THE SONNET GAME

                      To write a sonnet is to play a game
                      To find out what you didn’t know you knew,
                      Yet working through the form reveals your aim
                      As your rhyming pentameters accrue.
                      This surely is what Shakespeare learned as he,
                      Beginning his career, first turned his hand
                      To master the sweet craft of sonnetry
                      Before attempting something far more grand.
                      But, unlike him, I did not graduate
                      To the dramatic mode, but just wrote more
                      And more fourteeners, good but hardly great,
                      Without the art that makes the Bard’s verse soar.
                           And yet it is an exercise I’ll still
                           Practice, in hopes to grow as good as Will.

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