You want to write a sonnet. 

It’s a good goal, and easily achieved!

You just need fourteen lines, one right after the other. And some kind of order within and between the lines.

Since we’re speaking English, we’ll start our careers with the Shakespearean sonnet. 

So our lines will all be iambic pentameters — ten syllables long, with a beat structure of unstressed, stressed, … unstressed, stressed.

And, we’ll arrange the lines in the following rhyme pattern: 
ABABCDCDEFEFGG

Here, let’s do one together:

Let’s write a practice sonnet, you and me!

That was our first line. Notice the beat: if you read the sentence without meaning to do poetry, your speech still naturally follows the unstressed, stressed, … unstressed, stressed pattern. 

For the next line, we needn’t think about rhyming. So we’ll just try to continue with some kind of a coherent thought:

Let’s write a practice sonnet, you and me!
Together I believe we will succeed. 

Read over the first line, counting out each syllable and exaggerating the natural emphasis of each syllable - to verify that it is indeed an iambic pentameter. 
And then do the same for the second line.

OK! All we’ve got to do next is find an iambic pentameter that continues a meaningful thought and whose final syllable rhymes with “me”. 

Many words end with a stressed “eee” sound. 
Like “tree”: it’s just one word, and if the word before it is unstressed, it will be, relative to that word, stressed. 
Or like “poetry”. The “po” is stressed. The “eh” unstressed. And the “tree” sound again stressed.
Or like “dignity”. 
And so on.

Let’s write a practice sonnet, you and me!
Together I believe we will succeed.
It was so lonely until poetry

And then we ought to complete that thought with an iambic pentameter ending in a stressed “eed” sound.

Let’s write a practice sonnet, you and me!
Together I believe we will succeed.
It was so lonely until poetry’s
clear, steady structures came to intercede.

For the sake of the sentence’s meaning, we had to make “poetry” into “poetry’s”. That’s OK. The rhyme’s still basically intact.

Whether we meant to or not, we’ve now created a thought. Do you feel it growing inside? It is whispering, it is suggesting, it is pleading that perhaps communication and human affairs could be less scary and lonely and hopeless lost if we applied a little more form, a little more structure. Perhaps if we could stick to reliable rules while expressing ourselves, we’d find the discipline, security, and solidity necessary for us to stand up tall and share not the frothy flighty passions at the top of our thought, but the deeper, more essential, and thus more universal and less egotistical underbelly of our conscious moments. We needn’t flush that thought out too much. It is enough to feel it wiggling inside as a vague thought, a titch of a joke, a dab of a conjecture, a touch of a desperate wail.

Let’s write a practice sonnet, you and me!
Together I believe we will succeed.
It was so lonely until poetry’s
clear, steady structures came to intercede.

We met in autumn’s softer, fonder light
to speak glad hearts from out our eager minds.
I shook and quaked and trembled that I might
betray my weakness - -where I slip behind.

Can one accept limitations without
abandoning the deeper, wider game?
It’s wise to work around wild errant doubts
reflecting side-selves– not me in the main.

So write I you a poem to share my heart:
It shows up brighter wrapped and cloaked in art.

That was pretty good!

We began sensing a notion and then, cleaving to the sonnet’s structure, we made our way carefully around the notion like mountaineers feeling their way up the mountain along a steep, narrow, winding path. With prose we might’ve blasted a staircase for ourselves right up to the top of the mountain. But that vista would’ve lacked nuances that we discovered via the more arduous route.

We could’ve just said that classical poetry’s insistence on form provides one with a structured environment that creates a reassuring safety net (the predictability and thus reliability of the form itself) while demanding discipline and encouraging invention and strangeness/obliqueness; and that this combination can help one gain insight in areas where one, for whatever reason(s), struggles to progress with a more direct and unfettered approach.

But that’s not quite what the poem is about, is it?

And you don’t feel that analysis as viscerally as you feel someone meditating around the hope that poetry will help them to be brave and poised enough to share their true feelings.

The poem did miss one important point. Part of what is critical in poetry’s structure is the rhythm: that is how poetry connects to the body, allowing us to physically participate in the language — in addition to the emotional and intellectual participation that this circuitous route to insight compels us towards. Poetry lends itself to whole-being meditations.

In any case, the poem’s kind of cool, and it is one example of a sonnet, and it is our practice sonnet — thanks for being a part of it!

I’m afraid that we at Bartleby’s Poetry Corner almost always cheat on our sonnets. 
We usually give up on the structure after ten lines, like we do here:

Hike Mt. Thumb Sonnet

A town beneath the shadow of a thumb.
A mighty thumb of splintered stone atop
a pleasant hike wound through thick needles clumped
on twisted rough-barked arms, through boulder crops.

We posed in cotton shorts and Ts beside
a giant wooden sign upon a wall
of river rocks so smooth and cool we liked
to hug and pat it like a pet or doll.

Me first up winding trail, crisp dried pine air!
Me first through sprinkling sunlight, proud I’m there.

And here again:

Christmas 2019 Sonnet

A child on whirring elbows makes her way
through wrapping rubble, hotwheels, boxes, blocks.
A child on dancing toes at manic play.
The grownups keep their chairs, content in talk.

A walk with Uncle, Aunt, and cousin all
High boulders heaped along the slipping sea.
Between bouncing boy and where ocean lalls,
with scamp’ring collie-beagle snagged on leash.

A silent shepherd mouths what Mary speaks
while parents grin and pews and programs creak.

Ah well!
What’re you gonna do?

Author: Bartleby Willard
Editor: Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andrew Mackenzie Watson

Original Version of the Practice Sonnet:

Let’s write a practice sonnet, you and me!
Together I believe we will succeed.
It was so lonely until poetry’s
clear, steady structures came to intercede.

We met in autumn’s softer, fonder light
and spoke glad hearts from out our eager minds.
I shook and quaked and trembled that I might
betray my weakness - where I slip behind.

Can I accept limitations without
abandoning the deeper, wider game?
It’s wise to work around those errant doubts
reflecting side-mes - not me in the main.

So write I you a poem to share my heart:
It shows up brighter wrapped and cloaked in art.

Another Version:

Let’s write a practice sonnet, you and me!
Together I believe we will succeed.
It was so lonely until poetry’s
clear, steady structures came to intercede.

We met in autumn’s softer, fonder light
to speak glad hearts from out our eager minds.
I shook and quaked and trembled that I might
betray my weakness - where I slip behind.

I want to tell you truth - not hopes and fears.
My longing’s shallow, yet profoundly sweet.
Please rhythm, pattern, order, form - please steer
past lust and pride, to innocence’s seat.

So write I you a poem to share my heart:
It shows up brighter wrapped and cloaked in art.