp to me than spurring to his side;\nFor that same groan doth put this in my mind,\nMy grief lies onward, and my joy behind."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nEnd of the day. A bar where you ought to leave a tip.\nThe green bird was saying pretty pretty pretty,\nloved ones were walking home across the city.\nI waved at the girl who waves her whip ...\nbut please be certain I’m a citizen ...\nI take stuff to the dump ... or maybe it’s the tip?\nI’m where the nitty really meets the gritty.\nI know I find it hard to listen.\nI read too much. I often need a drink.\nIt isn’t the world that makes us think,\nit’s words that we can’t come up with.\nSure, I can work up fresh examples\nand send them off to the committee.\nBut the poetry is in the bird. And in the pretty."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nNothing can reach you now, not lead or steel,\nor what life itself eventually reveals.\nNo more studies of kindness or courtesy,\nnor grace or charity, all is needless now.\nAll is needless now, sky, world, family\ngrieving for their bundles of purity,\nnow beyond disgrace, failure, winter streets,\nor whatever attacks, and then retreats.\nClassrooms emptied of children’s things,\npaper and paste, and love’s imaginings,\nbundles of peace, Christmas-blessed\nwith the unborn and the dead at rest,\nnothing can reach you now, not lead or steel\nor what life itself eventually reveals."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nNot from the stars do I my judgement pluck;\nAnd yet methinks I have astronomy,\nBut not to tell of good or evil luck,\nOf plagues, of dearths, or seasons’ quality;\nNor can I fortune to brief minutes tell,\nPointing to each his thunder, rain and wind,\nOr say with princes if it shall go well\nBy oft predict that I in heaven find:\nBut from thine eyes my knowledge I derive,\nAnd constant stars in them I read such art\nAs ‘Truth and beauty shall together thrive,\nIf from thyself, to store thou wouldst convert’;\nOr else of thee this I prognosticate:\n‘Thy end is truth’s and beauty’s doom and date.’"} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhen the bed is empty, we pull the shades to block light,\nlight of resemblance to remembery, long light of waiting,\nan impatience in the glows of it. The here of the now and the glow\nthat days make in the room, without the body but with the stench\nof it. So we say, vacancy and abject,against the was, against\na philosophy of once and then not. Not-being against.\nA child once grew here. As lines on a wall. As\ngrowing without knowing what would one day not be. A\ngnawing grows. Grew and was. Protection is curled. Motion-\nless. I envy her in her room. Hers with paint and dolls and hand-\nprints. Great green and glowing under blankets with a hand\nthat nurtures the heart of the mouth, purrs into mouth, loves\nthe heart. Heart beating within another—blushing blood—\nGod, the beating, lit, and doing what it does."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nNo other man, unless it was Doc Hill,\nDid more for people in this town than l.\nAnd all the weak, the halt, the improvident\nAnd those who could not pay flocked to me.\nI was good-hearted, easy Doctor Meyers.\nI was healthy, happy, in comfortable fortune,\nBlest with a congenial mate, my children raised,\nAll wedded, doing well in the world.\nAnd then one night, Minerva, the poetess,\nCame to me in her trouble, crying.\nI tried to help her out—she died—\nThey indicted me, the newspapers disgraced me,\nMy wife perished of a broken heart.\nAnd pneumonia finished me."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThat thou hast her it is not all my grief,\nAnd yet it may be said I loved her dearly;\nThat she hath thee is of my wailing chief,\nA loss in love that touches me more nearly.\nLoving offenders thus I will excuse ye:\nThou dost love her, because thou know’st I love her;\nAnd for my sake even so doth she abuse me,\nSuffering my friend for my sake to approve her.\nIf I lose thee, my loss is my love’s gain,\nAnd losing her, my friend hath found that loss;\nBoth find each other, and I lose both twain,\nAnd both for my sake lay on me this cross:\nBut here’s the joy; my friend and I are one;\nSweet flattery! then she loves but me alone."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nA thin wet sky, that yellows at the rim,\nAnd meets with sun-lost lip the marsh’s brim.\nThe pools low lying, dank with moss and mould,\nGlint through their mildews like large cups of gold.\nAmong the wild rice in the still lagoon,\nIn monotone the lizard shrills his tune.\nThe wild goose, homing, seeks a sheltering,\nWhere rushes grow, and oozing lichens cling.\nLate cranes with heavy wing, and lazy flight,\nSail up the silence with the nearing night.\nAnd like a spirit, swathed in some soft veil,\nSteals twilight and its shadows o’er the swale.\nHushed lie the sedges, and the vapours creep,\nThick, grey and humid, while the marshes sleep."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhen men shall find thy flower, thy glory pass,\nAnd thou, with careful brow sitting alone,\nReceivèd hast this message from thy glass,\nThat tells thee truth, and says that all is gone,\nFresh shalt thou see in me the wounds thou madest,\nThough spent thy flame, in me the heat remaining,\nI that have loved thee thus before thou fadest,\nMy faith shall wax, when thou art in thy waning.\nThe world shall find this miracle in me,\nThat fire can burn when all the matter’s spent;\nThen what my faith hath been thyself shall see,\nAnd that thou wast unkind thou mayst repent.\nThou mayst repent that thou hast scorned my tears,\nWhen Winter snows upon thy golden hairs."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMy letters! all dead paper, ... mute and white ! —\nAnd yet they seem alive and quivering\nAgainst my tremulous hands which loose the string\nAnd let them drop down on my knee to-night.\nThis said, ... he wished to have me in his sight\nOnce, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring\nTo come and touch my hand ... a simple thing,\nYet I wept for it! — this, ... the paper's light ...\nSaid, Dear, I love thee; and I sank and quailed\nAs if God's future thundered on my past.\nThis said, I am thine — and so its ink has paled\nWith lying at my heart that beat too fast.\nAnd this ... O Love, thy words have ill availed,\nIf, what this said, I dared repeat at last!"} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nYou must not wonder, though you think it strange,\nTo see me hold my louring head so low,\nAnd that mine eyes take no delight to range\nAbout the gleams which on your face do grow.\nThe mouse which once hath broken out of trap\nIs seldom ’ticèd with the trustless bait,\nBut lies aloof for fear of more mishap,\nAnd feedeth still in doubt of deep deceit.\nThe scorchèd fly, which once hath ’scaped the flame,\nWill hardly come to play again with fire,\nWhereby I learn that grievous is the game\nWhich follows fancy dazzled by desire:\nSo that I wink or else hold down my head,\nBecause your blazing eyes my bale have bred."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nColumns, arches, vaults: how he knew\nThe ways you promise what you lack;\nAnd that your bodies, like your souls,\nAlways slip from our grasping hands.\nSpace is such a lure . . . Swift to disappoint,\nAs they raise and topple clouds, the sky's\nArchitects still offer more than ours,\nWho only build a scaffolding of dreams.\nHe dreamed, all the same; but on that day,\nHe gave a better use to beauty's shapes:\nHe understood that form means to die.\nAnd this, his final work, is a coin\nWith both sides bare. He made in stone,\nOf this great room, the arrow and the bow."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI stand in Walgreens while my mother sleeps.\nThe store is fluorescent and almost empty.\nMy father is ailing in a nursing home,\nmy friend is dying in the hospital.\nWhat I want tonight is lipstick.\nAs pure a red as I can find—no coral\nundertones, no rust or fawn. Just red.\nIgnoring the salespeople, I untwist tubes\nand scrawl each color on my wrist,\ntill the blue veins beneath my skin\ndisappear behind smeared bars. I select one.\nBack in my mother's apartment, silence.\nI limn my lips back out of my wan face.\nThere they are again: smacky and wanting."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nall you have to do\nis show yourself\nin case you hear us\nwe are so small\nand fenceless in the shade\nthrow us a hook\nwhen you can\ntouch the scribbled\nchild in the inferno\nall you have to do\nis show yourself a little\npin your dark\nolive green parts\nagainst the boulder"} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nOn a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.\nTired of his dark dominion swung the fiend\nAbove the rolling ball in cloud part screened,\nWhere sinners hugged their spectre of repose.\nPoor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.\nAnd now upon his western wing he leaned,\nNow his huge bulk o'er Afric's sands careened,\nNow the black planet shadowed Arctic snows.\nSoaring through wider zones that pricked his scars\nWith memory of the old revolt from Awe,\nHe reached a middle height, and at the stars,\nWhich are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank.\nAround the ancient track marched, rank on rank,\nThe army of unalterable law."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nBlow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!\nThere’s none of these so lonely and poor of old,\nBut, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.\nThese laid the world away; poured out the red Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be\nOf work and joy, and that unhoped serene,\nThat men call age; and those who would have been,\nTheir sons, they gave, their immortality.\nBlow, bugles, blow!\nThey brought us, for our dearth,\nHoliness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain,\nHonour has come back, as a king, to earth,\nAnd paid his subjects with a royal wage;\nAnd Nobleness walks in our ways again;\nAnd we have come into our heritage."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhat can I give thee back, O liberal\nAnd princely giver, who hast brought the gold\nAnd purple of thine heart, unstained, untold,\nAnd laid them on the outside of the wall\nFor such as I to take or leave withal,\nIn unexpected largesse? am I cold,\nUngrateful, that for these most manifold\nHigh gifts, I render nothing back at all?\nNot so; not cold,—but very poor instead.\nAsk God who knows. For frequent tears have run\nThe colours from my life, and left so dead\nAnd pale a stuff, it were not fitly done\nTo give the same as pillow to thy head.\nGo farther! let it serve to trample on."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nHow can I then return in happy plight,\nThat am debarre’d the benefit of rest?\nWhen day’s oppression is not eas’d by night,\nBut day by night and night by day oppress’d,\nAnd each, though enemies to either’s reign,\nDo in consent shake hands to torture me,\nThe one by toil, the other to complain\nHow far I toil, still farther off from thee.\nI tell the day, to please him thou art bright,\nAnd dost him grace when clouds do blot the heaven:\nSo flatter I the swart-complexion’d night,\nWhen sparkling stars twire not thou gild’st the even.\nBut day doth daily draw my sorrows longer,\nAnd night doth nightly make grief’s length seem stronger."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIt may be esoteric and perverse\nThat I consult Pythagoras to hear\nA music tuning in the universe.\nMy interest in his math of star and sphere\nHas triggered theorems too far-fetched to solve.\nThey don't add up. But if I rack and toil\nMore in ether than a mortal coil,\nIt is to comprehend how you revolve,\nBy formulas of orbit, ellipse, and ring.\nDear son and daughter, if I seem to range\nIt is to chart the numbers spiraling\nBetween my life and yours until the strange\nAnd seamless beauty of equations click\nSolutions for the heart's arithmetic."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSoldiers are citizens of death's grey land,\nDrawing no dividend from time's to-morrows.\nIn the great hour of destiny they stand,\nEach with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.\nSoldiers are sworn to action; they must win\nSome flaming, fatal climax with their lives.\nSoldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin\nThey think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives.\nI see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,\nAnd in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,\nDreaming of things they did with balls and bats,\nAnd mocked by hopeless longing to regain\nBank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,\nAnd going to the office in the train."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nOthers abide our question. Thou art free.\nWe ask and ask—Thou smilest and art still,\nOut-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill,\nWho to the stars uncrowns his majesty,\nPlanting his steadfast footsteps in the sea,\nMaking the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place,\nSpares but the cloudy border of his base\nTo the foil'd searching of mortality;\nAnd thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know,\nSelf-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure,\nDidst tread on earth unguess'd at.—Better so!\nAll pains the immortal spirit must endure,\nAll weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow,\nFind their sole speech in that victorious brow."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIf you find yourself half naked\nand barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing,\nagain, the earth's great, sonorous moan that says\nyou are the air of the now and gone, that says\nall you love will turn to dust,\nand will meet you there, do not\nraise your fist. Do not raise\nyour small voice against it. And do not\ntake cover. Instead, curl your toes\ninto the grass, watch the cloud\nascending from your lips. Walk\nthrough the garden's dormant splendor.\nSay only, thank you.\nThank you."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nDid your father come home after fighting\nthrough the week at work? Did the sweat change\nto salt in his ears? Was that bitter white\ngrain the only music he’d hear? Is this why\nyou were quiet when other poets sang\nof the black man’s beauty? Is this why\nyou choked on the tonsil of Negro Duty?\nWere there as many offices for pain\nas love? Should a black man never be shy?\nWas your father a mountain twenty\nshovels couldn’t bury? Was he a train\nleaving a lone column of smoke? Was he\na black magnolia singing at your feet?\nWas he a blackjack smashed against your throat?"} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nDear! of all happy in the hour, most blest\nHe who has found our hid security,\nAssured in the dark tides of the world that rest,\nAnd heard our word, ‘Who is so safe as we?’ We have found safety with all things undying,\nThe winds, and morning, tears of men and mirth,\nThe deep night, and birds singing, and clouds flying,\nAnd sleep, and freedom, and the autumnal earth.\nWe have built a house that is not for Time’s throwing.\nWe have gained a peace unshaken by pain for ever.\nWar knows no power.\nSafe shall be my going,\nSecretly armed against all death’s endeavour;\nSafe though all safety’s lost; safe where men fall;\nAnd if these poor limbs die, safest of all."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhether or not shadows are of the substance\nsuch is the expectation I can\nwait to surprise my vision as a wind\nenters the valley: sudden and silent\nin its arrival, drawing to full cry\nthe whorled invisibilities, glassen towers\nfreighted with sky-chaff; that, as barnstorming\npowers, rammack the small\norchard; that well-steaded oaks\nride stolidly, that rake the light-leafed ash,\nthat glowing yew trees, cumbrous, heave aside.\nAmidst and abroad tumultuous lumina,\nregents, reagents, cloud-fêted, sun-ordained,\nfly tally over hedgerows, across fields."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThings happen when you drink too much mescal.\nOne night, with not enough food in my belly,\nhe kept on buying. I’m a girl who’ll fall\ndamn near in love with gratitude and, well, he\nwas hot and generous and so the least\nthat I could do was let him kiss me, hard\nand soft and any way you want it, beast\nand beauty, lime and salt—sweet Bacchus’ pards—\nand when his friend showed up I felt so warm\nand generous I let him kiss me too.\nHis buddy asked me if it was the worm\ninside that makes me do the things I do.\nI wasn’t sure which worm he meant, the one\nI ate? The one that eats at me alone?"} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\na sower walks into the great hall\nit's war out there, he says\nand you awash in emptiness\nyou've sworn off your duty to sound the alarm\nI've come in the name of fields\nit's war out there\nI walk out from that great hall\nall four directions a boundless harvest scene\nI start planning for war\nrehearsing death\nand the crops I burn\nsend up the wolf-smoke of warning fires\nbut something haunts me furiously:\nhe's sowing seed across marble floors"} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nGlitz girls in the spackle. Teen climbed\nThe boughed over stair. Stole lace to begin again\nIn darkness, a fingering salt. Print\nDelighted the line to lined\nPink. Was doll-sized, weighted out. Was flat-reaped sigh\nAnd dollar bin plaid. Fridays we stayed in\nTill in coughed through with dry heat. Men\nGrew approximate in their longing for something to mine.\nSippy cup of burn, acrylic camel, and melting kohl\nWas a hiding past boyish. We shone with miraculous\nDroll. Don’t try to kiss me, she was always saying. Older\nThan a watch, the girl who pays starch to hush\nMeat. Gargantuan between grown and still us,\nI leave her orange street, my wanting ode"} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nBut be contented: when that fell arrest\nWithout all bail shall carry me away,\nMy life hath in this line some interest,\nWhich for memorial still with thee shall stay.\nWhen thou reviewest this, thou dost review\nThe very part was consecrate to thee:\nThe earth can have but earth, which is his due;\nMy spirit is thine, the better part of me:\nSo then thou hast but lost the dregs of life,\nThe prey of worms, my body being dead;\nThe coward conquest of a wretch’s knife,\nToo base of thee to be remembered.\nThe worth of that is that which it contains,\nAnd that is this, and this with thee remains."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhen I consider everything that grows\nHolds in perfection but a little moment,\nThat this huge stage presenteth nought but shows\nWhereon the stars in secret influence comment;\nWhen I perceive that men as plants increase,\nCheered and checked even by the self-same sky,\nVaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,\nAnd wear their brave state out of memory;\nThen the conceit of this inconstant stay\nSets you most rich in youth before my sight,\nWhere wasteful Time debateth with Decay\nTo change your day of youth to sullied night,\nAnd all in war with Time for love of you,\nAs he takes from you, I engraft you new."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nShe stands as pale as Parian statues stand;\nLike Cleopatra when she turned at bay,\nAnd felt her strength above the Roman sway,\nAnd felt the aspic writhing in her hand.\nHer face is steadfast toward the shadowy land,\nFor dim beyond it looms the light of day;\nHer feet are steadfast; all the arduous way\nThat foot-track hath not wavered on the sand.\nShe stands there like a beacon thro' the night,\nA pale clear beacon where the storm-drift is;\nShe stands alone, a wonder deathly white;\nShe stands there patient, nerved with inner might,\nIndomitable in her feebleness,\nHer face and will athirst against the light."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air.\nI am blind. I am unable to understand the dark\npassages. I begin to speak of being deprived.\nI believe that I am being kept in want. Who\ngoverns me? Who is to say what I am,\nand what I am not? I wish to be conscious\nof myself. My frontiers are long and insecure.\nI contract them. I cannot command them.\nI determine myself not to desire what is\nunattainable. I have a wound in my leg.\nI am a schoolboy. A rule does not oppress me\nif I impose it on myself. I assimilate it\ninto my substance. I can never be thwarted.\nI cannot want it to be other than it is."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nI know that all beneath the moon decays,\nAnd what by mortals in this world is brought,\nIn Time’s great periods shall return to nought;\nThat fairest states have fatal nights and days;\nI know how all the Muse’s heavenly lays,\nWith toil of spright which are so dearly bought,\nAs idle sounds of few or none are sought,\nAnd that nought lighter is than airy praise.\nI know frail beauty like the purple flower,\nTo which one morn oft birth and death affords;\nThat love a jarring is of minds’ accords,\nWhere sense and will invassal reason’s power:\nKnow what I list, this all can not me move,\nBut that, O me! I both must write and love."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nA woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted\nHast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;\nA woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted\nWith shifting change as is false women’s fashion;\nAn eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,\nGilding the object whereupon it gazeth;\nA man in hue, all hues in his controlling,\nWhich steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.\nAnd for a woman wert thou first created,\nTill nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,\nAnd by addition me of thee defeated\nBy adding one thing to my purpose nothing.\nBut since she pricked thee out for women's pleasure,\nMine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nA woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted,\nHast thou, the master mistress of my passion;\nA woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted\nWith shifting change, as is false women’s fashion:\nAn eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,\nGilding the object whereupon it gazeth;\nA man in hue all ‘hues’ in his controlling,\nWhich steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.\nAnd for a woman wert thou first created;\nTill Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,\nAnd by addition me of thee defeated,\nBy adding one thing to my purpose nothing.\nBut since she prick’d thee out for women’s pleasure,\nMine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhy and by whose power were you sent?\nWhat do you see that you may wish to steal?\nWhy this dancing? Why do your dark bodies\nDrink up all the light? What are you demanding\nThat we feel? Have you stolen something? Then\nWhat is that leaping in your chest? What is\nThe nature of your mission? Do you seek\nTo offer a confession? Have you anything to do\nWith others brought by us to harm? Then\nWhy are you afraid? And why do you invade\nOur night, hands raised, eyes wide, mute\nAs ghosts? Is there something you wish to confess?\nIs this some enigmatic type of test? What if we\nFail? How and to whom do we address our appeal?"} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhy & what is sweetness all alone?\nEither that or it becomes, alas, fleeting,\nWhich actually helps, because of rhythm.\n& there’s a pale intensity to truth, no matter\nHow pale it is on the levels we receive on.\nI mean, the minute you invent a time interval\nThe more it seems to “jelly out” the excitation\nOf accidents; zum Beispiel, “Saginaw, Michigan.”\nAfter a while, we almost expect him or her\nTo inveigle us into a cafe without bay-breasted warblers.\nIt’s almost like we have a streak of orange-smell\nWhich nobody’ll pay for because they can’t talk to it,\nAlthough that’s probably all wrong, or at least falsified\nBy its very mention, like gravity. Do you agree?"} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI cry your mercy—pity—love! Aye, love!\nMerciful love that tantalizes not,\nOne-thoughted, never-wandering, guileless love,\nUnmasked, and being seen—without a blot!\nO! let me have thee whole,—all—all—be mine!\nThat shape, that fairness, that sweet minor zest\nOf love, your kiss,—those hands, those eyes divine,\nThat warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast,—\nYourself—your soul—in pity give me all,\nWithhold no atom’s atom or I die,\nOr living on perhaps, your wretched thrall,\nForget, in the mist of idle misery,\nLife’s purposes,—the palate of my mind\nLosing its gust, and my ambition blind!"} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nWe feel the volt inside our veins,\ninside the vines, inside the rain,\nand through the capillaries of\na tree. We feel the pulse above\nin storms, vibrato of thunder,\nthe whispering rhythms of a river,\nmagnetic currents in the earth,\nthe alternating flow of breath,\nthe push of tides, reversing air\nfrom caves, dilating hum and dance\nof bees, the chant of auctioneer.\nAll oscillate together, or\nthey seem to, in this play of chance,\nbeneath the stars' indifference."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI did but prompt the age to quit their clogs\nBy the known rules of ancient liberty,\nWhen straight a barbarous noise environs me\nOf owls and cuckoos, asses, apes and dogs:\nAs when those hinds that were transform'd to frogs\nRail'd at Latona's twin-born progeny\nWhich after held the sun and moon in fee.\nBut this is got by casting pearl to hogs,\nThat bawl for freedom in their senseless mood,\nAnd still revolt when truth would set them free.\nLicence they mean when they cry liberty;\nFor who loves that, must first be wise and good.\nBut from that mark how far they rove we see,\nFor all this waste of wealth and loss of blood."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nShe was changing on the inside\nit was true what had been written\nThe new syntax of love\nboth sucked and burned\nThe secret clung around them\nShe took in the smell\nWalking down a road to nowhere\nevery sound was relevant\nThe sun fell behind them now\nhe seemed strangely moved\nShe would take her clothes off\nfor the camera\nshe said in plain english\nbut she wasn’t holding that snake"} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThrough Vasenka: a herd of boys runs.\nWith their icy hands they haul a policeman and for an apple a look they display the man on the asphalt.\nSnow falls in his nostrils.\nI watch him.\nThey circle his eyes with a red pencil.\nThey teach his neighbors to spit in two red holes.\nI watch the snowflakes melt in their hair.\nThe neighbor aims in the red circle, spits.\nI stand on a park bench and chew snow.\nBoys walk west of Tedna, carrying snowflakes in their hair.\nA neighbor aims in the hole, spits.\nWalking by night with their arms lifted up from their bodies.\nAs if they were about to leave the earth.\nAnd were trying out the wind."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLo! in the orient when the gracious light\nLifts up his burning head, each under eye\nDoth homage to his new-appearing sight,\nServing with looks his sacred majesty;\nAnd having climb’d the steep-up heavenly hill,\nResembling strong youth in his middle age,\nYet mortal looks adore his beauty still,\nAttending on his golden pilgrimage:\nBut when from highmost pitch, with weary car,\nLike feeble age, he reeleth from the day,\nThe eyes, ’fore duteous, now converted are\nFrom his low tract, and look another way:\nSo thou, thyself outgoing in thy noon:\nUnlook’d, on diest unless thou get a son."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nCherry-lipt Adonis in his snowie shape,\nMight not compare with his pure ivorie white,\nOn whose faire front a poet’s pen may write,\nWhose roseate red excels the crimson grape,\nHis love-enticing delicate soft limbs,\nAre rarely fram’d t’intrap poore gazine eies:\nHis cheeks, the lillie and carnation dies,\nWith lovely tincture which Apollo’s dims.\nHis lips ripe strawberries in nectar wet,\nHis mouth a Hive, his tongue a hony-combe,\nWhere Muses (like bees) make their mansion.\nHis teeth pure pearle in blushing correll set.\nOh how can such a body sinne-procuring,\nBe slow to love, and quicke to hate, enduring?"} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nMuses that sing love's sensual empery,\nAnd lovers kindling your enraged fires\nAt Cupid's bonfires burning in the eye,\nBlown with the empty breath of vain desires;\nYou that prefer the painted cabinet\nBefore the wealthy jewels it doth store ye,\nThat all your joys in dying figures set,\nAnd stain the living substance of your glory;\nAbjure those joys, abhor their memory,\nAnd let my love the honour'd subject be\nOf love, and honour's complete history.\nYour eyes were never yet let in to see\nThe majesty and riches of the mind,\nBut dwell in darkness; for your god is blind."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nCrooks run the whole world, and the Dow just fell.\nCrap rules the airwaves. All your best plans stall.\nThe air is dirty, and you don’t feel well.\nYour wife won’t listen. Friends no longer call.\nSad songs from youth no longer cast a spell.\nCancer research has run into a wall.\nSome inflated hack just won the Nobel.\nYou witness clear signs of decline and fall.\nThe neighbors are cold, and your house won’t sell.\nYour cat has bad teeth. Your paychecks feel small.\nMaybe you’re really sick. It’s hard to tell.\nUp ahead, traffic has slowed to a crawl.\nThe world didn’t just start going to hell.\nYou just noticed for the first time, that’s all."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThink thou and act; to-morrow thou shalt die\nOutstretch'd in the sun's warmth upon the shore,\nThou say'st: \"Man's measur'd path is all gone o'er:\nUp all his years, steeply, with strain and sigh,\nMan clomb until he touch'd the truth; and I,\nEven I, am he whom it was destin'd for.\"\nHow should this be? Art thou then so much more\nThan they who sow'd, that thou shouldst reap thereby?\nNay, come up hither. From this wave-wash'd mound\nUnto the furthest flood-brim look with me;\nThen reach on with thy thought till it be drown'd.\nMiles and miles distant though the last line be,\nAnd though thy soul sail leagues and leagues beyond,—\nStill, leagues beyond those leagues, there is more sea."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhen I was three,\na tsunami hit town.\n“Daddy, Daddy, save me,\ndon’t let me drown.”\nHe saved me\nand my common-type dolls.\nWhen I was sixteen,\nanother tsunami hit town.\nI cried to my daddy,\n“Daddy, Daddy, please save me,\ndon’t let me drown!”\nBut he let go of my hand!\nI still dance\nto what broke on my life."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nTouching your goodness, I am like a man\nWho turns a letter over in his hand\nAnd you might think this was because the hand\nWas unfamiliar but, truth is, the man\nHas never had a letter from anyone;\nAnd now he is both afraid of what it means\nAnd ashamed because he has no other means\nTo find out what it says than to ask someone.\nHis uncle could have left the farm to him,\nOr his parents died before he sent them word,\nOr the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.\nAfraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him.\nWhat would you call his feeling for the words\nThat keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?"} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nFrom child to youth; from youth to arduous man;\nFrom lethargy to fever of the heart;\nFrom faithful life to dream-dower'd days apart;\nFrom trust to doubt; from doubt to brink of ban;—\nThus much of change in one swift cycle ran\nTill now. Alas, the soul!—how soon must she\nAccept her primal immortality,—\nThe flesh resume its dust whence it began?\nO Lord of work and peace! O Lord of life!\nO Lord, the awful Lord of will! though late,\nEven yet renew this soul with duteous breath:\nThat when the peace is garner'd in from strife,\nThe work retriev'd, the will regenerate,\nThis soul may see thy face, O Lord of death!"} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSo I'll speak ill of the dead. A was crooked,\nplanting the small left finger of the raccoon in the upholstery\nbefore he sold the car. B made certain to point out Celia's\nbewildered look before her pink slip came in the flimsy institution.\nIn the videos of C, a jejune overwhelmed the cast.\nD built dollhouses. Even Lonnie down at Shell\nfound him less a man for it, the night they went off to see the stock\ncars break. I wanted E's hair, but by the end it was no more. F\nrefused alms, pulling the man up by his shirt in the street, and\nG sought rewards. Marybeth said H fondled her for sport.\nNow you, I, Smokey, hell\nbent on a village version of Club 21, embarrassed by our attentions.\nMistrust it was. Dig me a chamber of preparedness.\nWilliam T. Osborn, 1964-1993"} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nFar in a western brookland\nThat bred me long ago The poplars stand and tremble\nBy pools I used to know.\nThere, in the windless night-time,\nThe wanderer, marvelling why,\nHalts on the bridge to hearken\nHow soft the poplars sigh.\nHe hears: long since forgotten\nIn fields where I was known,\nHere I lie down in London\nAnd turn to rest alone.\nThere, by the starlit fences,\nThe wanderer halts and hears My soul that lingers sighing\nAbout the glimmering weirs."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nOthers taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs\nAlways wrong to the light, so never seeing\nDeeper down in the well than where the water\nGives me back in a shining surface picture\nMe myself in the summer heaven godlike\nLooking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,\nI discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,\nThrough the picture, a something white, uncertain,\nSomething more of the depths—and then I lost it.\nWater came to rebuke the too clear water.\nOne drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple\nShook whatever it was lay there at bottom,\nBlurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?\nTruth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nBecause the only view we have is the one\nthat looks down on the knees. Praise perspective.\nPraise shared disdain. Praise space made by connective\ntissue; the synaptic cleft; elbowroom\nat the dinner table; polite conversation;\nlies you push through your teeth. Because dissecting\na dog's heart won't change the way it thinks. Praise redirected\ntraffic. Praise the gnarled lip that defends\nthe gentle bones. Because your mother was\na seahorse. And to think of her thin is\nto empty all the ice from the tea glasses;\nto strain the soup by driving it through your hand.\nPraise tablecloths; sway-back chairs; the plastic\nfolds that protect slice after slice of cheese."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIn syrup, in syrup,\nIn syrup we drown,\nWho sell ourselves\nWith a sparkling smile.\nPadded with pathos\nOur winding sheet.\nThe bomb bounded\nBy buxom beauties.\nHorror gelded\nBy the happy ending.\nHow can we swim\nWho hold to our haloes?\nDown we go, down\nIn syrup, in syrup."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAccuse me not, beseech thee, that I wear\nToo calm and sad a face in front of thine;\nFor we two look two ways, and cannot shine\nWith the same sunlight on our brow and hair.\nOn me thou lookest with no doubting care,\nAs on a bee shut in a crystalline;\nSince sorrow hath shut me safe in love’s divine,\nAnd to spread wing and fly in the outer air\nWere most impossible failure, if I strove\nTo fail so. But I look on thee—on thee—\nBeholding, besides love, the end of love,\nHearing oblivion beyond memory;\nAs one who sits and gazes from above,\nOver the rivers to the bitter sea."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI’m terrified of a number of fates,\nPoisoned water under a tyrant’s wage,\nBeing fired for doing nothing, my parents dying,\nCommitting a thought like this to the page,\nThe splash of acid to the face\nThe Queens non-profit boss received\nLeaving work one blue August evening. Hell’s\nSo eloquent and poetry’s no fate at all\nUnless you count the story of the divided sea\nWaiting to wash its assassins away.\nSays the Pharaoh, “That’s so sad.”\nBut that story is less fate than news, whereas\nThat Queens boss? Permanently burned, the Times\nSays one eye won’t stop weeping."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nPoor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, [......] these rebel powers that thee array,\nWhy dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,\nPainting thy outward walls so costly gay?\nWhy so large cost, having so short a lease,\nDost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?\nShall worms, inheritors of this excess,\nEat up thy charge?\nIs this thy body's end?\nThen soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss And let that pine to aggravate thy store;\nBuy terms divine in selling hours of dross;\nWithin be fed, without be rich no more.\nSo shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,\nAnd,\nDeath once dead, there's no more dying then."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nGod started small At the first showdown\nbetween good and evil God didn’t come at anyone\nlike a cowboy God didn’t open with solar flares\nor asteroids or mass extinction or planetary heat death\nGod didn’t outgun anyone God outmanned them\nGod made man in the face of the beast\nAnd in the face of the beast God made —from inside\nthe great and gaping maw while languishing\nin the hot damp In the face of that\ngreat terror God summoned the smallest—\nadrenaline serotonin hemoglobin oxytocin motes\nof possibility God started by making—\nlight into land masses sand into vessels preservation\nas civilization and sometimes God won"} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhat potions have I drunk of Siren tears,\nDistill’d from limbecks foul as hell within,\nApplying fears to hopes, and hopes to fears,\nStill losing when I saw myself to win!\nWhat wretched errors hath my heart committed,\nWhilst it hath thought itself so blessed never!\nHow have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted,\nIn the distraction of this madding fever!\nO benefit of ill! now I find true\nThat better is, by evil still made better;\nAnd ruin’d love, when it is built anew,\nGrows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater.\nSo I return rebuk’d to my content,\nAnd gain by ill thrice more than I have spent."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIn vain to me the smiling Mornings shine,\nAnd reddening Phœbus lifts his golden fire;\nThe birds in vain their amorous descant join;\nOr cheerful fields resume their green attire;\nThese ears, alas! for other notes repine,\nA different object do these eyes require;\nMy lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;\nAnd in my breast the imperfect joys expire.\nYet Morning smiles the busy race to cheer,\nAnd new-born pleasure brings to happier men;\nThe fields to all their wonted tribute bear;\nTo warm their little loves the birds complain;\nI fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear,\nAnd weep the more because I weep in vain."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nThou two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate,\nDidst weep when Spain cast forth with flaming sword,\nThe children of the prophets of the Lord,\nPrince, priest, and people, spurned by zealot hate.\nHounded from sea to sea, from state to state,\nThe West refused them, and the East abhorred.\nNo anchorage the known world could afford,\nClose-locked was every port, barred every gate.\nThen smiling, thou unveil’dst, O two-faced year,\nA virgin world where doors of sunset part,\nSaying, \"Ho, all who weary, enter here!\nThere falls each ancient barrier that the art\nOf race or creed or rank devised, to rear\nGrim bulwarked hatred between heart and heart!\""} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nBeing your slave, what should I do but tend\nUpon the hours and times of your desire?\nI have no precious time at all to spend,\nNor services to do, till you require.\nNor dare I chide the world-without-end hour\nWhilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you.\nNor think the bitterness of absence sour\nWhen you have bid your servant once adieu;\nNor dare I question with my jealous thought\nWhere you may be, or your affairs suppose,\nBut like a sad slave, stay and think of nought,\nSave, where you are how happy you make those.\nSo true a fool is love that in your will\nThough you do anything, he thinks no ill."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSo is it not with me as with that Muse,\nStirr’d by a painted beauty to his verse,\nWho heaven itself for ornament doth use\nAnd every fair with his fair doth rehearse,\nMaking a couplement of proud compare.\nWith sun and moon, with earth and sea’s rich gems,\nWith April’s first-born flowers, and all things rare,\nThat heaven’s air in this huge rondure hems.\nO! let me, true in love, but truly write,\nAnd then believe me, my love is as fair\nAs any mother’s child, though not so bright\nAs those gold candles fix’d in heaven’s air:\nLet them say more that like of hearsay well;\nI will not praise that purpose not to sell."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nUp the dog bounds to the window, baying\nlike a basset his doleful, tearing sounds\nfrom the belly, as if mourning a dead king, and now he’s howling like a beagle – yips, brays,\ngagging growls – and scratching the sill paintless,\nthat’s how much he’s missed you, the two of you, both of you, mother and daughter, my wife\nand child.\nAll week he’s curled at my feet,\nwarming himself and me watching more TV, or wandered the lonely rooms, my dog shadow,\nwho like a poodle now hops, amped-up windup\nmaniac yo-yo with matted curls and snot nose smearing the panes, having heard another car\nlike yours taking its grinding turn down\nour block, or a school bus, or bird-squawk, that’s how much he’s missed you, good dog,\ncompanion dog, dog-of-all-types, most excellent dog\nI told you once and for all we should never get."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nLoving you less than life, a little less\nThan bitter-sweet upon a broken wall\nOr brush-wood smoke in autumn, I confess\nI cannot swear I love you not at all.\nFor there is that about you in this light—\nA yellow darkness, sinister of rain—\nWhich sturdily recalls my stubborn sight\nTo dwell on you, and dwell on you again.\nAnd I am made aware of many a week\nI shall consume, remembering in what way\nYour brown hair grows about your brow and cheek\nAnd what divine absurdities you say:\nTill all the world, and I, and surely you,\nWill know I love you, whether or not I do."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhen last we parted, thou wert young and fair,\nHow beautiful let fond remembrance say!\nAlas! since then old time has stolen away\nFull thirty years, leaving my temples bare.—\nSo has it perished like a thing of air,\nThe dream of love and youth!— now both are grey\nYet still remembering that delightful day,\nThough time with his cold touch has blanched my hair,\nThough I have suffered many years of pain\nSince then, though I did never think to live\nTo hear that voice or see those eyes again,\nI can a sad but cordial greeting give,\nAnd for thy welfare breathe as warm a prayer—\nAs when I loved thee young and fair."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI hold my honey and I store my bread\nIn little jars and cabinets of my will.\nI label clearly, and each latch and lid\nI bid, Be firm till I return from hell.\nI am very hungry. I am incomplete.\nAnd none can tell when I may dine again.\nNo man can give me any word but Wait,\nThe puny light. I keep eyes pointed in;\nHoping that, when the devil days of my hurt\nDrag out to their last dregs and I resume\nOn such legs as are left me, in such heart\nAs I can manage, remember to go home,\nMy taste will not have turned insensitive\nTo honey and bread old purity could love."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nOne foot down, then hop! It's hot.\nGood things for the ones that's got.\nAnother jump, now to the left.\nEverybody for hisself.\nIn the air, now both feet down.\nSince you black, don't stick around.\nFood is gone, the rent is due,\nCurse and cry and then jump two.\nAll the people out of work,\nHold for three, then twist and jerk.\nCross the line, they count you out.\nThat's what hopping's all about.\nBoth feet flat, the game is done.\nThey think I lost. I think I won."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nInside every world there is another world trying to get out,\nand there is something in you that would like to discount this world.\nThe stars could rise in darkness over heartbreaking coasts,\nand you would not know if you were ruining your life or beginning a real one.\nYou could claim professional fondness for the world around you;\nthe pictures would dissolve under the paint coming alive,\nand you would only feel a phantom skip of the heart, absorbed so in the colors.\nYour disbelief is a later novel emerging in the long, long shadow of an earlier one—\nis this the great world, which is whatever is the case?\nThe sustained helplessness you feel in the long emptiness of days is matched\nby the new suspiciousness and wrath you wake to each morning.\nIsn’t this a relationship with your death, too, to fall in love with your inscrutable life?\nYour teeth fill with cavities. There is always unearned happiness for some,\nand the criminal feeling of solitude. Always, everyone lies about his life."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nHis piercing pince-nez. Some dim frieze\nHands point to a dim frieze, in the dark night.\nIn the book of his music the corners have straightened:\nWhich owe their presence to our sleeping hands.\nThe ox-blood from the hands which play\nFor fire for warmth for hands for growth\nIs there room in the room that you room in?\nUpon his structured tomb:\nStill they mean something. For the dance\nAnd the architecture.\nWeave among incidents\nMay be portentous to him\nWe are the sleeping fragments of his sky,\nWind giving presence to fragments."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nStill will I harvest beauty where it grows:\nIn coloured fungus and the spotted fog\nSurprised on foods forgotten; in ditch and bog\nFilmed brilliant with irregular rainbows\nOf rust and oil, where half a city throws\nIts empty tins; and in some spongy log\nWhence headlong leaps the oozy emerald frog. . . .\nAnd a black pupil in the green scum shows.\nHer the inhabiter of divers places\nSurmising at all doors, I push them all.\nOh, you that fearful of a creaking hinge\nTurn back forevermore with craven faces,\nI tell you Beauty bears an ultra fringe\nUnguessed of you upon her gossamer shawl!"} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMy heart is a fancy place\nWhere giant reddish-purple cauliflowers\n& white ones in French & English are outside\nWaiting to welcome you to a boat\nOver the low black river for a big dinner\nThere's alot of choice among the foods\nEven a tortured lamb served in pieces\nEn croute on a plate so hot as a rack\nOf clouds blown over the cold filthy river\nWe are entitled to see anytime while we\nUse the tablecovers to love each other\nPublicly dishing out imitative luxuries\nTo show off poetry's extreme generosity\nThen home in the heart of a big limousine"} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhen I have seen by Time’s fell hand defac’d\nThe rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;\nWhen sometime lofty towers I see down-raz’d,\nAnd brass eternal slave to mortal rage;\nWhen I have seen the hungry ocean gain\nAdvantage on the kingdom of the shore,\nAnd the firm soil win of the watery main,\nIncreasing store with loss, and loss with store;\nWhen I have seen such interchange of state,\nOr state itself confounded, to decay;\nRuin hath taught me thus to ruminate:\nThat Time will come and take my love away.\nThis thought is as a death which cannot choose\nBut weep to have, that which it fears to lose."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIt smiles to see me\nStill in my bathrobe.\nIt sits in my lap\nAnd will not let me rise.\nNow it is kissing my eyes.\nArms enfold me, arms\nPale with a thick down.\nIt seems I am falling asleep\nTo the sound of a story\nBeing read me.\nThis is the story.\nWeeks have passed\nSince first I lifted my hand\nTo set it down."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAgainst that time, if ever that time come,\nWhen I shall see thee frown on my defects,\nWhen as thy love hath cast his utmost sum,\nCall’d to that audit by advis’d respects;\nAgainst that time when thou shalt strangely pass,\nAnd scarcely greet me with that sun, thine eye,\nWhen love, converted from the thing it was,\nShall reasons find of settled gravity;\nAgainst that time do I ensconce me here,\nWithin the knowledge of mine own desert,\nAnd this my hand, against my self uprear,\nTo guard the lawful reasons on thy part:\nTo leave poor me thou hast the strength of laws,\nSince why to love I can allege no cause."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe small grey cloudy louse that nests in my beard\nIs not, as some have called it, ‘a pearl of God’ —\nNo, it is a fiery tormentor\nWaking me at two a.m.\nOr thereabouts, when the lights are still on\nIn the houses in the pa, to go across thick grass\nWet with rain, feet cold, to kneel\nFor an hour or two in front of the red flickering\nTabernacle light — what He sees inside\nMy meandering mind I can only guess —\nA madman, a nobody, a raconteur\nWhom He can joke with — ‘Lord,’ I ask Him,\n‘Do You or don’t You expect me to put up with lice?’\nHis silent laugh still shakes the hills at dawn."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe fish are drifting calmly in their tank\nbetween the green reeds, lit by a white glow\nthat passes for the sun. Blindly, the blank\nglass that holds them in displays their slow\nprogress from end to end, familiar rocks\nset into the gravel, murmuring rows\nof filters, a universe the flying fox\nand glass cats, Congo tetras, bristle-nose\npleocostemus all take for granted. Yet\nthe platys, gold and red, persist in leaping\noccasionally, as if they can't quite let\nalone a possibility—of wings,\nmaybe, once they reach the air? They die\non the rug. We find them there, eyes open in surprise."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLike a loose island on the wide expanse,\nUnconscious floating on the fickle sea,\nHerself her all, she lives in privacy;\nHer waking life as lonely as a trance,\nDoom’d to behold the universal dance,\nAnd never hear the music which expounds\nThe solemn step, coy slide, the merry bounds.\nThe vague, mute language of the countenance.\nIn vain for her I smooth my antic rhyme;\nShe cannot hear it. All her little being\nConcentrated in her solitary seeing—\nWhat can she know of beauty or sublime?\nAnd yet methinks she looks so calm and good,\nGod must be with her in her solitude!"} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nOh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes!\nHow shall I lure thee to my haunts forlorn!\nFor me wilt thou renew the withered rose,\nAnd clear my painful path of pointed thorn?\nAh come, sweet nymph! in smiles and softness drest,\nLike the young hours that lead the tender year\nEnchantress come! and charm my cares to rest:\nAlas! the flatterer flies, and will not hear!\nA prey to fear, anxiety, and pain,\nMust I a sad existence still deplore?\nLo! the flowers fade, but all the thorns remain,\n‘For me the vernal garland blooms no more.’\nCome then, ‘pale Misery’s love!’ be thou my cure,\nAnd I will bless thee, who though slow art sure."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThat you were once unkind befriends me now,\nAnd for that sorrow, which I then did feel,\nNeeds must I under my transgression bow,\nUnless my nerves were brass or hammer’d steel.\nFor if you were by my unkindness shaken,\nAs I by yours, you’ve pass’d a hell of time;\nAnd I, a tyrant, have no leisure taken\nTo weigh how once I suffer’d in your crime.\nO! that our night of woe might have remember’d\nMy deepest sense, how hard true sorrow hits,\nAnd soon to you, as you to me, then tender’d\nThe humble salve, which wounded bosoms fits!\nBut that your trespass now becomes a fee;\nMine ransoms yours, and yours must ransom me."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLook in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest,\nNow is the time that face should form another,\nWhose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,\nThou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.\nFor where is she so fair whose uneared womb\nDisdains the tillage of thy husbandry?\nOr who is he so fond will be the tomb\nOf his self-love, to stop posterity?\nThou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee\nCalls back the lovely April of her prime;\nSo thou through windows of thine age shalt see,\nDespite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.\nBut if thou live rememb’red not to be,\nDie single, and thine image dies with thee."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSo are you to my thoughts as food to life,\nOr as sweet-season’d showers are to the ground;\nAnd for the peace of you I hold such strife\nAs ’twixt a miser and his wealth is found.\nNow proud as an enjoyer, and anon\nDoubting the filching age will steal his treasure;\nNow counting best to be with you alone,\nThen better’d that the world may see my pleasure:\nSometime all full with feasting on your sight,\nAnd by and by clean starved for a look;\nPossessing or pursuing no delight,\nSave what is had, or must from you be took.\nThus do I pine and surfeit day by day,\nOr gluttoning on all, or all away."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhen forty winters shall besiege thy brow\nAnd dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,\nThy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,\nWill be a tattered weed, of small worth held.\nThen being asked where all thy beauty lies—\nWhere all the treasure of thy lusty days—\nTo say within thine own deep-sunken eyes\nWere an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.\nHow much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use\nIf thou couldst answer \"This fair child of mine\nShall sum my count and make my old excuse\",\nProving his beauty by succession thine.\nThis were to be new made when thou art old,\nAnd see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nDown the long hall she glistens like a star,\nThe foam-born mother of Love, transfixed to stone,\nYet none the less immortal, breathing on.\nTime's brutal hand hath maimed but could not mar.\nWhen first the enthralled enchantress from afar\nDazzled mine eyes, I saw not her alone,\nSerenely poised on her world-worshipped throne,\nAs when she guided once her dove-drawn car,—\nBut at her feet a pale, death-stricken Jew,\nHer life adorer, sobbed farewell to love.\nHere Heine wept! Here still he weeps anew,\nNor ever shall his shadow lift or move,\nWhile mourns one ardent heart, one poet-brain,\nFor vanished Hellas and Hebraic pain."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThat thou art blam’d shall not be thy defect,\nFor slander’s mark was ever yet the fair;\nThe ornament of beauty is suspect,\nA crow that flies in heaven’s sweetest air.\nSo thou be good, slander doth but approve\nThy worth the greater being woo’d of time;\nFor canker vice the sweetest buds doth love,\nAnd thou present’st a pure unstained prime.\nThou hast passed by the ambush of young days\nEither not assail’d, or victor being charg’d;\nYet this thy praise cannot be so thy praise,\nTo tie up envy, evermore enlarg’d,\nIf some suspect of ill mask’d not thy show,\nThen thou alone kingdoms of hearts shouldst owe."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIn the other world we use other words, painting\nthem with water on the desert’s sidewalk under • unwaver\ning / the / sky’s gaze, meant to be eaten up immediate\nly by our nearest star: we know we’re brief, a flash\nof the magnesium bulb’s Lichtenberg lace or\nin the hardpan land we inhabit, unwilling / it’s /\nto unloosen • Edenic ancestry to us, to unearth / un\ncouth / the • treasure which lies (we believe) like an ocean\nof luminous fish with their wayfinder’s lanterned\nfaces beneath us, sufficiently gilded to wake the dead\n’s memory of what they no longer own: a form\nfor the nation-state to take, to write its penal colony’s\npenalties upon, or hold, same as we hold our own\nsouls, which wager against us as soon as they’re able."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSee, it’s a kind of crime scene,\nas if the mind were a dime\nnovel, a scrim of need and semen,\nall cinder and siren, a dim\nprison where the miser dines\non rinds of desire, and the sinner,\nsincere as denim, repeats Eden’s\ndemise — that luckless toss of dice.\nYet here at the rim of this demesne\na mitigating mise-en-scène:\na close-up of her mother stirring rice,\na glass of sparkling cider, a mince\npie spliced in — not to rescind or mend:\nwhat mind denies mercies mine in the end."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI’d have you known! It puzzles me forever\nTo hear, day in, day out, the words men use,\nBut never a single word about you, never.\nStrange!—in your every gesture, worlds of news.\nOn busses people talk. On curbs I hear them;\nIn parks I listen, barbershop and bar.\nIn banks they murmur, and I sidle near them;\nBut none allude to you there. None so far.\nI read books too, and turn the pages, spying:\nYou must be there, one beautiful as you!\nBut never, not by name. No planes are flying\nYour name in lacy trailers past the blue\nMarquees of heaven. No trumpets cry your fame.\nStrange!—how no constellations spell your name!"} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWere’t aught to me I bore the canopy,\nWith my extern the outward honouring,\nOr laid great bases for eternity,\nWhich proves more short than waste or ruining;\nHave I not seen dwellers on form and favour\nLose all, and more, by paying too much rent,\nFor compound sweet forgoing simple savour,\nPitiful thrivers, in their gazing spent?\nNo;—let me be obsequious in thy heart,\nAnd take thou my oblation, poor but free,\nWhich is not mix’d with seconds, knows no art,\nBut mutual render, only me for thee.\nHence, thou suborn’d informer! a true soul,\nWhen most impeach’d, stands least in thy control."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\ninstead of entrance\nGoodbye means Avoir\nSved’s dream said from nowhere\nof aliquant angles\nsome spindle of the sun\nempirically facted\ndeafening skin\nopen and afterwards\na cough is a couch\nidled into\nwithout rain\nan island\neasily a third worse\nIndigo with a flame-red tongue"} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhat is your substance, whereof are you made,\nThat millions of strange shadows on you tend?\nSince every one, hath every one, one shade,\nAnd you but one, can every shadow lend.\nDescribe Adonis, and the counterfeit\nIs poorly imitated after you;\nOn Helen’s cheek all art of beauty set,\nAnd you in Grecian tires are painted new:\nSpeak of the spring, and foison of the year,\nThe one doth shadow of your beauty show,\nThe other as your bounty doth appear;\nAnd you in every blessed shape we know.\nIn all external grace you have some part,\nBut you like none, none you, for constant heart."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhen forty winters shall besiege thy brow,\nAnd dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,\nThy youth’s proud livery so gazed on now,\nWill be a tatter’d weed of small worth held:\nThen being asked, where all thy beauty lies,\nWhere all the treasure of thy lusty days;\nTo say, within thine own deep sunken eyes,\nWere an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise.\nHow much more praise deserv’d thy beauty’s use,\nIf thou couldst answer ‘This fair child of mine\nShall sum my count, and make my old excuse,’\nProving his beauty by succession thine!\nThis were to be new made when thou art old,\nAnd see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIt’s a strange courageyou give me, ancient star:\nShine alone in the sunrisetoward which you lend no part!\nI\nShine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze,\nthat reflects neither my face nor any inner part\nof my being, shine like fire, that mirrors nothing.\nII\nLend no part to any humanity that suffuses\nyou in its own light.\nBe not chimera of morning,\nHalf-man, half-star.\nBe not an intelligence,\nLike a widow’s bird\nOr an old horse."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nTake all my loves, my love, yea take them all;\nWhat hast thou then more than thou hadst before?\nNo love, my love, that thou mayst true love call;\nAll mine was thine, before thou hadst this more.\nThen, if for my love, thou my love receivest,\nI cannot blame thee, for my love thou usest;\nBut yet be blam’d, if thou thyself deceivest\nBy wilful taste of what thyself refusest.\nI do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief,\nAlthough thou steal thee all my poverty:\nAnd yet, love knows it is a greater grief\nTo bear love’s wrong, than hate’s known injury.\nLascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,\nKill me with spites yet we must not be foes."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nNo, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change:\nThy pyramids built up with newer might\nTo me are nothing novel, nothing strange;\nThey are but dressings of a former sight.\nOur dates are brief, and therefore we admire\nWhat thou dost foist upon us that is old;\nAnd rather make them born to our desire\nThan think that we before have heard them told.\nThy registers and thee I both defy,\nNot wondering at the present nor the past,\nFor thy records and what we see doth lie,\nMade more or less by thy continual haste.\nThis I do vow and this shall ever be;\nI will be true despite thy scythe and thee."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe moon drops one or two feathers into the field.\nThe dark wheat listens.\nBe still.\nNow.\nThere they are, the moon's young, trying\nTheir wings.\nBetween trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow\nOf her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone\nWholly, into the air.\nI stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe\nOr move.\nI listen.\nThe wheat leans back toward its own darkness,\nAnd I lean toward mine."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nSince there is no escape, since at the end\nMy body will be utterly destroyed,\nThis hand I love as I have loved a friend,\nThis body I tended, wept with and enjoyed;\nSince there is no escape even for me\nWho love life with a love too sharp to bear:\nThe scent of orchards in the rain, the sea\nAnd hours alone too still and sure for prayer—\nSince darkness waits for me, then all the more\nLet me go down as waves sweep to the shore\nIn pride, and let me sing with my last breath;\nIn these few hours of light I lift my head;\nLife is my lover—I shall leave the dead\nIf there is any way to baffle death."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe jolt that comes to bones inside a tumbled streetcar\nis what the painter considers as she strokes her-\nself into story. There is less to the jolt that\ncomes as he shuts his eyes before the monitor, save\nwhat he imagines—a lightning bolt, a god tapping\nthe shoulder. He imagines the sky swelling\nwith ceiling fans or the guano of extinct birds,\na jolt riding from his shoulder\nblades to his eyelids, dropping with roller\ncoaster clacks to his fingers. Here, he dreams of Frida\nKahlo. Here, he says, let me spread my flesh out like a\ntable linen, let my bones be silver that touches,\nmaking, again, that clack. My skull will be a glass,\nset properly, I have class enough."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe boy painted himself white and ran into the darkness.\nWe let the words “he may be dead, bury him,”\nbury him.\nWe took his clothes to the rummage sale\nin the basement of the mission\nWe put his photographs and drawings\nin a birdcage and covered it with a starquilt.\nFor four nights voices carried clear to the river.\nAfter winter so many storms moved in\nstrangers came among us\nThey danced\nThey shoveled in the shadows of trees\nThen, somehow we all felt\nall of us were of this one boy."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nDull to myself, and almost dead to these\nMy many fresh and fragrant mistresses;\nLost to all music now, since everything\nPuts on the semblance here of sorrowing.\nSick is the land to th' heart, and doth endure\nMore dangerous faintings by her desp'rate cure.\nBut if that golden age would come again\nAnd Charles here rule, as he before did reign;\nIf smooth and unperplex'd the seasons were\nAs when the sweet Maria lived here;\nI should delight to have my curls half drown'd\nIn Tyrian dews, and head with roses crown'd.\nAnd once more yet (ere I am laid out dead)\nKnock at a star with my exalted head."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMethought I saw the grave where Laura lay,\nWithin that temple where the vestal flame\nWas wont to burn; and, passing by that way,\nTo see that buried dust of living fame,\nWhose tomb fair Love, and fairer Virtue kept:\nAll suddenly I saw the Fairy Queen;\nAt whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept,\nAnd, from thenceforth, those Graces were not seen:\nFor they this queen attended; in whose stead\nOblivion laid him down on Laura’s hearse:\nHereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed,\nAnd groans of buried ghosts the heavens did pierce:\nWhere Homer’s spright did tremble all for grief,\nAnd cursed the access of that celestial thief!"} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhen in the chronicle of wasted time\nI see descriptions of the fairest wights,\nAnd beauty making beautiful old rime,\nIn praise of ladies dead and lovely knights,\nThen, in the blazon of sweet beauty’s best,\nOf hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,\nI see their antique pen would have express’d\nEven such a beauty as you master now.\nSo all their praises are but prophecies\nOf this our time, all you prefiguring;\nAnd for they looked but with divining eyes,\nThey had not skill enough your worth to sing:\nFor we, which now behold these present days,\nHave eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nNow hardly here and there a hackney-coach Appearing, show'd the ruddy morn's approach.\nNow Betty from her master's bed had flown,\nAnd softly stole to discompose her own.\nThe slip-shod 'prentice from his master's door Had par'd the dirt, and sprinkled round the floor.\nNow Moll had whirl'd her mop with dext'rous airs,\nPrepar'd to scrub the entry and the stairs.\nThe youth with broomy stumps began to trace The kennel-edge, where wheels had worn the place.\nThe small-coal man was heard with cadence deep;\nTill drown'd in shriller notes of \"chimney-sweep.\" Duns at his lordship's gate began to meet;\nAnd brickdust Moll had scream'd through half a street.\nThe turnkey now his flock returning sees,\nDuly let out a-nights to steal for fees.\nThe watchful bailiffs take their silent stands;\nAnd schoolboys lag with satchels in their hands."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nFayre is my love, when her fayre golden heares,\nWith the loose wynd ye waving chance to marke:\nFayre when the rose in her red cheekes appears,\nOr in her eyes the fyre of love does sparke.\nFayre when her brest lyke a rich laden barke,\nWith pretious merchandize she forth doth lay:\nFayre when that cloud of pryde which oft doth dark\nHer goodly light with smiles she drives away,\nBut fayrest she, when so she doth display\nThe gate with pearles and rubyes richly dight:\nThrogh which her words so wise do make their way\nTo beare the message of her gentle spright.\nThe rest be works of natures wonderment,\nBut this the worke of harts astonishment."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nNevermind that keeping ashes\non the mantel feels ghoulish,\nand comically impractical:\nnot just another thing,\na miniature memento urn, to dust,\nbut dust to dust—\nI dread the conversational\nHara-kiri, not, that’s what’s leftof my brother, but, he died of suicide:\nthe chasm of silence following the leap—\nso the cremains stay\nin the office closet till they migrate\nthrough no will of their own\nto a moving box\nI haven’t unpacked and likely won’t."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nHer unawed face, whose pose so long assumed\nIs touched with what reality we feel,\nBends to itself and, to itself resumed,\nRestores a tender fiction to the real.\nAnd in her artful posture movement lies\nWhose timeless motion flesh must so conceal;\nYet what her pose conceals we might surmise\nAnd might pretend to gather from her eyes\nThe final motion flesh gives up to art.\nBut slowly, if we watch her long enough,\nThe nerves grow subtler, and she moves apart\nInto a space too dim with time and blood\nFor our set eyes to follow true enough,\nOr nerves to guess about her, if they would."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nO patient shore, that canst not go to meet\nThy love, the restless sea, how comfortest\nThou all thy loneliness? Art thou at rest,\nWhen, loosing his strong arms from round thy feet,\nHe turns away? Know’st thou, however sweet\nThat other shore may be, that to thy breast\nHe must return? And when in sterner test\nHe folds thee to a heart which does not beat,\nWraps thee in ice, and gives no smile, no kiss,\nTo break long wintry days, still dost thou miss\nNaught from thy trust? Still, wait, unfaltering,\nThe higher, warmer waves which leap in spring?\nO sweet, wise shore, to be so satisfied!\nO heart, learn from the shore! Love has a tide!"} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMine eye and heart are at a mortal war,\nHow to divide the conquest of thy sight;\nMine eye my heart thy picture’s sight would bar,\nMy heart mine eye the freedom of that right.\nMy heart doth plead that thou in him dost lie,\nA closet never pierced with crystal eyes;\nBut the defendant doth that plea deny,\nAnd says in him thy fair appearance lies.\nTo side this title is impannelled\nA quest of thoughts, all tenants to the heart;\nAnd by their verdict is determined\nThe clear eye’s moiety, and the dear heart’s part:\nAs thus; mine eye’s due is thy outward part,\nAnd my heart’s right, thy inward love of heart."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSo shall I live, supposing thou art true,\nLike a deceived husband; so love’s face\nMay still seem love to me, though alter’d new;\nThy looks with me, thy heart in other place:\nFor there can live no hatred in thine eye,\nTherefore in that I cannot know thy change.\nIn many’s looks, the false heart’s history\nIs writ in moods, and frowns, and wrinkles strange.\nBut heaven in thy creation did decree\nThat in thy face sweet love should ever dwell;\nWhate’er thy thoughts, or thy heart’s workings be,\nThy looks should nothing thence, but sweetness tell.\nHow like Eve’s apple doth thy beauty grow,\nIf thy sweet virtue answer not thy show!"} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWe cannot live, except thus mutually\nWe alternate, aware or unaware,\nThe reflex act of life: and when we bear\nOur virtue onward most impulsively,\nMost full of invocation, and to be\nMost instantly compellant, certes, there\nWe live most life, whoever breathes most air\nAnd counts his dying years by sun and sea.\nBut when a soul, by choice and conscience, doth\nThrow out her full force on another soul,\nThe conscience and the concentration both\nMake mere life, Love. For Life in perfect whole\nAnd aim consummated, is Love in sooth,\nAs nature’s magnet-heat rounds pole with pole."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLong have I long’d to see my love againe,\nStill have I wisht, but never could obtaine it;\nRather than all the world (if I might gaine it)\nWould I desire my love’s sweet precious gaine.\nYet in my soule I see him everie day,\nSee him, and see his still sterne countenaunce,\nBut (ah) what is of long continuance,\nWhere majestie and beautie beares the sway?\nSometimes, when I imagine that I see him,\n(As love is full of foolish fantasies)\nWeening to kisse his lips, as my love’s fees,\nI feele but aire: nothing but aire to bee him.\nThus with Ixion, kisse I clouds in vaine:\nThus with Ixion, feele I endles paine."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nBehold the gloomy tyrant’s awful form\nBinding the captive earth in icy chains;\nHis chilling breath sweeps o’er the watery plains,\nHowls in the blast, and swells the rising storm.\nSee from its centre bends the rifted tower,\nThreat’ning the lowly vale with frowning pride,\nO’er the scared flocks that seek its sheltering side,\nA fearful ruin o’er their heads to pour.\nWhile to the cheerful hearth and social board\nContent and ease repair, the sons of want\nReceive from niggard fate their pittance scant;\nAnd where some shed bleak covert may afford,\nWan poverty, amidst her meagre host\nCasts round her haggard eyes, and shivers at the frost."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nA boy came up the street and there was a girl.\n\"Hello,\" they said in passing, then didn’t pass.\nThey began to imagine. They imagined all night\nand woke imagining what the other imagined.\nLater they woke with no need to imagine.\nThey were together. They kept waking together.\nOnce they woke a daughter who got up\nand went looking for something without looking back.\nBut they had one another. Then one of them died.\nIt makes no difference which. Either. The other\ntried to imagine dying, and couldn’t really,\nbut died later, maybe to find out,\nthough probably not. Not everything that happens\nis a learning experience. Maybe nothing is."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMy master/father sent me up from South\nCarolina to Boston as a nine-year-old.\nMy mother's illiterate silence has been a death.\nI wonder if she still labors in his fields.\nHis sister, dutiful but cold as snow,\ngave me a little room in her house, below\nthe stairs with the Irish servants, who hated me\nfor the fatal flaw in my genealogy.\nFor the first time in my life I am at home\nin this bevy of scholars, my first family.\nHere, the wallpapers welcome me into every room,\nand the mirrors see me, not my pedigree.\nMy sisters, Jerusha, Emilia, Elizabeth ...\nBut Mama's unlettered silence is a death."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nJook joint's about to come alive!\nIt's like a bee outside a hive;\nAnd when the hive begins to hum,\nIt's like a dim and distant drum;\nAnd when the drum begins to beat,\nIt's like a circus down the street;\nAnd when the street begins to fill,\nIt's like a sudden summer chill;\nAnd just as summer simmers down,\nIt's like the fireworks over town.\nDon't matter what the preachers say—\nThis congregation's here to stay\n'Cause when the jook joint comes alive\nIs when the Delta blues arrive!"} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nBoth guitars run trebly.\nOne noodlesOver a groove.\nThe other slushes chords.Then they switch.\nIt’s quite an earnest affair.They close my eyes.\nI close their eyes.\nA hornBlares its inner air to brass.\nA girl shakesHer ass.\nSome dude does the same.\nThe music’sGone moot.\nWho doesn’t love it when the bassDoesn’t hide?\nWhen you can feel the trumpet peelOld oil and spit from deep down the emptyPit of a note or none or few?\nSo don’tGive up on it yet: the scenario.You know that it’s just as tired of youAs you are of it.\nStill, there’s much more to itThan that.\nIt does not not get you quite wrong."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nFrom Daddy sprung my inborn ribaldry.\nHis crudeness destined me to be the same.\nA seedlet, flowered from a shitty heap,\nI came, the crowning glory of his aim.\nFrom Mother I inherited ennui,\nThe leg irons of the queendom I once rattled.\nBut I won’t let such chains imprison me.\nAnd there is just no telling what this brat’ll...!\nThis marriage thing? We snub our nose at it.\nWhat’s pearl turns piss, what’s classy breeds what’s smutty.\nBut like it? Lump it? Neither’s exigent.\nAnd I’m the end result of all that fucking.\nDo what you will! This world’s your oyster, Pet.\nBut be forewarned. The sea might drown you yet."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nOnce my sister told me that from her summit at the city\npool she could see the yellow billows spread like gas\nor dreams between kids’ legs. In something the size of the sea,\nyou can’t be sure who’s watching from above. Let’s say\nit’s the Almighty, twirling His whistle, ready to blow it\nat any moment and let loose the bottomless Apocalypse:\nthe ocean would make bone of a body, coral of bone.\nPiss, and a tiger-fish darts through a skull-hole, a weed\nweaves itself through ribs. You, too, have seen\nthe bulbs flash from the sea. You, too, have felt\nit breathing down your neck. You eat fish. You’ve heard\nthat mermaids sing. My dreams are as beleaguered as the next\nJoe’s, my happiness as absurd, but I’m not going to go\npiss in the ocean about it. No, not in the ocean."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThey that have power to hurt and will do none,\nThat do not do the thing they most do show,\nWho, moving others, are themselves as stone,\nUnmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:\nThey rightly do inherit heaven's graces\nAnd husband nature's riches from expense;\nThey are the lords and owners of their faces,\nOthers but stewards of their excellence.\nThe summer's flower is to the summer sweet\nThough to itself it only live and die,\nBut if that flower with base infection meet,\nThe basest weed outbraves his dignity:\nFor sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;\nLilies that fester smell far worse than weeds."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhy didst thou promise such a beauteous day,\nAnd make me travel forth without my cloak,\nTo let base clouds o’ertake me in my way,\nHiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke?\n’Tis not enough that through the cloud thou break,\nTo dry the rain on my storm-beaten face,\nFor no man well of such a salve can speak,\nThat heals the wound, and cures not the disgrace:\nNor can thy shame give physic to my grief;\nThough thou repent, yet I have still the loss:\nThe offender’s sorrow lends but weak relief\nTo him that bears the strong offence’s cross.\nAh! but those tears are pearl which thy love sheds,\nAnd they are rich and ransom all ill deeds."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWe mourn the broken things, chair legs\nwrenched from their seats, chipped plates,\nthe threadbare clothes. We work the magic\nof glue, drive the nails, mend the holes.\nWe save what we can, melt small pieces\nof soap, gather fallen pecans, keep neck bones\nfor soup. Beating rugs against the house,\nwe watch dust, lit like stars, spreading\nacross the yard. Late afternoon, we draw\nthe blinds to cool the rooms, drive the bugs\nout. My mother irons, singing, lost in reverie.\nI mark the pages of a mail-order catalog,\nlisten for passing cars. All day we watch\nfor the mail, some news from a distant place."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLo, as a careful housewife runs to catch\nOne of her feather’d creatures broke away,\nSets down her babe, and makes all swift dispatch\nIn pursuit of the thing she would have stay;\nWhilst her neglected child holds her in chase,\nCries to catch her whose busy care is bent\nTo follow that which flies before her face,\nNot prizing her poor infant’s discontent;\nSo runn’st thou after that which flies from thee,\nWhilst I thy babe chase thee afar behind;\nBut if thou catch thy hope, turn back to me,\nAnd play the mother’s part, kiss me, be kind;\nSo will I pray that thou mayst have thy ‘Will,’\nIf thou turn back and my loud crying still."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMore then most faire, full of the living fire,\nKindled above unto the maker neere:\nNo eies but joyes, in which al powers conspire,\nThat to the world naught else be counted deare.\nThrugh your bright beams doth not the blinded guest\nShoot out his darts to base affections wound?\nBut Angels come to lead fraile mindes to rest\nIn chast desires on heavenly beauty bound.\nYou frame my thoughts and fashion me within,\nYou stop my toung, and teach my hart to speake,\nYou calme the storme that passion did begin,\nStrong thrugh your cause, but by your vertue weak.\nDark is the world, where your light shined never;\nWell is he borne, that may behold you ever."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nHe crawls through the cracks\nof my stone foundation,\nsly and sleek as\nI tempt him with food.\nHe stays out of habit; I cook\nout of love for things that move.\nWe grow accustomed to each other’s\ntrails and smells, the skins we’ve shed\nalong the long, long road\nof rubbing each other smooth.\nTill all the skins we’ve shed lie sparkling\nlike so many stones in this desert land.\nI scoop him up in my hand\nand eat him."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe only time I’ve been to Switzerland\nwas early one spring on a train through the mountains.\nThere was a lake—I guess it was Lucerne?\nAbove me cliff tops ridged with snow fanned out\nso that where I stood at the edge of the platform\nlight bathed the empty siding all around\nwith a diffused opalescence off the water.\nBehind the station must have been a town,\nspires of churches, municipal arcades,\nand coffee squelching in the fogged cafés.\nI never saw the place, though I remember\nthinking this is Switzerland and took\na mind-shot of the pines, breathing in the cold\nas the porter whistled at us to reboard."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nwhat thoughts I have of you tonight, Du Bois\nof bodies rocked and minds embalmed in bark\nour blanched arrival—seethin with scandal's mark\nnowadays I peep you in the bean-pie seller's poise\nwith that silhouette fit for bust or cameo\nI can't always divine your debonair birth\nor your boocoo brain laborin like an earth\nin hallelujah's ether, somehow duckin death's blow\nsure sprung from Imhotep's kundalini\nstitchin white reconstruction's funeral shroud\nscriptin Philly dirges for the cryin out loud\ncussin Garvey's name over martinis\nsometimes I wonder if you double agent on the page\nor mastermind of our ordered rage"} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nHow can my Muse want subject to invent,\nWhile thou dost breathe, that pour’st into my verse\nThine own sweet argument, too excellent\nFor every vulgar paper to rehearse?\nO! give thyself the thanks, if aught in me\nWorthy perusal stand against thy sight;\nFor who’s so dumb that cannot write to thee,\nWhen thou thyself dost give invention light?\nBe thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth\nThan those old nine which rhymers invocate;\nAnd he that calls on thee, let him bring forth\nEternal numbers to outlive long date.\nIf my slight Muse do please these curious days,\nThe pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nTir'd with all these, for restful death I cry,\nAs, to behold desert a beggar born,\nAnd needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,\nAnd purest faith unhappily forsworn,\nAnd gilded honour shamefully misplac'd,\nAnd maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,\nAnd right perfection wrongfully disgrac'd,\nAnd strength by limping sway disabled,\nAnd art made tongue-tied by authority,\nAnd folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,\nAnd simple truth miscall'd simplicity,\nAnd captive good attending captain ill.\nTir'd with all these, from these would I be gone,\nSave that, to die, I leave my love alone."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSo am I as the rich, whose blessed key,\nCan bring him to his sweet up-locked treasure,\nThe which he will not every hour survey,\nFor blunting the fine point of seldom pleasure.\nTherefore are feasts so solemn and so rare,\nSince, seldom coming in that long year set,\nLike stones of worth they thinly placed are,\nOr captain jewels in the carcanet.\nSo is the time that keeps you as my chest,\nOr as the wardrobe which the robe doth hide,\nTo make some special instant special-blest,\nBy new unfolding his imprison’d pride.\nBlessed are you whose worthiness gives scope,\nBeing had, to triumph; being lacked, to hope."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nBeshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan\nFor that deep wound it gives my friend and me!\nIs’t not enough to torture me alone,\nBut slave to slavery my sweet’st friend must be?\nMe from myself thy cruel eye hath taken,\nAnd my next self thou harder hast engross’d:\nOf him, myself, and thee I am forsaken;\nA torment thrice three-fold thus to be cross’d:\nPrison my heart in thy steel bosom’s ward,\nBut then my friend’s heart let my poor heart bail;\nWhoe’er keeps me, let my heart be his guard;\nThou canst not then use rigour in my jail:\nAnd yet thou wilt; for I, being pent in thee,\nPerforce am thine, and all that is in me."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAll the kids came rumbling down the wood tenement\nShaky stairs, sneakers slapping against the worn\nTin tread edges, downhall came Pepo, Chino, Cojo,\nCurly bursting from the door like shells exploding\nSinging \"I'm a Rican Doodle Dandy\" and \"What shall\nWe be today, Doctors or Junkies, Soldiers or Winos?\"\nPepo put a milk crate on a Spanish Harlem johnny pump\nAnd drops opened like paratroopers carrying war news.\nThen Urban Renewal attacked the pump, cleared the slums\nBlamed Puerto Rico and dispersed the Spies, blasting\nThem into the Army or Anywhere Avenue in the Bronx.\nAnd nobody, but nobody, came back from that summer.\nJust as Korea was death in service to the warring Nation\nThe Bronx was death in service to the negligent Nation"} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nPoet of Nature, thou hast wept to know\nThat things depart which never may return:\nChildhood and youth, friendship and love’s first glow,\nHave fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.\nThese common woes I feel. One loss is mine\nWhich thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore.\nThou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine\nOn some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar:\nThou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood\nAbove the blind and battling multitude:\nIn honoured poverty thy voice did weave\nSongs consecrate to truth and liberty,—\nDeserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,\nThus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThanks, no thanks, to eternal life. What pleasure\nwatching my old house broken-beamed, grey\nelephant brought to its knees? White ash—gone\nthe way of trilobites and horsehair fern,\neven the nuclear-proof cockroach in deep-freeze.\nCueballs knock each other randomly; reverse.\nthe tape and movement looks the same, illustrating\nthe end of time: things happen, but don't matter.\nAnd if Lethe strips you like a swimmer\nfrom his trunks, where will \"I\" be? If Heaven\nwithout you is Hell, how will I know? A forever\nof no-never-mind does not appeal, God's heart\na cold, contracting cinder. Give me the white light,\nthe slit of split-second calm, and knowing over is over."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIn the dirt you dig fragments.\nTurn them and ponder.\nWeed chard. Forms\nmorph like clouds.\nAt lunch, you write down\nhow in this jungle\na gem-backed toad startled\nand hopped away—\nhow June tiger lilies trumpet the sun.\nIn the bean patch brown spiders,\negg sacs on their backs.\nToddling through shadows,\nsturdy, wobbling,\nfragile, pregnant as summer is—"} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nBoth lying on our sides, making love in\nspoon position when she’s startled, What’s that?\nShe means the enormous ship passing before you—\nmaybe not that large, is it a freighter\nor a passenger ship? But it seems huge in the dark\nand it’s so close. That’s a poem you say, D. H.\nLawrence—Have you built your ship of death,\nhave you? O build your ship of death,\nfor you will need it. Right here it would be good\nif there were a small orchestra on board, you’d hear\nthem and say to her, That piece is called Autumn,\nthat’s what the brave musicians played as the Titanic\nwent under—and then you could name this poem “Autumn.”\nBut no, the ship is silent, its white lights glow in the darkness."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nFlaunting in the atrium, ostentatious at the gates\nI saw a shooting star thru a window on Alcatraz Ave\n& cladding struck up against those who demand\nWe stomach the stick and tend the commode\nThey're selling trees in the paint store! trees in the paint store\nDatebook chips in the soft skin of our wrists\nOn NBC, CNN, and NPR broken windows are weeping\nWe'll have 35 apples and shrieking in the thickets\nAloft in the air golden and golden the dial among the mounds\nSo much is stunted in understanding of what a light can be\nThey storm the scrimmage line and clear-cut bran and germ\nWe want the petal unto itself, the unalterable vessel\nThe arc end of the precipice grows 1.9% annually\nWhat was popular music like before the crisis?"} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nHow soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,\nStol'n on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!\nMy hasting days fly on with full career,\nBut my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th.\nPerhaps my semblance might deceive the truth\nThat I to manhood am arriv'd so near;\nAnd inward ripeness doth much less appear,\nThat some more timely-happy spirits endu'th.\nYet be it less or more, or soon or slow,\nIt shall be still in strictest measure ev'n\nTo that same lot, however mean or high,\nToward which Time leads me, and the will of Heav'n:\nAll is, if I have grace to use it so\nAs ever in my great Task-Master's eye."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nDear Letters,\nFond Letters,\nMust I with you part?\nYou are such a source of joy\nTo my lonely heart.\nSweet Letters,\nDear Letters,\nWhat a tell you tell;\nO, no power on earth can break\nThis strange mystic spell!\nDear Letters,\nFond Letters,\nYou my secret know—Don’t you tell it, any one—\nLet it live and grow."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nLet us consider the farmer who makes his straw hat his\nsweetheart; or the old woman who makes a floor lamp her son;\nor the young woman who has set herself the task of scraping\nher shadow off a wall....\nLet us consider the old woman who wore smoked cows’\ntongues for shoes and walked a meadow gathering cow chips\nin her apron; or a mirror grown dark with age that was given\nto a blind man who spent his nights looking into it, which\nsaddened his mother, that her son should be so lost in\nvanity....\nLet us consider the man who fried roses for his dinner,\nwhose kitchen smelled like a burning rose garden; or the man\nwho disguised himself as a moth and ate his overcoat, and for\ndessert served himself a chilled fedora...."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nOh, oh, you will be sorry for that word!\nGive back my book and take my kiss instead.\nWas it my enemy or my friend I heard,\n“What a big book for such a little head!”\nCome, I will show you now my newest hat,\nAnd you may watch me purse my mouth and prink!\nOh, I shall love you still, and all of that.\nI never again shall tell you what I think.\nI shall be sweet and crafty, soft and sly;\nYou will not catch me reading any more:\nI shall be called a wife to pattern by;\nAnd some day when you knock and push the door,\nSome sane day, not too bright and not too stormy,\nI shall be gone, and you may whistle for me."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nCount your fingers\nCount your toes\nCount your nose holes\nCount your blessings\nCount your stars (lucky or not)\nCount your loose change\nCount the cars at the crossing\nCount the miles to the state line\nCount the ticks you pulled off the dog\nCount your calluses\nCount your shells\nCount the points on the antlers\nCount the newjack's keys\nCount your cards; cut them again"} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMine eye hath play’d the painter and hath stell’d,\nThy beauty’s form in table of my heart;\nMy body is the frame wherein ’tis held,\nAnd perspective it is best painter’s art.\nFor through the painter must you see his skill,\nTo find where your true image pictur’d lies,\nWhich in my bosom’s shop is hanging still,\nThat hath his windows glazed with thine eyes.\nNow see what good turns eyes for eyes have done:\nMine eyes have drawn thy shape, and thine for me\nAre windows to my breast, where-through the sun\nDelights to peep, to gaze therein on thee;\nYet eyes this cunning want to grace their art,\nThey draw but what they see, know not the heart."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThose pretty wrongs that liberty commits,\nWhen I am sometime absent from thy heart,\nThy beauty, and thy years full well befits,\nFor still temptation follows where thou art.\nGentle thou art, and therefore to be won,\nBeauteous thou art, therefore to be assail’d;\nAnd when a woman woos, what woman’s son\nWill sourly leave her till he have prevail’d?\nAy me! but yet thou mightst my seat forbear,\nAnd chide thy beauty and thy straying youth,\nWho lead thee in their riot even there\nWhere thou art forced to break a twofold truth:\nHers by thy beauty tempting her to thee,\nThine by thy beauty being false to me."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe builder who first bridged Niagara’s gorge,\nBefore he swung his cable, shore to shore,\nSent out across the gulf his venturing kite\nBearing a slender cord for unseen hands\nTo grasp upon the further cliff and draw\nA greater cord, and then a greater yet;\nTill at the last across the chasm swung\nThe cable then the mighty bridge in air!\nSo we may send our little timid thought\nAcross the void, out to God’s reaching hands—\nSend out our love and faith to thread the deep—\nThought after thought until the little cord\nHas greatened to a chain no chance can break,\nAnd we are anchored to the Infinite!"} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhen the strange girl skips rope her hair flies\nlike a porpoise. She collects things that melt\nand things that tick, circles and cubes\nand checkerboards in a drawer\nshe can pull out from her navel.\nOther children, alerted by the rumble\nof marbles in her chest, chase her\nacross the field. She insists she is only\nhungry, but they pin her down and open her\nup. Cockroaches rush out and bullies run\nand squeal, crushing carapaces underfoot.\nShe gathers as many as she can,\ntells them she’s sorry there is no lock. She’s sorry,\nbut good children shouldn’t have secrets."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThey put me in a dead boy’s clothes dead Joseph\nExcept he wasn’t dead at first they put\nMe in his clothes dead Joseph’s after Joseph\nDied and I used to call him Joe they put\nMe in Joe’s clothes at first before he died\nJoe wasn’t five yet when I met him I\nWas seven I was seven when he died\nStill but a whole year bigger then but I\nWore his clothes still and the whole year I lived with\nMomma Varina and with daddy Jeff\nI never lived so good as when I lived with\nThem and especially it was daddy Jeff\nWho kept me fed and wearing those nice clothes\nUntil they fit as tight as bandages"} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMy future will not copy fair my past—\nI wrote that once; and thinking at my side\nMy ministering life-angel justified\nThe word by his appealing look upcast\nTo the white throne of God, I turned at last,\nAnd there, instead, saw thee, not unallied\nTo angels in thy soul! Then I, long tried\nBy natural ills, received the comfort fast,\nWhile budding, at thy sight, my pilgrim’s staff\nGave out green leaves with morning dews impearled.\nI seek no copy now of life’s first half:\nLeave here the pages with long musing curled,\nAnd write me new my future’s epigraph,\nNew angel mine, unhoped for in the world!"} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\ndreaming the lives of the ancestors,\nyou awake, justly terrified of this world:you could dance underwater and not get wet,\nyou hear, but the pressure is drowning you:\nyou’re awake, but just terrified of this world,\nwhere all solids are ice: underwater boogie,\nyou hear, but the press sure is drowning you:\nthe igbo were walking, not dancing:\nwhere all solids are ice, underwater boogie\nis good advice, because they’re quick to melt:\nthe igbo were straight up walking, not dancing:\nand you’ve still got to get through this life:\ntake my advice, quickly: they’re melting:you could dance underwater and not get wet:\nand you’ve got to, to get through this life still\ndreaming the lives of the ancestors"} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhen I was\nnearly six my\nfather\nopened his magic\ndoctor bag:\ntwo\ntongue depressors fastened by\na rubber\nband;\none flick\nof his hairy wrist\nand lo!\nwe invented\nflight."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nFalling leaves and falling men!\nWhen the snows of winter fall,\nAnd the winds of winter blows,\nWill be woven Nature’s pall.\nLet us, then, forsake our dead;\nFor the dead will surely wait While we rush upon the foe,\nEager for the hero’s fate.\nLeaves will come upon the trees;\nSpring will show the happy race;\nMothers will give birth to sons—\nLoyal souls to fill our place.\nWherefore should we rest and rush?\nSoldiers, we must fight and save Freedom now, and give our foes\nAll their country should—a grave!"} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIn our house, all the clocks are turned off and the mirrors\nDon’t work. We sit like bread in a stay-fresh wrapper,\nKeep ourselves to our selves. Sometimes the speeches\nAre so beautiful it hurts. On the porch where we can’t be\nSeen to smile, the honeysuckle meshes with silent\nWeeds. We rock back and forth, back and forth in our long\nBlack dresses. Mosquitoes taste our blood and find it good.\nInside, candles are lit every night and keep going\nUntil they burn themselves down. We kiss our fingers\nTo our lips like Italians, promise we’ll never look back.Whip-poor-will. When the doorbell rings we don’t answer.\nIn winter, the fur grows long on the horses and the ice\nGrows long on the eaves. We sleep in the same bed\nLike good animals, braid our hair together, tailor\nOur limbs to fit. Conspiracy of wood."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI watch the woods for deer as if I’m armed.\nI watch the woods for deer who never come.\nI know the hes and shes in autumn\nrendezvous in orchards stained with fallen\napples’ scent. I drive my car this way to work\nso I may let the crows in corn believe\nit’s me their caws are meant to warn,\nand snakes who turn in warm and secret caves\nthey know me too. They know the boy\nwho lives inside me still won’t go away.\nThe deer are ghosts who slip between the light\nthrough trees, so you may only hear the snap\nof branches in the thicket beyond hope.\nI watch the woods for deer, as if I’m armed."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI think I should have loved you presently,\nAnd given in earnest words I flung in jest;\nAnd lifted honest eyes for you to see,\nAnd caught your hand against my cheek and breast;\nAnd all my pretty follies flung aside\nThat won you to me, and beneath your gaze,\nNaked of reticence and shorn of pride,\nSpread like a chart my little wicked ways.\nI, that had been to you, had you remained,\nBut one more waking from a recurrent dream,\nCherish no less the certain stakes I gained,\nAnd walk your memory’s halls, austere, supreme,\nA ghost in marble of a girl you knew\nWho would have loved you in a day or two."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThere is a drear and lonely tract of hell\nFrom all the common gloom removed afar:\nA flat, sad land it is, where shadows are,\nWhose lorn estate my verse may never tell.\nI walked among them and I knew them well:\nMen I had slandered on life's little star\nFor churls and sluggards; and I knew the scar\nUpon their brows of woe ineffable.\nBut as I went majestic on my way,\nInto the dark they vanished, one by one,\nTill, with a shaft of God's eternal day,\nThe dream of all my glory was undone,—\nAnd, with a fool's importunate dismay,\nI heard the dead men singing in the sun."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSybaritic afterlife I don’t crave you.\nI like daylight. I like crowds.\nI don’t think it will be charming underground.\nThe silence will be sudden then last.\nWhat’s chic will shrink.\nThere won’t be any pretty, pity.\nWill never peaches there, or air.\nWe’ll be so squashed and sour there.\nI don’t want a cold place.\nDon’t want a threadbare\nclamp and consequence all old.\nOur loneliness will be prolonged then go too far.\nOh fuck it’s true.\nThen nothing left of you."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThis is that blessed Mary, pre-elect\nGod's Virgin. Gone is a great while, and she\nDwelt young in Nazareth of Galilee.\nUnto God's will she brought devout respect,\nProfound simplicity of intellect,\nAnd supreme patience. From her mother's knee\nFaithful and hopeful; wise in charity;\nStrong in grave peace; in pity circumspect.\nSo held she through her girlhood; as it were\nAn angel-water'd lily, that near God\nGrows and is quiet. Till, one dawn at home,\nShe woke in her white bed, and had no fear\nAt all,—yet wept till sunshine, and felt aw'd:\nBecause the fulness of the time was come."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe sovereign beauty which I do admire,\nWitness the world how worthy to be praised:\nThe light whereof hath kindled heavenly fire\nIn my frail spirit, by her from baseness raised;\nThat being now with her huge brightness dazed,\nBase thing I can no more endure to view;\nBut looking still on her, I stand amazed\nAt wondrous sight of so celestial hue.\nSo when my tongue would speak her praises due,\nIt stopped is with thought's astonishment:\nAnd when my pen would write her titles true,\nIt ravish'd is with fancy's wonderment:\nYet in my heart I then both speak and write\nThe wonder that my wit cannot endite."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nYou flinch. Something flickers, not fleeing your face. My\nHeart hammers at the ceiling, telling my tongue\nTo turn it down. Too late. The something climbs, leaps, is\nFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainy\nLord. I chose the wrong word. I am wrong for not choosing\nMerely to smile, to pull you toward me and away from\nWhat you think of as that other me, who wanders lost among ...\nAmong whom? The many? The rare? I wish you didn’t care.\nI watch you watching her. Her very shadow is a rage\nThat trashes the rooms of your eyes. Do you claim surprise\nAt what she wants, the poor girl, pelted with despair,\nWho flits from grief to grief? Isn’t it you she seeks? And\nIf you blame her, know that she blames you for choosing\nNot her, but me. Love is never fair. But do we — should we — care?"} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nFresh spring the herald of loves mighty king,\nIn whose cote armour richly are displayed\nAll sorts of flowers the which on earth do spring\nIn goodly colours gloriously arrayd:\nGoe to my love, where she is carelesse layd,\nYet in her winters bowre not well awake:\nTell her the joyous time wil not be staid\nUnless she doe him by the forelock take.\nBid her therefore her selfe soone ready make,\nTo wayt on love amongst his lovely crew:\nWhere every one that misseth then her make,\nShall be by him amearst with penance dew.\nMake hast therefore sweet love, whilest it is prime,\nFor none can call againe the passèd time."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIf I leave all for thee, wilt thou exchange\nAnd be all to me? Shall I never miss\nHome-talk and blessing and the common kiss\nThat comes to each in turn, nor count it strange,\nWhen I look up, to drop on a new range\nOf walls and floors, another home than this?\nNay, wilt thou fill that place by me which is\nFilled by dead eyes too tender to know change\nThat’s hardest. If to conquer love, has tried,\nTo conquer grief, tries more, as all things prove,\nFor grief indeed is love and grief beside.\nAlas, I have grieved so I am hard to love.\nYet love me—wilt thou? Open thy heart wide,\nAnd fold within, the wet wings of thy dove."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nwhen the cultivators of corpses are busy seeding\nplague across vast acres of the land, choking schools\nand churches in the motley toxins of grief, breeding\nvirile shoots of violence so soon verdant even fools\nfear to tread in their wake :: when all known tools\nof resistance are clutched in the hands of the vile\nlike a wilting bouquet, cut from their roots, while\nthe disempowered slice smiles across their own faces\nand hide the wet knives in writhing thickets of hair\nfor future use :: when breathing in the ashen traces\nof dreams deferred, the detonator’s ticking a queer\necho that amplifies instead of fading :: when there-\nyou-are is where-you-were and the sunset groans\ninto the atlantic, setting blue fire to dark white bones."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIF ANYONE KNOWS WHAT IS GOING ON EVER THEN HEY\nI AM HERE IT WOULD BE NICE TO TALK SOMETIME\nINFOMERCIALS HAVE STARTED AND I KIND OF WANT TO DIE\nI’M PRETTY SURE THIS ONE IS ACTUALLY FOR A MORGUE\nOK SO ACTUALLY IT’S FOR THE BIBLE OR SOMETHING\nSO IT’S A COMMERICAL FOR TRYING TO BE HAPPY OR SOMETHING\nBUT I AM NOT HAPPY TONIGHT NO I AM NOT JUST HERE\nIF HAPPINESS EVER WORKED THEN HOW—I DON’T KNOW\nHAPPINESS IS A LIZARD IN THE SUNLIGHT GETTING WARM\nAND THEN IN THE NIGHT BENEATH A ROCK EATING FLIES\nAND SWALLLOWING THE MEAT OF THE TRASH OF THE DIRT\nAH, SO TONIGHT IS A LITTLE DRUNK AND OK OK OK\nTHAT IS GOOD SO LET ME BE—THERE IS NO LOVE TONIGHT\nGOD IS LIKE BONO—SOME DICKWAD NO ONE WILL EVER MEET OR LIKE"} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIf the dull substance of my flesh were thought,\nInjurious distance should not stop my way;\nFor then despite of space I would be brought,\nFrom limits far remote, where thou dost stay.\nNo matter then although my foot did stand\nUpon the farthest earth remov’d from thee;\nFor nimble thought can jump both sea and land,\nAs soon as think the place where he would be.\nBut, ah! thought kills me that I am not thought,\nTo leap large lengths of miles when thou art gone,\nBut that so much of earth and water wrought,\nI must attend time’s leisure with my moan;\nReceiving nought by elements so slow\nBut heavy tears, badges of either’s woe."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI never saw that you did painting need,\nAnd therefore to your fair no painting set;\nI found, or thought I found, you did exceed\nThat barren tender of a poet’s debt:\nAnd therefore have I slept in your report,\nThat you yourself, being extant, well might show\nHow far a modern quill doth come too short,\nSpeaking of worth, what worth in you doth grow.\nThis silence for my sin you did impute,\nWhich shall be most my glory being dumb;\nFor I impair not beauty being mute,\nWhen others would give life, and bring a tomb.\nThere lives more life in one of your fair eyes\nThan both your poets can in praise devise."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMy own heart let me more have pity on; let\nMe live to my sad self hereafter kind,\nCharitable; not live this tormented mind\nWith this tormented mind tormenting yet.\nI cast for comfort I can no more get\nBy groping round my comfortless, than blind\nEyes in their dark can day or thirst can find\nThirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.\nSoul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise\nYou, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile\nElsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size\nAt God knows when to God knows what; whose smile\n's not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather — as skies\nBetweenpie mountains — lights a lovely mile."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMy monkey-wrench man is my sweet patootie;\nthe lover of my life, my youth and age.\nMy heart belongs to him and to him only;\nthe children of my flesh are his and bear his rage\nNow grown to years advancing through the dozens\nthe honeyed kiss, the lips of wine and fire\nfade blissfully into the distant years of yonder\nbut all my days of Happiness and wonder\nare cradled in his arms and eyes entire.\nThey carry us under the waters of the world\nout past the starposts of a distant planet\nAnd creeping through the seaweed of the ocean\nthey tangle us with ropes and yarn of memories\nwhere we have been together, you and I."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nI was cold and leaned against the big oak tree\nas if it were my mother wearing a rough apron\nof bark, her upraised arms warning of danger.\nThrough those boughs and leaves I saw\ndark patches of sky. I thought a brooding\nwitch waited to catch me up from under\nbranches and take me, careening on her broom,\nto her home in the jaundiced moon.\nI looked to the roof of mom and dad's house\nand wondered if the paisley couch patterns\nwould change during the day. My brother peeked\nfrom a window and waved. When the bus came,\nI pawed away from the trunk, fumbled,\nand took my first step toward not returning."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLong time a child, and still a child, when years\nHad painted manhood on my cheek, was I,—\nFor yet I lived like one not born to die;\nA thriftless prodigal of smiles and tears,\nNo hope I needed, and I knew no fears.\nBut sleep, though sweet, is only sleep, and waking,\nI waked to sleep no more, at once o’ertaking\nThe vanguard of my age, with all arrears\nOf duty on my back. Nor child, nor man,\nNor youth, nor sage, I find my head is grey,\nFor I have lost the race I never ran:\nA rathe December blights my lagging May;\nAnd still I am a child, tho’ I be old,\nTime is my debtor for my years untold."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nI passed him by at first. From the photograph\nPeered sepia eyes, blindered, unappeased\nFrom a lair of brows and beard: one not amazed\nAt anything, as if to have looked enough\nThen turned aside worked best for him—as if\nNight vision was the discipline that eased\nThe weight of what he saw. A man’s gaze posed\nToo long in the sun goes blank; comes to grief.\nThat face could be a focus for this back room,\nFor pack-rat papers strewn as if in rage,\nFond notes unread: each wary eye a phial\nUnstopped to let huge Melville out, to calm\nThe sea of pages; Melville in older age:\nThe grown man’s sleepy defiance of denial."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThy country, Wilberforce, with just disdain,\nHears thee, by cruel men and impious, call'd\nFanatic, for thy zeal to loose th' enthrall'd\nFrom exile, public sale, and slav'ry's chain.\nFriend of the poor, the wrong'd, the fetter-gall'd,\nFear not lest labour such as thine be vain!\nThou hast achiev'd a part; hast gain'd the ear\nOf Britain's senate to thy glorious cause;\nHope smiles, joy springs, and tho' cold caution pause\nAnd weave delay, the better hour is near,\nThat shall remunerate thy toils severe\nBy peace for Afric, fenc'd with British laws.\nEnjoy what thou hast won, esteem and love\nFrom all the just on earth, and all the blest above!"} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAnd therefore if to love can be desert,\nI am not all unworthy. Cheeks as pale\nAs these you see, and trembling knees that fail\nTo bear the burden of a heavy heart,—\nThis weary minstrel-life that once was girt\nTo climb Aornus, and can scarce avail\nTo pipe now ’gainst the valley nightingale\nA melancholy music,—why advert\nTo these things? O Belovëd, it is plain\nI am not of thy worth nor for thy place!\nAnd yet, because I love thee, I obtain\nFrom that same love this vindicating grace\nTo live on still in love, and yet in vain,—\nTo bless thee, yet renounce thee to thy face."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nNow sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;\nNor waves the cypress in the palace walk;\nNor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font.\nThe firefly wakens; waken thou with me.\nNow droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,\nAnd like a ghost she glimmers on to me.\nNow lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,\nAnd all thy heart lies open unto me.\nNow slides the silent meteor on, and leaves\nA shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.\nNow folds the lily all her sweetness up,\nAnd slips into the bosom of the lake.\nSo fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip\nInto my bosom and be lost in me."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nDay and night, the lake dreams of sky.\nA privacy as old as the mountains\nAnd her up there, stuck among peaks. The whole eye\nFastened on hawk, gatherings of cloud or stars,\nSo little trespass. An airplane once\nCrossed her brow; she searched but could not find\nA face. Having lived with such strict beauty\nShe comes to know how the sun is nothing\nBut itself and the path it throws; the moon\nA riddled stone. If only a hand\nWould tremble along her cheek, would disturb. Even the elk\nPass by, drawn to the spill of creeks below—\nHow she cannot help abundance, even as it leaves\nHer, as it sings all the way down the mountain."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThy glass will show thee how thy beauties wear,\nThy dial how thy precious minutes waste;\nThese vacant leaves thy mind’s imprint will bear,\nAnd of this book, this learning mayst thou taste.\nThe wrinkles which thy glass will truly show\nOf mouthed graves will give thee memory;\nThou by thy dial’s shady stealth mayst know\nTime’s thievish progress to eternity.\nLook! what thy memory cannot contain,\nCommit to these waste blanks, and thou shalt find\nThose children nursed, deliver’d from thy brain,\nTo take a new acquaintance of thy mind.\nThese offices, so oft as thou wilt look,\nShall profit thee and much enrich thy book."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\npeach of a grape\nin his fingertips\nlike holding home\nhe noses its muskTaste, he says\nand parts my lips with a globe and\na thumb I lick\nI bite the thick skin\nHis Arkansas aches\nsweet\non my tongue\nHis hand vines my chin my throatMy face flames\nTo the lady on the bus\nhe brags\nHer blush comes from my touch."} |
|
|
