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Sonnets - John N MacNeill

A sonnet is just fourteen lines long. So you can take your time over these.

A Place So Perfect
- about two people
- set to music here

I Never Should Have
Version Two
- about two people

Second on my List
Version of March 2019
- about meeting an old female acquaintance
- amended here to be about meeting a male
- set to music here

Trying Not To Wake Her
- a double sonnet, set early in the morning
- amended here as Trying Not To Wake Him

I never wanted cabbage
Version of May 2021
- about liking

You & Me
- a sonnet, but slightly extended
- about two young people

Remembering
- about a girlfriend of long ago
Second version

Diagnosis
- a sonnet in disguise
- a woman, a diagnosis …
- amended here to be about a man

1972
- a sonnet in disguise
- a memory of those times

The rhyme-scheme of a Shakespearian sonnet is ABAB-CDCD-EFEF-GG or ABBA-CDDC-EFFE-GG. To a large extent, the sonnets here also follow the pattern of three quatrains and a couplet, but with the less usual rhyme-scheme ABBA-BCCB-CDDC-DD. In some cases, instead of four rhyming lines there are two pairs of rhyming lines, those rhymes having assonance. Sometimes rhymes are mid-word; occasionally there are only half-rhymes instead of rhymes. Commonly a poem has a change of viewpoint, a refocusing, the point after which this begins being known as the turn. In a sonnet the turn is often after line eight or twelve; in these sonnets, not all turns & line-breaks happen where the rhyme-scheme might suggest.


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