Send me two ideas for our discussion of Donne before 8 am Wed.
one idea should concern the content of a sonnet (i.e., what it says), and
(ii)the other idea should concern its form (i.e., the way it says what it says); this might include word choice, or any of the various aspects of poetic form (e.g., rhyme, meter, line breaks)
The sonnet form always has 14 lines but rhyme schemes vary (to some extent even among Donne’s own sonnets). Typically there is at least one definite change or “turn” in content in a sonnet, often after the first 8 lines, so you might watch for this feature.
Many of Donne’s poems were written about the same time as Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets (Donne was less than 10 years younger than Shakespeare), so you can expect much of the language to be unfamiliar. Be ready to use a dictionary; and, if an ordinary dictionary doesn’t suffice, you can access the enormous Oxford English Dictionary by way of the library database page at
http://library.wabash.edu/databases.html#O
or, when you are on the college network, directly at