Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory;
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding.
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Thou blossom bright with autumn dew,
And colored with the heaven’s own blue,
That openest when the quiet light Succeeds the keen and frosty night.
Thou comest not when violets lean O’er wandering brooks and springs unseen,
Or columbines, in purple dressed,
Nod o’er the ground-bird’s hidden nest.
Thou waitest late and com’st alone,
When woods are bare and birds are flown,
And frosts and shortening days portend The aged year is near his end.
Then doth thy sweet and quiet eye Look through its fringes to the sky,
Blue-blue-as if that sky let fall A flower from its cerulean wall.
I would that thus, when I shall see The hour of death draw near to me,
Hope, blossoming within my heart,
May look to heaven as I depart.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Supposed as forfeit to a confin’d doom.
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endur’d,
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assur’d,
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Now with the drops of this most balmy time,
My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,
Since, spite of him, I’ll live in this poor rime,
While he insults o’er dull and speechless tribes:
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
The stones we have thrown I hear
fall, glass-clear through the year. In the valley
confused actions of the moment
fly howling from tree-top
to tree-top, quieting
in air thinner than now's, gliding
like swallows from mountain-top
to mountain-top till they
reach the furthest plateaus
along the edge of existence. Where
all our deeds fall
glass-clear
to no ending
except ourselves.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
i want ! to be friends ! with katya ! i want
to dress ! how i want to dress ! like a gale !     full of glitter ! and back alleys ! a seagull
laugh ! to shake our being ! whose secret lies !
perhaps ! in kicking legs upwards in delight !
painted ! an omnivorous harpy ! goofy !
loving our friends ! lighting up around them !
what a man ! unstoppable ! they’ll say, why !
they’re the perfect woman ! (now that’s me !)
judy jetson ! enraged ! with a penis ! and
obsessed with Contact too ! in every situation !
a little Jodie Foster ! o dear role modelfor my role model ! find meaning ! play parts !
everything real ! happens ! behind the eyes !
all those things we cannot prove ! like love !
like the world ! is just ! what we make of it


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
O! that you were your self; but, love you are
No longer yours, than you yourself here live:
Against this coming end you should prepare,
And your sweet semblance to some other give:
So should that beauty which you hold in lease
Find no determination; then you were
Yourself again, after yourself’s decease,
When your sweet issue your sweet form should bear.
Who lets so fair a house fall to decay,
Which husbandry in honour might uphold,
Against the stormy gusts of winter’s day
And barren rage of death’s eternal cold?
O! none but unthrifts. Dear my love, you know,
You had a father: let your son say so.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou knowst thy estimate.
The Charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;
My bonds in thee are all determinate.
For how do I hold thee but by thy granting,
And for that riches where is my deserving?
The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,
And so my patent back again is swerving.
Thy self thou gav'st, thy own worth then not knowing,
Or me, to whom thou gav'st it, else mistaking,
So thy great gift, upon misprision growing,
Comes home again, on better judgement making.
Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter:
In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Seeing in crowded restaurants the one you love
You wave at the door, tall girl in imperious fur,
And make for him, bumping waiters, dropping a glove,
Arriving soft with affectionate slur.
As ladies half-turn, gazing, and men appraise
You heap the linen with purse, scarf, cigarettes, lighter,
Laughing some instantaneous droll phrase.
As if sudden sun came out, the table is brighter.
All moods: at a party everybody’s delight;
Intent while brown curls shadow the serious page;
When people are stuffy (more correct than right)
The stamp and turn on heel of a little girl’s rage.
But woman mostly, as winter moonlight sees,
Impetuous midnight, and the dune’s dark trees.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
woke up this morning
feeling excellent,
picked up the telephone
dialed the number of
my equal opportunity employer
to inform him I will not
be into work today
Are you feeling sick?
the boss asked me
No Sir I replied:
I am feeling too good
to report to work today,
if I feel sick tomorrow
I will come in early


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
I like to touch your tattoos in complete
darkness, when I can’t see them. I’m sure of
where they are, know by heart the neat
lines of lightning pulsing just above
your nipple, can find, as if by instinct, the blue
swirls of water on your shoulder where a serpent
twists, facing a dragon. When I pull you
to me, taking you until we’re spent
and quiet on the sheets, I love to kiss
the pictures in your skin. They’ll last until
you’re seared to ashes; whatever persists
or turns to pain between us, they will still
be there. Such permanence is terrifying.
So I touch them in the dark; but touch them, trying.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silver’d o’er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;
And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Look up: blazing chrysanthemums in rose
shriek into bloom above the Tilt-a-Whirls,
hang for a blink, then die in smoky swirls.
They scream revolt at what the body knows:
all revels end. We clap and sigh. Then, no—
another rose! another peony! break,
flame, roar, as though by roaring they might make
the rides whirl in perpetuum. As though
we need not finally, wearily turn, to plow
back through the crush of bodies, the lank air,
to buses that inch us, sweating, across town.
As though we were not dropped in silence there
to trudge the last blocks home, the streetlamps low,
the crickets counting summer's seconds down.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
One writes telling me I am her guiding light
And my poems her bible — on this cold morning
After moss I smoke one cigarette
And hear a magpie chatter in the paddock,
The image of Hatana — he bashes at the windows
In idiot spite, shouting — ‘Pakeha! You can be
‘The country’s leading poet’ — at the church I murmured, ‘Tena koe,'
To the oldest woman and she replied, ‘Tena koe’—
Yet the red book is shut from which I should learn Maori
And these daft English words meander on,
How dark a light! Hatana, you have gripped me
Again by the balls; you sift and riddle my mind
On the rack of the middle world, and from my grave at length
A muddy spring of poems will gush out.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
A barefoot boy! I mark him at his play—
For May is here once more, and so is he,—
His dusty trousers, rolled half to the knee,
And his bare ankles grimy, too, as they:
Cross-hatchings of the nettle, in array
Of feverish stripes, hint vividly to me
Of woody pathways winding endlessly
Along the creek, where even yesterday
He plunged his shrinking body—gasped and shook—
Yet called the water "warm," with never lack
Of joy. And so, half enviously I look
Upon this graceless barefoot and his track,—
His toe stubbed—ay, his big toe-nail knocked back
Like unto the clasp of an old pocketbook.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
O! lest the world should task you to recite
What merit lived in me, that you should love
After my death, dear love, forget me quite,
For you in me can nothing worthy prove;
Unless you would devise some virtuous lie,
To do more for me than mine own desert,
And hang more praise upon deceased I
Than niggard truth would willingly impart:
O! lest your true love may seem false in this
That you for love speak well of me untrue,
My name be buried where my body is,
And live no more to shame nor me nor you.
For I am shamed by that which I bring forth,
And so should you, to love things nothing worth.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
…When that joy is gone for good
I move the arms beneath the blood.
When my blood is running wild
I sew the clothing of a child.
When that child is never born
I lean my breast against a thorn.
When the thorn brings no reprieve
I rise and live, I rise and live.
When I live from hand to hand
Nude in the marketplace I stand.
When I stand and am not sold
I build a fire against the cold.
When the cold does not destroy
I leap from ambush on my joy…


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
Since every one hath, every one, one shade,
And you, but one, can every shadow lend.
Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit
Is poorly imitated after you;
On Helen's cheek all art of beauty set,
And you in Grecian tires are painted new.
Speak of the spring and foison of the year:
The one doth shadow of your beauty show,
The other as your bounty doth appear;
And you in every blessèd shape we know.
In all external grace you have some part,
But you like none, none you, for constant heart.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Baudelaire: "The dead, the poor dead, have their bad hours." But the dead have no watches, no grief and no hours.
At first not smoking took all my time:
I did it a little by little and hour by hour.
Per diem.
Pro bono.
Cui bono?
Pro rata.
But the poor use English.
Off and on.
By the hour.
"I'm sorry but we'll have to stop now." There tick but fifty minutes in the psychoanalytic hour.
Vengeance is mine, yours, his or hers, ours, yours again (you-all's this time), and then (yikes!) theirs.
I prefer ours.
Twenty minutes fleeing phantoms at full tilt and then the cat coils herself like a quoit and sleeps for hours.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Lyke as the Culver on the barèd bough,
Sits mourning for the absence of her mate:
And in her songs sends many a wishfull vow,
For his returne that seemes to linger late,
So I alone now left disconsolate,
Mourne to my selfe the absence of my love:
And wandring here and there all desolate,
Seek with my playnts to match that mournful dove:
Ne joy of ought that under heaven doth hove,
Can comfort me, but her owne joyous sight:
Whose sweet aspèct both God and man can move,
In her unspotted pleasauns to delight.
Dark is my day, whyles her fayre light I mis,
And dead my life that wants such lively blis.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
When we met first and loved, I did not build
Upon the event with marble.  Could it mean
To last, a love set pendulous between
Sorrow and sorrow?  Nay, I rather thrilled,
Distrusting every light that seemed to gild
The onward path, and feared to overlean
A finger even.  And, though I have grown serene
And strong since then, I think that God has willed
A still renewable fear . . . O love, O troth . . .
Lest these enclaspëd hands should never hold,
This mutual kiss drop down between us both
As an unowned thing, once the lips being cold.
And Love, be false! if he, to keep one oath,
Must lose one joy, by his life’s star foretold.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Is it indeed so?  If I lay here dead,
Wouldst thou miss any life in losing mine?
And would the sun for thee more coldly shine
Because of grave-damps falling round my head?
I marvelled, my Belovëd, when I read
Thy thought so in the letter.  I am thine—
But . . . so much to thee?  Can I pour thy wine
While my hands tremble?  Then my soul, instead
Of dreams of death, resumes life’s lower range.
Then, love me, Love! look on me—breathe on me!
As brighter ladies do not count it strange,
For love, to give up acres and degree,
I yield the grave for thy sake, and exchange
My near sweet view of heaven, for earth with thee!


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
Would that you were alive today,
Catullus!
Truth ’tis, there is a filthy skunk amongst us,
A rank musk-idiot, the filthiest skunk,
Of no least sorry use on earth, but only Fit in fancy to justify the outlay Of your most horrible vocabulary.
My Muse, all innocent as Eve in Eden,
Would yet wear any skins of old pollution Rather than celebrate the name detested.
Ev’n now might he rejoice at our attention,
Guess'd he this little ode were aiming at him.
O! were you but alive again,
Catullus!
For see, not one among the bards of our time With their flimsy tackle was out to strike him;
Not those two pretty Laureates of England,
Not Alfred Tennyson nor Alfred Austin.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
How careful was I when I took my way,
Each trifle under truest bars to thrust,
That to my use it might unused stay
From hands of falsehood, in sure wards of trust!
But thou, to whom my jewels trifles are,
Most worthy comfort, now my greatest grief,
Thou best of dearest, and mine only care,
Art left the prey of every vulgar thief.
Thee have I not lock’d up in any chest,
Save where thou art not, though I feel thou art,
Within the gentle closure of my breast,
From whence at pleasure thou mayst come and part;
And even thence thou wilt be stol’n I fear,
For truth proves thievish for a prize so dear.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
What a relief
you cannot live everywhere all at once.
Today, here in Diamond Cave,
there's no longer any reason to live.
Stay one or two days:
this world
& the Other are drained of difference.
Wind blows.
As a pearl is born at seabottom in agony
out of oyster flesh from within the most obscure darkness
here the wind blows from the depths.
I want to travel far & then return.
The wind blows as if I were eighty-five,
maybe eighty-seven.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
As an unperfect actor on the stage,
Who with his fear is put beside his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart;
So I, for fear of trust, forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love’s rite,
And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay,
O’ercharg’d with burthen of mine own love’s might.
O! let my looks be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love, and look for recompense,
More than that tongue that more hath more express’d.
O! learn to read what silent love hath writ:
To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown'd,
Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth
And delves the parallels in beauty's brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
That god forbid, that made me first your slave,
I should in thought control your times of pleasure,
Or at your hand the account of hours to crave,
Being your vassal, bound to stay your leisure!
O! let me suffer, being at your beck,
The imprison’d absence of your liberty;
And patience, tame to sufferance, bide each check,
Without accusing you of injury.
Be where you list, your charter is so strong
That you yourself may privilage your time
To what you will; to you it doth belong
Yourself to pardon of self-doing crime.
I am to wait, though waiting so be hell,
Not blame your pleasure be it ill or well.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Alone, unfriended, on a foreign shore,
Behold an hapless, melancholy maid,
Begging her scanty fare from door to door,
With piteous voice, and humbly bended head.
Alas! her native tongue is known to few:
Her manners and her garb excite suprise;
The vulgar stare to see her bid adieu;
Her tattered garments fix their curious eyes.
Cease, cease your laugh, ye thoughtless vain;
Why sneer at yon poor Indian’s pain?
’Tis nature’s artless voice that speaks:
Behold the tear bedew her cheeks!
Imploring actions, bursting sighs,
Reveal enough to British eyes.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Please think of this as not merely a piece
Of writing that anyone would fully
Appreciate, but as plain and simple
Words that attempt to arouse whatever
Appetencies you, especially, depend
Upon language to fulfill; that drench you
In several levels of meaning at once,
Rendering my presence superfluous.
In other words, welcome this as a poem,
Not merely a missive I’ve slowly composed
And tucked under your windshield wiper
So that these onlookers who saw me bash
In your fender will think I’m jotting down
The usual information and go away.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
Monterosa, your body is dead on Avenue A. Angelo,
They found you eyes open staring at the beer
Soaked floorboards. Did you want that? Did
You mind them filling your back with buckshot?
Angelo, I am angry with them all, and you Monterosa
Killed and killers, killing and dealing dope. No good
You were, no good they are. Still, I wish their fate
To be bodies stacking under the same blue smoke.
Monterosa, there is blood on your song, blood on the juke
Box. The cowbell, the conga, and your corpse form the trio
That is the rhinestone pin of my failure, your failure,
Our failure, who loved, but did not rescue Angelo.
Angel, hold him, while I bury him in these clean words,
And pray to see the resurrection of the rose mountain.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
Beloved, thou hast brought me many flowers
Plucked in the garden, all the summer through
And winter, and it seemed as if they grew
In this close room, nor missed the sun and showers,
So, in the like name of that love of ours,
Take back these thoughts which here unfolded too,
And which on warm and cold days I withdrew
From my heart’s ground. Indeed, those beds and bowers
Be overgrown with bitter weeds and rue,
And wait thy weeding; yet here’s eglantine,
Here’s ivy!— take them, as I used to do
Thy flowers, and keep them where they shall not pine.
Instruct thine eyes to keep their colours true,
And tell thy soul, their roots are left in mine.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
My poet, thou canst touch on all the notes
God set between His After and Before,
And strike up and strike off the general roar
Of the rushing worlds a melody that floats
In a serene air purely.  Antidotes
Of medicated music, answering for
Mankind’s forlornest uses, thou canst pour
From thence into their ears.  God’s will devotes
Thine to such ends, and mine to wait on thine.
How, Dearest, wilt thou have me for most use?
A hope, to sing by gladly? or a fine
Sad memory, with thy songs to interfuse?
A shade, in which to sing—of palm or pine?
A grave, on which to rest from singing?  Choose.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
On the first page of my dreambook
It’s always evening
In an occupied country.
Hour before the curfew.
A small provincial city.
The houses all dark.
The storefronts gutted.
I am on a street corner
Where I shouldn’t be.
Alone and coatless
I have gone out to look
For a black dog who answers to my whistle.
I have a kind of Halloween mask
Which I am afraid to put on.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Thine eyes I love, and they, as pitying me,
Knowing thy heart torment me with disdain,
Have put on black and loving mourners be,
Looking with pretty ruth upon my pain.
And truly not the morning sun of heaven
Better becomes the grey cheeks of the east,
Nor that full star that ushers in the even,
Doth half that glory to the sober west,
As those two mourning eyes become thy face:
O! let it then as well beseem thy heart
To mourn for me since mourning doth thee grace,
And suit thy pity like in every part.
Then will I swear beauty herself is black,
And all they foul that thy complexion lack.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace.
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all-triumphant splendour on my brow;
But out, alack! he was but one hour mine;
The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
The feeling of time derives from heat,
an agitation of molecules,
oracles from the friction of air
through fissures and the leaves of oaks.
A few gnats stitch the lake’s edge
where a fox turns off the gravel road
to nose through rhododendron
as children crawl through winter coats
to reach a closet’s dark recess.
Dawdling at the edge of sleep
you work through problems already past
though unresolved, a notional path,
a crease through heads of wild blue phlox
that waking, you can’t follow.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
First time he kissed me, he but only kissed
The fingers of this hand wherewith I write;
And ever since, it grew more clean and white.
Slow to world-greetings, quick with its “O, list,”
When the angels speak.  A ring of amethyst
I could not wear here, plainer to my sight,
Than that first kiss.  The second passed in height
The first, and sought the forehead, and half missed,
Half falling on the hair.  O beyond meed!
That was the chrism of love, which love’s own crown,
With sanctifying sweetness, did precede
The third upon my lips was folded down
In perfect, purple state; since when, indeed,
I have been proud and said, “My love, my own.”


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,
For all the day they view things unrespected;
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,
And darkly bright, are bright in dark directed.
Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright,
How would thy shadow’s form form happy show
To the clear day with thy much clearer light,
When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so!
How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made
By looking on thee in the living day,
When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade
Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay!
All days are nights to see till I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
My spirit is too weak—mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
Yet ’tis a gentle luxury to weep
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep
Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old time—with a billowy main—
A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
If thou survive my well-contented day,
When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover
And shalt by fortune once more re-survey
These poor rude lines of thy deceased lover,
Compare them with the bett’ring of the time,
And though they be outstripp’d by every pen,
Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme,
Exceeded by the height of happier men.
O! then vouchsafe me but this loving thought:
‘Had my friend’s Muse grown with this growing age,
A dearer birth than this his love had brought,
To march in ranks of better equipage:
But since he died and poets better prove,
Theirs for their style I’ll read, his for his love’.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands,
Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream,
And times and things, as in that vision, seem
Keeping along it their eternal stands,—
Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd bands
That roamed through the young world, the glory extreme
Of high Sesostris, and that southern beam,
The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands.
Then comes a mightier silence, stern and strong,
As of a world left empty of its throng,
And the void weighs on us; and then we wake,
And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along
Twixt villages, and think how we shall take
Our own calm journey on for human sake.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,
And burn the long-liv’d phoenix, in her blood;
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleets,
And do whate’er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets;
But I forbid thee one most heinous crime:
O! carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen;
Him in thy course untainted do allow
For beauty’s pattern to succeeding men.
Yet do thy worst, old Time; despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Canst thou, O cruel! say I love thee not,
When I against myself with thee partake?
Do I not think on thee, when I forgot
Am of my self, all tyrant, for thy sake?
Who hateth thee that I do call my friend,
On whom frown’st thou that I do fawn upon,
Nay, if thou lour’st on me, do I not spend
Revenge upon myself with present moan?
What merit do I in my self respect,
That is so proud thy service to despise,
When all my best doth worship thy defect,
Commanded by the motion of thine eyes?
But, love, hate on, for now I know thy mind;
Those that can see thou lov’st, and I am blind.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Down milk-bright colonnades
the leper’s bell recedes.
Shades lowered against the gleaming waste of ice,
I sit back, bathe in lukewarm acquiescence.
Dutiful, prompt,
strapped, doped, a little drunk,
squinting at international afternoon
I’ll soon pass GO again.
And if these colored pencils, nose drops, passport
should plummet with the rest of the huge oval,
giant time capsule soft for the shark’s maw,
will a notebook ambered back to front with words
rescue me from oblivion?
Syrup of skittish travelers, fame. I yawn.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Thou comest! all is said without a word.
I sit beneath thy looks, as children do
In the noon-sun, with souls that tremble through
Their happy eyelids from an unaverred
Yet prodigal inward joy.  Behold, I erred
In that last doubt! and yet I cannot rue
The sin most, but the occasion—that we two
Should for a moment stand unministered
By a mutual presence.  Ah, keep near and close,
Thou dove-like help! and when my fears would rise,
With thy broad heart serenely interpose:
Brood down with thy divine sufficiencies
These thoughts which tremble when bereft of those,
Like callow birds left desert to the skies.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
’Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the Judgement that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And tender churl mak’st waste in niggarding:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
About twilight we came to the whitewashed pub
On a knuckle of land above the bay
Where a log was riding and the slow
Bird-winged breakers cast up spray.
One of the drinkers round packing cases had
The worn face of a kumara god,
Or so it struck me. Later on
Lying awake in the veranda bedroom
In great dryness of mind I heard the voice of the sea
Reverberating, and thought: As a man
Grows older he does not want beer, bread, or the prancing flesh,
But the arms of the eater of life, Hine-nui-te-po,
With teeth of obsidian and hair like kelp
Flashing and glimmering at the edge of the horizon.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Can life be a blessing,
Or worth the possessing,
Can life be a blessing if love were away?
Ah no! though our love all night keep us waking,
And though he torment us with cares all the day,
Yet he sweetens, he sweetens our pains in the taking,
There's an hour at the last, there's an hour to repay.
In ev'ry possessing,
The ravishing blessing,
In ev'ry possessing the fruit of our pain,
Poor lovers forget long ages of anguish,
Whate'er they have suffer'd and done to obtain;
'Tis a pleasure, a pleasure to sigh and to languish,
When we hope, when we hope to be happy again.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
I dunno yer highfalutin' words, but here's th' way it seems
When I'm peekin' out th' winder o' my little House o Dreams;
I've been lookin' 'roun' this big ol' world, as bizzy as a hive,
An' I want t' tell ye, neighbor mine, it's good t' be alive.
I've ben settin' here, a-thinkin' hard, an' say, it seems t' me
That this big ol' world is jest about as good as it kin be,
With its starvin' little babies, an' its battles, an' its strikes,
An' its profiteers, an' hold-up men—th' dawggone little tykes!
An' its hungry men that fought fer us, that nobody employs.
An' I think, "Why, shucks, we're jest a lot o' grown-up little boys!"
An' I settle back, an' light my pipe, an' reach fer Mother's hand,
An' I wouldn't swap my peace o' mind fer nothin' in the land;
Fer this world uv ours, that jest was made fer folks like me an' you
Is a purty good ol' place t' live—say, neighbor, ain't it true?


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
But sad mortality o’er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out
Against the wrackful siege of batt’ring days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall time’s best jewel from time’s chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O, none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
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Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larkinglarking Playing tricks, kidding, fooling around.
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it, for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O if, I say, you look upon this verse,
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse;
But let your love even with my life decay;
Lest the wise world should look into your moan,
And mock you with me after I am gone.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
When I consider everything that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;
When I perceive that men as plants increase,
Cheered and check'd even by the selfsame sky,
Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,
And wear their brave state out of memory;
Then the conceit of this inconstant stay
Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,
Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay
To change your day of youth to sullied night;
And all in war with Time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,
That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue,
Could make me any summer’s story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew:
Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight
Drawn after you, – you pattern of all those.
Yet seem’d it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
A lexicon of words that were not
said in childhood, and all of those
that were, were said beside
an upturned boat, lapped
planking of the creosoted shed,
were said into the wind on
tussocky ground, by farm-rust vehicles.
The buildings I could not complete
without my father’s help, the wind
in which I was at sea. Rain blooming
in August that moved the land
and over land toward the autumn,
sliding through the gates of summer,
feeling for the bone inside the wrist.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
The young Endymion sleeps Endymion's sleep;
The shepherd-boy whose tale was left half told!
The solemn grove uplifts its shield of gold
To the red rising moon, and loud and deep The nightingale is singing from the steep;
It is midsummer, but the air is cold;
Can it be death?
Alas, beside the fold
A shepherd's pipe lies shattered near his sheep.
Lo! in the moonlight gleams a marble white,
On which I read: "Here lieth one whose name
Was writ in water." And was this the meed Of his sweet singing?
Rather let me write:
"The smoking flax before it burst to flame
Was quenched by death, and broken the bruised reed."


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
And then when you stand where it is quiet so that
you notice when thought ends and
listening begins when listening ends
and seeing begins when a bird
flies when you glide as a black bird
and scream when you start to speak
in the clear air and can speak of nothing
but the light as if it were the first
light when you cast a shadow
on the rock and say my shadow stays
and the rock passes away when at this moment
it is true that it is good to attempt the entire mission
you can call the desert by its name
Translated from the German


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
I like how the mallard ducklings
goofy and weak
waddle up the cement incline
then slide into this runoff
of lawn sprinklers and car washes
and how the great blue heron
seems to be teleported here
from the Jurassic
to look for extinct species of fish
but mostly I like the way
the little birds
fly in and out of the barbed wire
with only a smear of water
to keep them singing.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
Passing the shop after school, he would look up at the sign
and go on, glad that his own life had to do with books.
Now at night when he saw the grey in his parents’ hair and
heard their talk of that day’s worries and the next:
lack of orders, if orders, lack of workers, if workers, lack of
goods, if there were workers and goods, lack of orders
again,
for the tenth time he said, “I’m going in with you: there’s more
money in business.”
His father answered, “Since when do you care about money?
You don’t know what kind of a life you’re going into—
but you have always had your own way.”
He went out selling: in the morning he read the Arrival of
Buyers


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Or I shall live your epitaph to make,
Or you survive when I in earth am rotten;
From hence your memory death cannot take,
Although in me each part will be forgotten.
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Though I, once gone, to all the world must die:
The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men’s eyes shall lie.
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read;
And tongues to be, your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead;
You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen,
Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
To celebrate his final Pride, in June,
my friend, lymphatic, thin, and in distress,
managed to dress in drag. He shot the moon:
outstretched, he’d used his dying to think—obsess—
about the Prada pumps, their skin a snake;
the heavy pantyhose, two pair; the moot
but lacy underthings; the makeup, cake,
to overlay his pain. I called him beaut-
i-ful; he said he felt like Greta Garbo
in Queen Christina (our campy interplay);
I countered that he looked more like a hobo-
sexual in heels. We howled. That day,
we never left his Castro flat. His rhinestone
glittered, and everywhere, the smell of cologne.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Not even the cops who can do anything could do this—
work on Sunday picking up dirty and delivering clean
laundry in Philadelphia. Rambling with my father, get this,
in a truck that wasn’t even our own,
part ambulance, part bullet, there wasn’t anything
we couldn’t do. Sheets of stigmata, macula of love,
vomit and shit and the stains of pissing
another week’s salary away, we picked up and drove
to the stick men in shirt sleeves, the thin
Bolshevik Jews who laughed out the sheets like the empty
speech in cartoons. They smelled better than sin,
better than decadent capitalism. And oh, we
could deliver, couldn’t we, the lawless bags through the city
that said in his yawn, get money, get money, get money.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
We unstave the winter’s tangle.
Sad tomatoes, sullen sky.
We unplay the summer’s blight.
Rotted on the vine, black fruit
swings free of the strings that bound it.
In the compost, ghost melon; in the fields(,)
grotesque extruded peppers.
We prod half-thawed mucky things.
In the sky, starlings eddying.
Tomorrow, snow again, old silence.
Today, the creaking icy puller.
Last night I woke
to wild unfrozen prattle.
Rain on the roof— a foreign liquid tongue.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
"A cradle thief," my mother called the man
we'd see in shops, cafes, parks, even church,
with "that poor girl" beside him. Hand in hand,
they'd walk as if they didn't feel the scorch
of people's stares. The day we saw him press
his lips to hers, my mother blocked my eyes
as if his mouth (I longed for my first kiss)
against her mouth was smothering her cries.
All week, I ran a fever that wouldn't break.
"A cradle thief"—a voice I only half
knew as my own surprised me in the dark,
my sick-bed wet with shivers. "A cradle thief,"
I said again, as if the words could will
my window broken, footprint on the sill.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
beside the grave
the ties gave
was she there
everywhere
in the fern
or return
when he called her
of black alder
on her lips
the fresh chips
or felled tree
she was free
and no child
and too wild


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Three sang of love together: one with lips
Crimson, with cheeks and bosom in a glow,
Flushed to the yellow hair and finger tips;
And one there sang who soft and smooth as snow
Bloomed like a tinted hyacinth at a show;
And one was blue with famine after love,
Who like a harpstring snapped rang harsh and low
The burden of what those were singing of.
One shamed herself in love; one temperately
Grew gross in soulless love, a sluggish wife;
One famished died for love. Thus two of three
Took death for love and won him after strife;
One droned in sweetness like a fattened bee:
All on the threshold, yet all short of life.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
You perished, in a toyland, of surprise;
and only I am here to bury you
in dessicated tulip tips and eyes
of broken diadie-dolls. Poor pink, poor blue!
Will you be grown when I’m in Heaven too?
Will length of death have turned you Classical
like old Bisque faces, keen and sainted view,
pearl on your breast, pearl-pointed linen shawl?
No, you’ll still have your flowers with no stem,
and harp, clear stringed, the blur of La Boheme.
You’ll heap upon that Mansion’s mantlepiece
impossible plush animal creations,
and pout the pillared City’s aberrations.
You rest a Classic, but of Wedgewood’s Greece.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
I'm used to the emperor's bitterness
I can't find the sweet place unless you make me
This face that is not my face I may
look made but when you touch me you make me
Make the oak say blossom The stripped say swell
The avenue pavement say river Make me
This shirt I can't take off The one
the nights without you gathered to make me
The new day The sweet place Tomorrow
whispering from tonight's last light Make me
Kissing you without authorization
If you want me to stop you'll have to make me
The ruined city Or is it a woman
interrupting your sleep to say Now To say Make me


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!”
Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.
But not so.   How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . .
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
When I ran, it rained. Late in the afternoon—
midsummer, upstate New York, mornings I wrote,
read Polish history, and there was a woman
whom I thought about; outside the moody, humid
American sublime—late in the afternoon,
toward sundown, just as the sky was darkening,
the light came up and redwings settled in the cattails.
They were death's idea of twilight, the whole notes
of a requiem the massed clouds croaked
above the somber fields. Lady of eyelashes,
do you hear me? Whiteness, otter's body,
coolness of the morning, rubbed amber
and the skin's salt, do you hear me? This is Poland speaking,
“era of the dawn of freedom,” nineteen twenty-two.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
Drunk on the Umbrian hills at dusk and drunk
On one pink cloud that stood beside the moon,
Drunk on the moon, a marble smile, and drunk,
Two young Americans, on one another,
Far from home and wanting this forever—
Who needed God? We had our bodies, bread,
And glasses of a raw, green, local wine,
And watched our Godless perfect darkness breed
Enormous softly burning ancient stars.
Who needed God? And why do I ask now?
Because I’m older and I think God stirs
In details that keep bringing back that time,
Details that are just as vivid now—
Our bodies, bread, a sharp Umbrian wine.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
The Chinese concubine feeling has left and the
sky hovers like the preparation of a revolutionary speech.
You, my long walk with all that expectation
the sexy lunches, thousands of them,
and then all that religion of eroticism.
Beneath the squeeze on my heart is a stranglehold.
You, like a little Italian porcelain village that’s all over the
shop window saying admire this image of foreverness.
The red scarf is factory-made but silky
and it’s what I’d flutter over your face if you were here
and it would be cheap greasy hypnotism, my own malarkey
and we’d be on the southside, at the boat docks, and
I’d kiss you beside the stretch of a Russian grain ship, its
hammer and sickle like the sending out of rescue choppers.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Because I feel that, in the Heavens above,
The angels, whispering to one another,
Can find, among their burning terms of love,
None so devotional as that of “Mother,”
Therefore by that dear name I long have called you—
You who are more than mother unto me,
And fill my heart of hearts, where Death installed you
In setting my Virginia's spirit free.
My mother—my own mother, who died early,
Was but the mother of myself; but you
Are mother to the one I loved so dearly,
And thus are dearer than the mother I knew
By that infinity with which my wife
Was dearer to my soul than its soul-life.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye
And all my soul, and all my every part;
And for this sin there is no remedy,
It is so grounded inward in my heart.
Methinks no face so gracious is as mine,
No shape so true, no truth of such account;
And for myself mine own worth do define,
As I all other in all worths surmount.
But when my glass shows me myself indeed
Beated and chopp’d with tanned antiquity,
Mine own self-love quite contrary I read;
Self so self-loving were iniquity.
’Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise,
Painting my age with beauty of thy days.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Now that you too must shortly go the way
Which in these bloodshot years uncounted men
Have gone in vanishing armies day by day,
And in their numbers will not come again:
I must not strain the moments of our meeting
Striving for each look, each accent, not to miss,
Or question of our parting and our greeting,
Is this the last of all? is this—or this?
Last sight of all it may be with these eyes,
Last touch, last hearing, since eyes, hands, and ears,
Even serving love, are our mortalities,
And cling to what they own in mortal fears:—   But oh, let end what will,
I hold you fast
By immortal love, which has no first or last.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.
He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.
It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,
How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,
For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:
The exact rock where his inexactnesses
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,
Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
The aftermath always happening like an airplane falling, or a man
midair falling from a horse, and an arrow, a gun, many guns
pointing away, at us, our all bull’s-eye-on-the-mark. This is what he
sees when he sees. Maybe Wrong or not, the appropriation, the film
clip, chase, pressed lips over lips, photo moment on the minute-drawn
breath in, the over, the under, bodies in black and white cut to pose,
the way a kiss can pose, dispose of everything around it for another,
dispose of thinking. It’s like waving good-bye. Mouth to mouth seeing
as saying. Inside. Resuscitation back to the brain saying yes as the mouth
makes an O. Circles for the digital age, colored dots for faces already
made for erasing. Hurry, come, he, 6’7”, sees fifteen minutes from the
Mexican border, cremates his old paintings up close. But the ashes were
kept in a book urn, not so afloat in the ocean with my parents, Above,
On, and Under (with Mermaid)


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
Standing in front of a mirror, my mother tells me she is ugly
says the medication is making her fat. I laugh & walk her
back to the bed. My mother tells me she is ugly in the same voice
she used to say no woman could love you & I watch her
pull at her body & it is mine. My heavy breast.
My disappointing shape. She asks for a bowl of plain broth
& it becomes the cup of vinegar she would pour down my throat.
Everyday after school, I would kneel before her.
I would remove my clothes & ask her to mark the progress.
It’s important that I mention, I truly wanted to be beautiful
for her. In my dreams I am thin & if not thin, something better.
I tell my mother she is still beautiful & she laughs. The room fills
with flies. They gather in the shape of a small boy. They lead her
back to the mirror, but my reflection is still there.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
There’s nothing dandier than threadbare threads
worn by a discerning shabby dresser.
A collar’s fret or subtle fray is not lesser
because it’s worn away but models instead
the bespoke tailoring of time itself.
Done poorly—the gentleman farmer’s
piecemeal pastoral, that NoHo charmer’s
duct-taped boots—it’s like an unread bookshelf
of secondhand prose: a too-studied pose.
Done well, it draws you in to draw you near,
reveals the intricate pattern in the years’
inexorable ravel. Between decompose
and deconstruct, what seemed a foppish quirk
grows wise. Design undone. We wear time’s work.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written embassage,
To witness duty, not to show my wit:
Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine
May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it,
But that I hope some good conceit of thine
In thy soul’s thought, all naked, will bestow it:
Till whatsoever star that guides my moving,
Points on me graciously with fair aspect,
And puts apparel on my tatter’d loving,
To show me worthy of thy sweet respect:
Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee;
Till then, not show my head where thou mayst prove me.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Those parts of thee that the world’s eye doth view
Want nothing that the thought of hearts can mend;
All tongues, the voice of souls, give thee that due,
Uttering bare truth, even so as foes commend.
Thy outward thus with outward praise is crown’d;
But those same tongues, that give thee so thine own,
In other accents do this praise confound
By seeing farther than the eye hath shown.
They look into the beauty of thy mind,
And that in guess they measure by thy deeds;
Then churls their thoughts, although their eyes were kind,
To thy fair flower add the rank smell of weeds:
But why thy odour matcheth not thy show,
The soil is this, that thou dost common grow.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Now, in a breath, we’ll burst those gates of gold,
And ransack heaven before our moment fails.
Now, in a breath, before we, too, grow old,
We’ll mount and sing and spread immortal sails.
It is not time that makes eternity.
Love and an hour may quite out-span the years,
And give us more to hear and more to see
Than life can wash away with all its tears.
Dear, when we part, at last, that sunset sky
Shall not be touched with deeper hues than this;
But we shall ride the lightning ere we die
And seize our brief infinitude of bliss,
With time to spare for all that heaven can tell,
While eyes meet eyes, and look their last farewell.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
When I have seen by Time's fell hand defac'd
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-ras'd
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the wat'ry main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Yes, call me by my pet-name! let me hear
The name I used to run at, when a child,
From innocent play, and leave the cowslips plied,
To glance up in some face that proved me dear
With the look of its eyes.  I miss the clear
Fond voices which, being drawn and reconciled
Into the music of Heaven’s undefiled,
Call me no longer.  Silence on the bier,
While I call God—call God!—so let thy mouth
Be heir to those who are now exanimate.
Gather the north flowers to complete the south,
And catch the early love up in the late.
Yes, call me by that name,—and I, in truth,
With the same heart, will answer and not wait.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan th' expense of many a vanish'd sight;
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor'd, and sorrows end.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
I wake to money, and take my money slow
I watched for money, lights turned low
One must have a mind of money . . .
Money that is not there and the money that is
The art of money isn't hard to master
. . . The money surrounds us . . .
Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet money
Money on a wet, black bough
Do not go gentle into that good money
The pure products of money go crazy
Money sweeping out from us to disappear
Oh Money! My Money! our fearful trip is done
I myself will die without money
Money, Money, you bastard, I'm through.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Is it for fear to wet a widow’s eye,
That thou consum’st thyself in single life?
Ah! if thou issueless shalt hap to die,
The world will wail thee like a makeless wife;
The world will be thy widow and still weep
That thou no form of thee hast left behind,
When every private widow well may keep
By children’s eyes, her husband’s shape in mind:
Look! what an unthrift in the world doth spend
Shifts but his place, for still the world enjoys it;
But beauty’s waste hath in the world an end,
And kept unused the user so destroys it.
No love toward others in that bosom sits
That on himself such murd’rous shame commits.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
This sonnet is your personal amulet
To be worn in instance of need
Or constantly held in the mind
Occurring here and elsewhere at this moment
This sonnet is sent without cunning
To cull a particular phrase from your lips
To enlist another protector
In this age of malcontent benefactors
Against an ironclad schooner
Feudal kingdom
Dismemberment by jubilant crowds
Strangely indifferent faces
Heat and dust besides
Suicide implicating others


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Methought I saw my late espoused saint
Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave,
Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,
Rescu'd from death by force, though pale and faint.
Mine, as whom wash'd from spot of child-bed taint
Purification in the old Law did save,
And such as yet once more I trust to have
Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind;
Her face was veil'd, yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shin'd
So clear as in no face with more delight.
But Oh! as to embrace me she inclin'd,
I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
While summer roses all their glory yield
To crown the votary of love and joy,
Misfortune’s victim hails, with many a sigh,
Thee, scarlet Poppy of the pathless field,
Gaudy, yet wild and lone; no leaf to shield
Thy flaccid vest that, as the gale blows high,
Flaps, and alternate folds around thy head.
So stands in the long grass a love-crazed maid,
Smiling aghast; while stream to every wind
Her garish ribbons, smeared with dust and rain;
But brain-sick visions cheat her tortured mind,
And bring false peace. Thus, lulling grief and pain,
Kind dreams oblivious from thy juice proceed,
Thou flimsy, showy, melancholy weed.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
O me! what eyes hath Love put in my head,
Which have no correspondence with true sight;
Or, if they have, where is my judgement fled,
That censures falsely what they see aright?
If that be fair whereon my false eyes dote,
What means the world to say it is not so?
If it be not, then love doth well denote
Love’s eye is not so true as all men’s: no,
How can it? O! how can Love’s eye be true,
That is so vexed with watching and with tears?
No marvel then, though I mistake my view;
The sun itself sees not, till heaven clears.
O cunning Love! with tears thou keep’st me blind,
Lest eyes well-seeing thy foul faults should find.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thyself thy beauty’s legacy?
Nature’s bequest gives nothing, but doth lend,
And being frank she lends to those are free:
Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?
For having traffic with thyself alone,
Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive:
Then how when nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,
Which, used, lives th’ executor to be.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I ey’d,
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold,
Have from the forests shook three summers’ pride,
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn’d,
In process of the seasons have I seen,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn’d,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.
Ah! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand,
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceiv’d;
So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceiv’d:
For fear of which, hear this thou age unbred:
Ere you were born was beauty’s summer dead.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Thus can my love excuse the slow offence
Of my dull bearer when from thee I speed:
From where thou art why should I haste me thence?
Till I return, of posting is no need.
O! what excuse will my poor beast then find,
When swift extremity can seem but slow?
Then should I spur, though mounted on the wind,
In winged speed no motion shall I know,
Then can no horse with my desire keep pace;
Therefore desire, of perfect’st love being made,
Shall neigh no dull flesh in his fiery race,
But love, for love, thus shall excuse my jade:
‘Since from thee going, he went wilful-slow,
Towards thee I’ll run, and give him leave to go.’


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
A cigarette kiss in the desert. The wind-proof arc
of flame sparks inside the speeding Buick. Menthol:
a break from the monotony of highway nicotine—
most intimate of drugs. Make this mean sorrow
or thermodynamics, whatever small gesture
there is time for. Light another one, the vainglorious
interstate dusk and ash—the long, silver tooth.
This shirtless abandon, this ninety-mile-an-hour
electric laugh. The edges of windshield, haphazard
chatter. The clatter of the hubcap and the thunderclap:
the white-hot retinal memory of your life as a Joshua tree.
Permanence in the passenger seat. This long haul,
this first drag—nothing like cinnamon, nothing
like the iron taste on the back of your mortal tongue.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
What’s in the brain, that ink may character,
Which hath not figur’d to thee my true spirit?
What’s new to speak, what now to register,
That may express my love, or thy dear merit?
Nothing, sweet boy; but yet, like prayers divine,
I must each day say o’er the very same;
Counting no old thing old, thou mine, I thine,
Even as when first I hallow’d thy fair name.
So that eternal love in love’s fresh case,
Weighs not the dust and injury of age,
Nor gives to necessary wrinkles place,
But makes antiquity for aye his page;
Finding the first conceit of love there bred,
Where time and outward form would show it dead.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry:
As to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm’d in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplac’d,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgrac’d,
And strength by limping sway disabled
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall’d simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tir’d with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Hans Richter
What if the moon was essence of quinine
And high heels were a time of day
When certain birds bled
The chauffeur is telling the cook
The antler would pry into ice floes
Swim with a lamp
And we’d be shivering in a ditch
Biting through a black wing
There would be boats
There would be a dream country
The great quiet humming of the soul at night
The only sound is a shovel
Clearing a place for a mailbox


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
The old cupola glinted above the clouds, shone
among fir trees, but it took him an hour
for the half mile all the way up the hill. As he trailed,
the village passed him by, greeted him,
asked about his health, but everybody hurried
to catch the mass, left him leaning against fences,
measuring the road with the walking stick he sculpted.
He yearned for the day when the new church
would be built—right across the road. Now
it rises above the moon: saints in frescoes
meet the eye, and only the rain has started to cut
through the shingles on the roof of his empty
house. The apple trees have taken over the sky,
sequestered the gate, sidled over the porch.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Extreme exertion
isolates a person
from help,
discovered Atlas.
Once a certain
shoulder-to-burden
ratio collapses,
there is so little
others can do:
they can’t
lend a hand
with Brazil
and not stand
on Peru.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
What did they desire, the dead who had returned?
The sons who had inherited their estates
pretended not to know them. The iron gates
were welded shut, but soon the dead had learned
to hire lawyers practiced in the laws
that bound the afterlife to lesser gods.
The angels thundered on like piston rods,
denying their gold wings to either cause.
The city streetlamps flared like learnèd ghosts.
The moon turned red. Beneath a scrim of clouds,
Spanish moss draped the myrtle trees like shrouds—
in politics the guests became the hosts.
Those days made angels of the better sort.
The cases languished in a lower court.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
A heavy heart, Belovëd, have I borne
From year to year until I saw thy face,
And sorrow after sorrow took the place
Of all those natural joys as lightly worn
As the stringed pearls, each lifted in its turn
By a beating heart at dance-time.  Hopes apace
Were changed to long despairs, till God’s own grace
Could scarcely lift above the world forlorn
My heavy heart.  Then thou didst bid me bring
And let it drop adown thy calmly great
Deep being!  Fast it sinketh, as a thing
Which its own nature does precipitate,
While thine doth close above it, mediating
Betwixt the stars and the unaccomplished fate.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Tho’ lack of laurels and of wreaths not one
Prove you our lives abortive, shall we yet
Vaunt us our single aim, our hearts full set
To win the guerdon which is never won.
Witness, a purpose never is undone.
And tho’ fate drain our seas of violet
To gather round our lives her wide-hung net,
Memories of hopes that are not shall atone.
Not wholly starless is the ill-starred life,
Not all is night in failure, and the shield
Sometimes well grasped, tho’ shattered in the strife.
And here while all the lowering heaven is ringed
With our loud death-shouts echoed, on the field
Stands forth our Nikè, proud, tho’ broken-winged.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
To tell the truth, those brick Housing Authority buildings
For whose loveliness no soul had planned,
Like random dominoes stood, worn out and facing each other,
Creating the enclosure that was our home.
Long basement corridors connected one house to another
And had a special smell, from old bicycles and baby carriages
In the storage rooms. The elevators
Were used by kissing teenagers.
The playground—iron swingchains, fences, iron monkey bars,
Iron seesaw handles, doubtless now rusted—
Left a strong iron smell on my hands and in the autumn air
And rang with cries. To me it is even precious
Where they chased the local Mongoloid, yelling “Stupid Joey! Stupid Joey!”
Now I’ve said everything nice I can about this.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
The ship, solid and black,
enters the clear blackness
of the great harbor.
Quiet and cold.
—The people waiting
are still asleep, dreaming,
and warm, far away and still stretched out in this
dream, perhaps . . .
How real our watch is, beside the dream
of doubt the others had! How sure it is, compared
to their troubled dream about us!
Quiet. Silence.
Silence which in breaking up at dawn
will speak differently.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Once & could-be-future girl, believe we’re not like you. Sure,
the pickup was tucked in dusk, shed all carefree w/ its sunburn
shimmer. Still nothing new to say about the creek, how reeds
get moony, or when we saw pelicans hold hands & gossip.
But y’all must wanna get this close to soft, so here goes: spool
heels, silver sleeves w/ pink accents, kind to stifle the trailer
static, same color Dot says Granny passed in. Past since good
& we did keep her pearls for you, kissed the hems holy, darned
the moth marks back to true. Goes: none of it imitation. Goes:
we are her barefoot bloodline, butter in the salt pan. Trust
you’re not from this sweat but still a goodness. You once most
only boy in the yard, laugh into your born polish. Step-joy,
uncousin: home is a name you bless in silk & cinch. Believe
we’re all alive here. Come hum this lace blood-warm. Glisten.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
O golden-tongued Romance with serene lute!
Fair plumed Syren!
Queen of far away!
Leave melodizing on this wintry day,
Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute:
Adieu! for once again the fierce dispute,
Betwixt damnation and impassion'd clay
Must I burn through; once more humbly assay The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit.
Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion,
Begetters of our deep eternal theme,
When through the old oak forest I am gone,
Let me not wander in a barren dream,
But when I am consumed in the fire,
Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all:
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call—
All mine was thine before thou hadst this more.
Then if for my love thou my love receivest,
I cannot blame thee for my love thou usest;
But yet be blamed if thou this self deceivest
By wilful taste of what thyself refusest.
I do forgive thy robb’ry, gentle thief,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty;
And yet love knows it is a greater grief
To bear love’s wrong than hate’s known injury.
Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,
Kill me with spites, yet we must not be foes.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
Most happy letters, fram'd by skilful trade,
With which that happy name was first design'd:
The which three times thrice happy hath me made,
With gifts of body, fortune, and of mind.
The first my being to me gave by kind,
From mother's womb deriv'd by due descent,
The second is my sovereign Queen most kind,
That honour and large richesse to me lent.
The third my love, my life's last ornament,
By whom my spirit out of dust was raised:
To speak her praise and glory excellent,
Of all alive most worthy to be praised.
Ye three Elizabeths for ever live,
That three such graces did unto me give.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Accuse me thus: that I have scanted all,
Wherein I should your great deserts repay,
Forgot upon your dearest love to call,
Whereto all bonds do tie me day by day;
That I have frequent been with unknown minds,
And given to time your own dear-purchas’d right;
That I have hoisted sail to all the winds
Which should transport me farthest from your sight.
Book both my wilfulness and errors down,
And on just proof surmise, accumulate;
Bring me within the level of your frown,
But shoot not at me in your waken’d hate;
Since my appeal says I did strive to prove
The constancy and virtue of your love.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone!
Sweet voice, sweet lips, soft hand, and softer breast,
Warm breath, light whisper, tender semi-tone,
Bright eyes, accomplish’d shape, and lang’rous waist!
Faded the flower and all its budded charms,
Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,
Faded the shape of beauty from my arms,
Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise –
Vanish’d unseasonably at shut of eve,
When the dusk holiday – or holinight
Of fragrant-curtain’d love begins to weave
The woof of darkness thick, for hid delight,
But, as I’ve read love’s missal through to-day,
He’ll let me sleep, seeing I fast and pray.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
My sinful earth these rebel powers array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end?
Then soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shall thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
When thou shalt be dispos’d to set me light,
And place my merit in the eye of scorn,
Upon thy side, against myself I’ll fight,
And prove thee virtuous, though thou art forsworn.
With mine own weakness, being best acquainted,
Upon thy part I can set down a story
Of faults conceal’d, wherein I am attainted;
That thou in losing me shalt win much glory:
And I by this will be a gainer too;
For bending all my loving thoughts on thee,
The injuries that to myself I do,
Doing thee vantage, double-vantage me.
Such is my love, to thee I so belong,
That for thy right, myself will bear all wrong.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask.
But patience, to prevent That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best.
His state Is Kingly.
Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.”


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
And have we done with War at last?
Well, we've been lucky devils both,
And there's no need of pledge or oath   To bind our lovely friendship fast,
By firmer stuff   Close bound enough.
By wire and wood and stake we're bound,
By Fricourt and by Festubert,
By whipping rain, by the sun's glare,
By all the misery and loud sound,
By a Spring day,
By Picard clay.
Show me the two so closely bound   As we, by the wet bond of blood,
By friendship blossoming from mud,
By Death: we faced him, and we found   Beauty in Death,
In dead men, breath.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguil’d,
Which labouring for invention bear amiss
The second burthen of a former child!
O! that record could with a backward look,
Even of five hundred courses of the sun,
Show me your image in some antique book,
Since mind at first in character was done!
That I might see what the old world could say
To this composed wonder of your frame;
Wh’r we are mended, or wh’r better they,
Or whether revolution be the same.
O! sure I am the wits of former days,
To subjects worse have given admiring praise.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
After Lucille Clifton
Vulture, follow me up: here is the arm
my mother held me aloft with (as
well as she could, until she couldn’t), it
is cut free of her body now, pulled
away from her shoulder, away
from her breath, as you, Vulture, point
your wing toward her offered heart, toward me —
let’s pound her fingers into paste, pound the hand
open, come down, I chant, each word opens
the sky, the clouds need to be warned — once
she was hand & now she is wing, once she was dirt &
now she is air, she was food & now she is bird, she was
lifted & now she is gone.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Let not my love be call’d idolatry,
Nor my beloved as an idol show,
Since all alike my songs and praises be
To one, of one, still such, and ever so.
Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind,
Still constant in a wondrous excellence;
Therefore my verse to constancy confin’d,
One thing expressing, leaves out difference.
‘Fair, kind, and true,’ is all my argument,
‘Fair, kind, and true,’ varying to other words;
And in this change is my invention spent,
Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords.
Fair, kind, and true, have often liv’d alone,
Which three till now, never kept seat in one.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
You wanted to be so hungry, you would break into branches,
and have to choose between the starving month’s
nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-third evenings.
The liturgy begins to echo itself and why does it matter?
If the ground-water is too scarce one can stretch nets
into the air and harvest the fog.
Hunger opens you to illiteracy,
thirst makes clear the starving pattern,
the thick night is so quiet, the spinning spider pauses,
the angel stops whispering for a moment—
The secret night could already be over,
you will have to listen very carefully—
You are never going to know which night’s mouth is sacredly reciting
and which night’s recitation is secretly mere wind—


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Cover me with your everlasting arms,
Ye guardian giants of this solitude!
From the ill-sight of men, and from the rude,
Tumultuous din of yon wild world’s alarms!
Oh, knit your mighty limbs around, above,
And close me in for ever! let me dwell
With the wood spirits, in the darkest cell
That ever with your verdant locks ye wove.
The air is full of countless voices, joined
In one eternal hymn; the whispering wind,
The shuddering leaves, the hidden water springs,
The work-song of the bees, whose honeyed wings
Hang in the golden tresses of the lime,
Or buried lie in purple beds of thyme.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
The wind of night is mighty on the deep—
A presence haunting sea and land again.
That wind upon the watery waste hath been;
That wind upon the desert soon shall sweep.
O vast and mournful spirit, wherefore keep
Thy vigil at the fleeting homes of men,
Who need no voice of thine to tell them when
Is come the hour to labor or to sleep?
From waste to waste thou goest, and art dumb
Before the morning. Patient in her tree
The bird awaits until thy strength hath passed,
Forgetting darkness when the day is come.
With other tidings hast thou burdened me,
Whom desolations harbor at the last.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
“I know kung fu.” It won’t bring back the world.
5:15 a.m.: I wake from another dream,
the same as every dream. A man builds a ship
in my chest. Each of the sailors
carries by her breast a picture of her sister.
The ship is not the image of a ship.
Beyond its sails there are no stars.
The water is only water because it’s black.
5:15 a.m. Perhaps you’ve seen me
practicing my moves in the empty prison yard
and wondered whether you were the dreamer
conjuring me into existence from the bare
desire to caress a phantom ship
and my death the death of your desire.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another;
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose unear’d womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
Or who is he so fond will be the tomb,
Of his self-love to stop posterity?
Thou art thy mother’s glass and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
Despite of wrinkles this thy golden time.
But if thou live, remember’d not to be,
Die single and thine image dies with thee.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
Let me die on the prairie! and o’er my rude grave,
In the soft breeze of summer the tall grass shall wave;
I would breathe my last sigh as the bright hues of even Are melting away in the blue arch of Heaven.
Let me die on the prairie! unwept and unknown,
I would pass from this fair Earth forgotten, alone;—Yet no! – there are hearts I have learned to revere,
And methinks there is bliss in affection’s warm tear.
Oh, speak not to me of the green cypress shade;
I would sleep where the bones of the Indian are laid,
And the deer will bound o’er me with step light and free,
And the carol of birds will my requiem be.
Let me die on the prairie!
I have wished for it long;
There floats in wild numbers the bold hunter’s song; ’Tis the spot of all others the dearest to me,
And how sweet in its bosom my slumber will be!


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
O! how thy worth with manners may I sing,
When thou art all the better part of me?
What can mine own praise to mine own self bring?
And what is’t but mine own when I praise thee?
Even for this, let us divided live,
And our dear love lose name of single one,
That by this separation I may give
That due to thee which thou deserv’st alone.
O absence! what a torment wouldst thou prove,
Were it not thy sour leisure gave sweet leave,
To entertain the time with thoughts of love,
Which time and thoughts so sweetly doth deceive,
And that thou teachest how to make one twain,
By praising him here who doth hence remain.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
He sits beside his wife who takes the wheel.
Clutching coupons, he wanders the aisles   of Stop & Save.
There’s no place he must be,   no clock to punch.
Sure,  there are bass in the lake, a balsa model   in the garage, the par-three back nine.
But it’s not the same.
Time the enemy then, the enemy now.
As he points the remote at the screen
or pauses at the window, staring
into the neighbor’s fence but not really seeing it,
he listens to his wife in the kitchen, more amazed
than ever—how women seem to know
what to do.
How, with their cycles and timers,   their rolling boils and three-minute eggs,   they wait for something to start.
Or stop.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?
Before a face suddenly numinous,
her eyes watered, knees melted. Did she lactate
again, milk brought down by a girl’s kiss?
It’s documented torrents are unloosed
by such events as recently produced
not the wish, but the need, to consume, in us,
one pint of Maalox, one of Kaopectate.
My eyes and groin are permanently swollen,
I’m alternatingly brilliant and witless
—and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in.
Although I’d cream my jeans touching your breast,
sweetheart, it isn’t lust; it’s all the rest
of what I want with you that scares me shitless.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
the place of consequence, the station of his embrace.
Or else I’m not son enough to see
the innocence and the spiritual fiddlings
in the uneven floorboards and joists,
in the guttural speech of the pipes,
in the limp and the lack of heat.
All we need, all we really need is light!
And let there be a roof with no leaks.
Oh father landlord, fill up all our breaches.
He gives himself to the cracks; into the chinks
my father lowers his bone,
the do-it-yourself funeral. He holds the wires
in his teeth. He strips the insulation back.
If it’s black, it’s juiceless; if it’s red, elegiac.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Easter was the old North   Goddess of the dawn.
She rises daily in the East   And yearly in spring for the great   Paschal candle of the sun.
Her name lingers like a spot   Of gravy in the figured vestment   Of the language of the Britains.
Her totem the randy bunny.
Our very Thursdays and Wednesdays   Are stained by syllables of thunder   And Woden's frenzy.
O my fellow-patriots loyal to this   Our modern world of high heels,
Vaccination, brain surgery—   May they pass over us, the old   Jovial raptors,
Apollonian flayers,
Embodiments.
Egg-hunt,
Crucifixion.
Supper of encrypted   Dishes: bitter, unrisen, a platter   Compass of martyrdom,
Ground-up apples and walnuts   In sweet wine to embody mortar   Of affliction, babies for bricks.
Legible traces of the species   That devises the angel of death   Sailing over our doorpost   Smeared with sacrifice.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
Go wailing verse, the infants of my love,
Minerva-like, brought forth without a Mother:
Present the image of the cares I prove,
Witness your Father’s grief exceeds all other.
Sigh out a story of her cruel deeds,
With interrupted accents of despair:
A monument that whosoever reads,
May justly praise, and blame my loveless Fair.
Say her disdain hath dried up my blood,
And starved you, in succours still denying:
Press to her eyes, importune me some good;
Waken her sleeping pity with your crying.
Knock at that hard heart, beg till you have moved her;
And tell th’unkind, how dearly I have loved her.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
’Gainst death, and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgement that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Unlike are we, unlike, O princely Heart!
Unlike our uses and our destinies.
Our ministering two angels look surprise
On one another, as they strike athwart
Their wings in passing.  Thou, bethink thee, art
A guest for queens to social pageantries,
With gages from a hundred brighter eyes
Than tears even can make mine, to play thy part
Of chief musician.  What hast thou to do
With looking from the lattice-lights at me,
A poor, tired, wandering singer, singing through
The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree?
The chrism is on thine head,—on mine, the dew,—
And Death must dig the level where these agree.


Write a sonnet in 14 lines.
Sonnet:
When ocean-clouds over inland hills
Sweep storming in late autumn brown,
And horror the sodden valley fills,
And the spire falls crashing in the town,
I muse upon my country’s ills—
The tempest bursting from the waste of Time
On the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime.
Nature’s dark side is heeded now—
(Ah! optimist-cheer disheartened flown)—
A child may read the moody brow
Of yon black mountain lone.
With shouts the torrents down the gorges go,
And storms are formed behind the storm we feel:
The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
I have no Brother,—they who meet me now
Offer a hand with their own wills defiled,
And, while they wear a smooth unwrinkled brow,
Know not that Truth can never be beguiled;
Go wash the hand that still betrays thy guilt;
Before the spirit’s gaze what stain can hide?
Abel’s red blood upon the earth is spilt,
And by thy tongue it cannot be denied;
I hear not with my ear,—the heart doth tell
Its secret deeds to me untold before;
Go, all its hidden plunder quickly sell,
Then shalt thou cleanse thee from thy brother’s gore,
Then will I take thy gift; that bloody stain
Shall not be seen upon thy hand again.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
I would imagine underneath those warming bear hugs
was a kinda kind of soul
as your many poems attest. Those summer breezes.
Those many hazy sunsets nature’s voices echoing afar.
A life continually fulfilled bordering on the empty
and those inexplicable tragedies,
those bad timings unreconciled, then reconciled with time.
You had no answer that would satisfy your curiosity
and the why, the wherewithal just round the bend.
The morning mists descending in an angled quietude.
A birdcall here and there.
A rising wind unfurled and furling at the top-most branches of a conifer.
Those wetlands mysterioso.
A last-known address unknown at last.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine,
With all triumphant splendour on my brow;
But out! alack! he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath mask’d him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
I saw the racer coming to the jump,
Staring with fiery eyeballs as he rusht,
I heard the blood within his body thump,
I saw him launch, I heard the toppings crusht.
And as he landed I beheld his soul
Kindle, because, in front, he saw the Straight
With all its thousands roaring at the goal,
He laughed, he took the moment for his mate.
Would that the passionate moods on which we ride
Might kindle thus to oneness with the will;
Would we might see the end to which we stride,
And feel, not strain in struggle, only thrill,
And laugh like him and know in all our nerves
Beauty, the spirit, scattering dust and turves.


Write an English sonnet.
Sonnet:
What is so pure as grief? A wreck
set sail just to be wrecked again.
To lose what’s lost–it’s all born lost
and we just fetch it for a little while,
a dandelion span, a quarter-note.
Each day an envelope gummed shut
with honey and mud. Foolish
to think you can build a house
from suffering. Even the hinges will be
bitter. There will be no books
in that house, only transfusions.
And all the lemon and cedar
in the world won't rid the walls
of that hospital smell.


Write a poetic sonnet.
Sonnet:
If thy soul check thee that I come so near,
Swear to thy blind soul that I was thy ‘Will’,
And will, thy soul knows, is admitted there;
Thus far for love, my love-suit, sweet, fulfil.
‘Will’, will fulfil the treasure of thy love,
Ay, fill it full with wills, and my will one.
In things of great receipt with ease we prove
Among a number one is reckon’d none:
Then in the number let me pass untold,
Though in thy store’s account I one must be;
For nothing hold me, so it please thee hold
That nothing me, a something sweet to thee:
Make but my name thy love, and love that still,
And then thou lov’st me for my name is ‘Will.’


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
It doesn't
matter
to me
if
poems mean
nothing:
there's no
floor
to the
universe
and yet
one
walks the
floor.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Who will believe my verse in time to come,
If it were fill’d with your most high deserts?
Though yet heaven knows it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say ‘This poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne’er touch’d earthly faces.’
So should my papers, yellow’d with their age,
Be scorn’d, like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be term’d a poet’s rage
And stretched metre of an antique song:
But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice,—in it, and in my rhyme.


Produce a sonnet.
Sonnet:
At one friend's home whole arsenals of guns
litter the lawn—bright plastic shapes my sons
pick their ways between to take proffered
popsicles. Later, on evening news, words
like "ambush,"  "strike," and "friendly fire"
punctuate glowing clips of wreckage in far
fields where other mother's children kneel to
aim and pray. And though it's clichéd, truth
be told, I wish one could keep her boys
from growing old and going off to die. Toys
need not rush us there. Instinct? No harm?
An urge to hoist whatever's there, hard-
wired within? Perhaps ignoble, I'm still glad
when one spits on his own: They're bad.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Dazzling emptiness of the black green end of summer no one
running in the yard pulse pulse the absence.
Leave them not to the empty yards.
They resembled a family. Long quiet hours. Sometimes
one was angry sometimes someone called her "wife"
someone's hair receding.
An uptick in the hormone canopy embodied a restlessness
and oh what to do with it.
(How she arrived in a hush in a looking away and not looking.)
It had been some time since richness intangible
and then they made a whole coat of it.
Meanwhile August moved toward its impervious finale.
A mood by the river. Gone. One lucid rush carrying them along.
Borderless and open the days go on—


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
simplicity
say sleep
or
shall we
shower
have an apple
you are
as I need
water
shall I move?
do you dream?
shallow snow
flesh
melt this


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
My tongue-tied Muse in manners holds her still,
While comments of your praise richly compil’d,
Reserve their character with golden quill,
And precious phrase by all the Muses fil’d.
I think good thoughts, whilst others write good words,
And like unlettered clerk still cry ‘Amen’
To every hymn that able spirit affords,
In polish’d form of well-refined pen.
Hearing you praised, I say ‘’tis so, ’tis true,’
And to the most of praise add something more;
But that is in my thought, whose love to you,
Though words come hindmost, holds his rank before.
Then others, for the breath of words respect,
Me for my dumb thoughts, speaking in effect.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain
Full character’d with lasting memory,
Which shall above that idle rank remain,
Beyond all date; even to eternity:
Or, at the least, so long as brain and heart
Have faculty by nature to subsist;
Till each to raz’d oblivion yield his part
Of thee, thy record never can be miss’d.
That poor retention could not so much hold,
Nor need I tallies thy dear love to score;
Therefore to give them from me was I bold,
To trust those tables that receive thee more:
To keep an adjunct to remember thee
Were to import forgetfulness in me.


Compose a 14-line sonnet.
Sonnet:
Father’s opinion of savages
And dogs, a gay Bloomsbury epigram:
‘The brutes may possibly have souls,’ he says,
‘But reason, no. Nevertheless, I am
Prepared not to extend this to my spouse
And children.’ This demands a careful pity:
Poor Father! Whooping and romping in their house,
A holiday from ruin in the City.
His wit falls flat, his tie just will not tie.
The dog’s in chains, the reasonable books
Grazed by his children as they learn to fly.
He takes his dear wife’s arm (his hands grow hooks).
Pirates and pudding! Come, such cruelty!
His beard is branching like a burning tree.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
The sun time of the year died out and never might return.
We made fires big as coffee tables to approximate the sun.
I wanted to be a mountain.
I wanted us all countless mountains in a detailed painting.
Blood is everywhere as always.
But now it is blown further and oxygenated for longer.
Yet more sad word has come digitally.
We contain no blood with which to soften and warm the sad word.
Cold wind placed and places the house in its mouth.
We met the end numb and almost still.
Number meant less motion meant even number meant totally still.
The buildings stand still.
The buildings still stand.
The buildings like the builders take each other by the hand.


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
Those lines that I before have writ do lie,
Even those that said I could not love you dearer:
Yet then my judgement knew no reason why
My most full flame should afterwards burn clearer.
But reckoning Time, whose million’d accidents
Creep in ’twixt vows, and change decrees of kings,
Tan sacred beauty, blunt the sharp’st intents,
Divert strong minds to the course of altering things;
Alas! why fearing of Time’s tyranny,
Might I not then say, ‘Now I love you best,’
When I was certain o’er incertainty,
Crowning the present, doubting of the rest?
Love is a babe, then might I not say so,
To give full growth to that which still doth grow?


Create a beautiful sonnet.
Sonnet:
So oft as I her beauty do behold,
And therewith do her cruelty compare,
I marvel of what substance was the mould
The which her made at once so cruel-fair.
Not earth; for her high thoughts more heavenly are:
Not water; for her love doth burn like fire:
Not air; for she is not so light or rare:
Not fire; for she doth freeze with faint desire.
Then needs another element inquire
Whereof she might be made; that is, the sky.
For to the heaven her haughty looks aspire,
And eke her love is pure immortal high.
Then since to heaven ye likened are the best,
Be like in mercy as in all the rest.


Write a classic sonnet.
Sonnet:
How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December's bareness everywhere!
And yet this time remov'd was summer's time,
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime,
Like widow'd wombs after their lords' decease:
Yet this abundant issue seem'd to me
But hope of orphans and unfather'd fruit;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And thou away, the very birds are mute;
Or if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near.


Compose a sonnet.
Sonnet:
Yet, love, mere love, is beautiful indeed
And worthy of acceptation.  Fire is bright,
Let temple burn, or flax; an equal light
Leaps in the flame from cedar-plank or weed:
And love is fire.  And when I say at need
I love thee . . . mark! . . . I love thee—in thy sight
I stand transfigured, glorified aright,
With conscience of the new rays that proceed
Out of my face toward thine.  There’s nothing low
In love, when love the lowest: meanest creatures
Who love God, God accepts while loving so.
And what I feel, across the inferior features
Of what I am, doth flash itself, and show
How that great work of Love enhances Nature’s.