To conclude our unit on Shakespeare's sonnets, students authored their own original sonnets. In addition to reading Shakespeare's sonnets, students were given lessons on the three main rhyme schemes for sonnets and metrical rhythm.

Although such an assignment is a creative exercise, students noted that it helped them to be better literary critics and analyzers. Several noted that it made them more attentive to the effort and details that go into the composition of a literary work. Others said the composition of a sonnet helped them to remember the form, rhythm, and rhyme scheme of a sonnet.

Submissions were not required to correspond to the sonnet form completely, but students were given the following guidelines:

1.) Try to give your sonnet 14 lines.
2.) Your sonnet does not have to rhyme, but son cider making it rhyme and conform to one of the three main rhyme schemes (i.e., Italian/Petrarchan, English/Shakespearean, or Spenserian) for sonnets.
3.) Your sonnet does not have to be in iambic pentameter or "scan," but consider giving each line a consistent number of syllables or consistent meter.
4.) Consider giving your sonnet an identifiable theme or "conceit"--or even several themes and conceits. (In some of the sonnets we looked at, we have seen the themes of nature, war, and the cosmos.
5.) Your sonnet does not have to be about love.

Students and instructors composed sonnets and shared them with the class.

Below is the sonnet "Ode to an Orchid," written by Jonathan Shelley.

I forget your colors when out of bloom.
Green leaves and stems are all that look at me.
Your once beauty encased in nature’s tombs
Outside the purview of what man can see.
Some have at times called you a fickle plant
Because you died before their very eyes,
Relinquishing the grace that was your stamp
And browning yourself in sickly demise.
But I know that this sunset is a fluke,
A simple cover on your nature true.
For in time you will give this death rebuke
And emerge once again in heaven’s hue.
All the times in which they see certain doom,
For me is mere prelude of your rebloom.