Lesson video

Hi, welcome to today's English lesson.

This is lesson three of Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare series of lessons.

And in today's lesson, we're going to be looking particularly at structure within Sonnet 18.

Before we make a start, I want you to make sure you've got a pen and paper or something else to write with and something to write on, and you take some time to turn off any notifications or apps that might be running in the background that might distract you during the lesson.

Take a moment to do that now.

Okay, ready to continue? Then let's begin.

Sonnet 18.

So what do we remember about sonnets and Sonnet 18 in particular from previous lessons? Well, we know that the Shakespearean sonnet is one of the most common and most well known forms of the sonnet.

We know that a sonnet such as Sonnet 18 with that famous opening line, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," is a 14-line love poem that follows many of the usual conventions of a Shakespearean sonnet.

We know that Shakespearean sonnets predominantly follow the theme of love, and this is no exception.

And in Sonnet 18, in particular, we know that Shakespeare or at least the speaker in Shakespeare's poem is addressing this to a young man who he loves deeply, the object of his desire.

All of these aspects go together to make a Shakespearean sonnet.

And in this case, particularly, Sonnet 18.

Take a moment now to recap that learning and make sure that you understand everything we've just talked about.

There are three sentences written below, and I want you to copy them out and fill in the gaps.

Pause the video now and copy out those sentences.

Okay, you should have found that easy enough.

Let's see how you got on.

Sentence one, then, a Shakespearean sonnets are one of the most well known forms of the sonnets.

Sentence two, the main theme of a Shakespearean sonnet is love.

And sentence three, the speaker in Sonnet 18 is most likely addressing a young man that he desires.

Hopefully you did well there and got all three of those correct.

If you didn't, you can always go back to a previous lesson, a redress, you can recap your learning.

Sonnet 18 now.

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? "Thou art more lovely and more temperate: "Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, "And summer's lease hath all too short a date; "Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, "And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; 'And every fair from fair sometime declines, "By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd; "But thy eternal summer shall not fade, "Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st; "Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade, "When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st: "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, "So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." Here we see the key language used within Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 and in the last lesson we spent a long time discussing that language.

Here we'll address the structure of the poem in particular, and talk about how the structure of a sonnet reflects the words and the ideas behind it.

We already know from a few moments ago that a sonnet has 14 lines and those 14 lines are key to understanding the meaning, but a sonnet also follows a particular rhythm and a particular rhyme pattern.

Let's explore that now.

Poetic metre.

In poetry metre is the basic rhythm and structure of the verse or lines in verse.

The metre refers to the number of syllables in the line and the flow or beat those syllables make when read.

We've encountered the word syllables before.

The syllables mean the beats within a particular word.

So in the case of syllable, syl-ub-le, we have three beats: syl-ub-le.

Three beats there.

This reflects the poetic metre that we see within Sonnet 18.

The poetic metre that we know in Sonnet 18 is referred to as iambic pentameter.

Most sonnets are written in the poetic metre known as iambic pentameter, and certainly all of Shakespeare's sonnets are written in iambic pentameter.

The term iambic pentameter comes from iamb and pentameter.

Iamb refers to a pair of syllables or an iamb, two syllables together.

And pentameter, you may recognise the word pent from pentagon, refers to five lots or five pairs in each line.

So each line of iambic pentameter has five pairs of syllables.

That's 10 syllables in total, but each of them paired up together.

Iambic pentameter is when a poet uses five pairs of syllables called iambs in each line.

Iambic pentameter can be seen in Shakespearean sonnets.

You may have already encountered iambic pentameter using Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales" or other sonnets that you may have come across.

If you need to remind yourself what iambic pentameter is, then pause the video now and copy down these definitions.

True or false opportunity now then.

Four sentences that you can read on the slide.

I want you to tell me which one is true and which one is false.

Sentence a, a pair of syllables is called an iamb.

Sentence b, Shakespeare uses iambic pentameter throughout his sonnets.

Sentence c, a Shakespearean sonnet is written in free verse with no strict metre.

And sentence d, no other writers use iambic pentameter, only Shakespeare.

Take a moment now to pause the video and make your decision as to whether each is true or false.

You can feel free to write a T or a F to save you the opportunity.

Okay, let's see how you got on with that one then.

As you can see here, then, sentence a, a pair of syllables is called an iamb.

It is, an iamb is a paired two syllables together, and there are five of them in iambic pentameter.

Sentence b, Shakespeare uses iambic pentameters throughout his sonnets.

He does indeed.

Iambic pentameter is used throughout the sonnets to mimic normal human speech, but also the beating of a human heart.

Those paired syllables refer to the ba-boom we hear within a human heart.

Sentence c, a Shakespearean sonnet is written in free verse with no strict metre.

That's certainly not the case.

We know it's written in iambic pentameter, which is an incredibly strict metre that is followed throughout.

And d, no other writers use iambic pentameter, only Shakespeare.

Well, this is certainly not true.

Lots of sonnet writers and other writers use iambic pentameter.

And we just moments ago mentioned that in the epic poem, "The Canterbury Tales," Geoffrey Chaucer also used iambic pentameter.

Let's take a look at what iambic pentameter looks like in practise then.

So we've seen these lines several times before already, "Shall I compare them to a summer's day? "Thou art more lovely and more temperate: "Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, "And summer's lease hath all too short a date;" but as you can see here, what we've done is we've used backslashes to divide up the individual paired syllables, or iambs.

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" We have these one two, one two, one two, one two, one two.

These are five paired syllables or iambs.

We see 10 syllables in total in an line of iambic pentameter.

"Thou art more lovely and more temperate." Again we see those 10 syllables paired up to make five individual.

So let's look at the iambs in particular now.

"Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May." We have five individual sets of iambs.

And the fact that we sound a little bit like William Shatner from Star Trek.

"And summer's lease hath all too short a date." Here again, we have those five iambs, but when read fully we get, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? "Thou art more lovely and more temperate: "Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, "And summer's lease hath all too short a date." I'm sure we can recognise the ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom that we see within a line of iambic pentameter that mimics the human heartbeat.

In a second now I'd like you to pause the video and complete the first exercise in our lesson today.

You're going to copy out the line below of iambic pentameter, and what I would like you to do is to annotate the 10 syllables one two, one two, one two.

one two, one two, and the five iambs.

So the five pairs of syllables.

So the five individual ones as we go.

Use a backslash to divide up the iambs and one two, one two, one two, one two, one two to indicate the 10 individual syllables, just like we've been doing in our prior example.

Pause the video now and give it your best go.

Okay, let's see how you got on with that one then.

We should have something that looks a little bit like this.

"Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, "And often is his gold complexion dimm'd." You can see the one two, one two, one two, one two, one two, and the backslash is indicating the iambs there.

You should have something that looks a lot like that.

If you're struggling still a little bit, feel free to go back to earlier in the video where you can explain exactly what the iambs refer to in a little more detail.

And here we see how iambic pentameter works.

Iambic pentameter gives the poem a rhythmic quality.

The two paired syllables in each iamb mimic the beating of a human heart.

This makes iambic pentameter the perfect metre to symbolise love and the exact reason why Shakespeare uses it in his sonnets.

Chance to check your learning now then.

In a second I'm going to ask you to pause the video and choose one of the four options to answer the question, why does Shakespeare use iambic pentameter? Is it option one, iambic pentameter mimics human speech? Is it option two, iambic pentameter mimics a beating heart? Is it option three, iambic pentameter was fashionable at the time? Or is it option four, iambic pentameter sounds like a nursery rhyme? Pause the video now and make your decision.

Okay, that shouldn't have challenged you too much.

Let's see what you wrote for the answer.

Why does Shakespeare use iambic pentameter? Well, it's option two, isn't it? Iambic pentameter mimics a beating heart.

It's the ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom that we feel in a beating heart, and this is why it's perfect for representing love within these poems. Sonnet 18, the Shakespearean rhyme scheme.

So we've looked at metre now and let's look in a little more detail at the rhyme scheme that is very clear throughout Sonnet 18.

A rhyme scheme refers to the way that the last syllable of each line rhymes within the poem.

We label each line with a letter of the alphabet, A B, C, and so on.

This indicates which subsequent line each line rhymes with.

Now this might sound a little bit confusing, but let's look in a bit more detail exactly what this means.

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? "Thou art more lovely and more temperate: "Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, "And summer's lease hath all too short a date." Take a second now just to look at the last syllable on each of those lines: day, temperate, May, and date.

Which of them rhyme together? Well, I'm sure you managed to spot there that the first line has a rhyme of day.

We label this as rhyme A.

It's the first one.

The second line, temperate, -ate does not rhyme with day.

So we need to label this as rhyme number two, as B.

May, however, goes back to rhyme A again, doesn't it? It rhymes with day.

So we label it A again, and similarly, date rhymes with temperate, and we can label this as B.

So what we see here is a rhyme structure, ABAB.

In Shakespeare's poems, he uses three quatrains or three groups of four lines.

These four lines all follow the ABAB rhyme structure, So we have three groups of four lines that follow ABAB.

As we can see here, we've already labelled ABAB within those first four lines.

Day rhyming with May and temperate with date.

What I'd like you to do now is to pause the video and to label the remaining eight lines of the poem with the remaining letters.

So the next line, the next rhyme shines is going to be a C and so on and so forth.

Pause the video now and have a go at that.

Okay, let's see how you got on with that.

So we should have CDCD, shines, dim, declines, untrimm'd, and then EFEF, fed, ow'st, shade, grow'st.

So what we see here is that every other line rhymes with the one previously, the first and third line, the second and fourth line.

Then in the next quatrain we see that repeated.

So we get the fifth and seventh, sixth, and eighth.

And then again, we get the ninth and 11th, the 10th and the 12th line all rhyming, or an ABAB rhyme scheme.

You've probably noticed here though, that this is only 12 lines, and as we all know, a sonnet is 14 lines long.

The alternating rhymes at the end of each line give the impression of two lovers who have not quite become a pair yet.

They are wooing each other or romancing.

It is as though the lines dance around each other in the same way that lovers would woo each other before realising their love.

As we just mentioned, there is that ABAB rhyme scheme with the three sets of quatrains in Sonnet 18.

But we also have those last two lines, the quatrains, "But thy eternal summer shall not fade, "Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st; "Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade, "When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st." But we have those final two lines.

"So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, "So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." These last two lines are known as a rhyming couplet or romantic couplet.

And the idea is that we see the two lines paired together with adjacent rhyme syllables, see and thee, unlike the prior sections of the poem.

We end with that rhyming quatrain EFEF and we see this as GG, an adjacent pair of rhymes.

Chance to check your learning now then.

I want you to copy out and complete the three sentences below by filling in the gaps.

Take a moment now to pause the video and complete these three sentences.

Okay, let's see how you got on there then.

Sentence one, Shakespeare uses iambic pentameter as a metre to symbolise a beating heart.

It's the ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom of a beating heart that symbolises love.

Sentence two, Shakespeare uses ABAB rhyme scheme to represent the wooing of two lovers, and this is certainly the case.

The paired rhymes, the split in every other line, implies two lovers that have not quite come together yet.

They've not quite fulfilled their love.

Shakespeare ends with a rhyming couplet to represent the coming together of these two lovers.

So earlier the ABAB rhyme scheme implies the two lovers wooing or dancing around each other in the art of romance.

And those final rhyming or romantic couplet brings the two lovers together in exactly the way that the poet wished.

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? "Thou art more lovely and more temperate: "Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, "And summer's lease hath all too short a date; "Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, "And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; "And every fair from fair sometime declines, "By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd; "But thy eternal summer shall not fade, "Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st; "Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade, "When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st: "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, "So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." We can see here, there was initial 12 lines.

Even the language itself represents the speaker talking to his lover and wooing him, talking about how beautiful he is, how much better than he is than the summer's day.

And those final two lines representing the coming together of the two lovers.

Here the speaker tells the lover, tells his lover that actually as long as man exists, as long as anyone can read this poem, then it will give you a life, and your beauty, longevity.

You will be eternal.

In a second I want you to pause the video and move on to the next activity.

These are some sentence expansion activities, and I want you to develop those to a greater depth.

Three sentence expansion activities here for you then as you can see.

For each of them, I want you to copy down that sentence opening, and use your learning from today's lesson and possibly previous lessons to expand that sentence.

So your sentence openings are sentence one, Shakespeare uses iambic pentameter in his sonnets because.

Use your learning from today's lesson to explain why Shakespeare chooses to use iambic pentameter.

What does it symbolise? What does it represent? Sentence two, Shakespeare used an ABAB rhyme scheme in his sonnets, because.

Again, use your learning from today's lesson to talk about why Shakespeare used ABAB rhyme scheme, and what does it symbolise or represent? And finally, sentence three, Shakespeare uses the rhyming couplet at the end of his sonnets because, and talk about today's learning about why that rhyming couplet represents what it does and what we learnt about Shakespeare's use of that rhyming or romantic couplets.

Pause the video now and expand those three sentences.

Okay, those were quite tricky sentences to expand there, but let's see how you've got on.

Sentence one, then.

Shakespeare used iambic pentameter in his sonnets because iambic pentameter represents a beating heart.

This will be a perfectly acceptable answer.

It does indeed represent a beating heart with the ba-boom, ba-boom, ba- boom presenting there the human heart and being relevant to love.

But we could have gone into more depth with this answer.

Shakespeare used iambic pentameter in his sonnets because the paired syllables of each iamb represent the beating of the human heart and so symbolise the love between the couple.

Here we are very specific about the syllables of each iamb and we refer to the iambs in particular.

We say how this represents the human heart and the symbolic reference to love between the two people.

This is a stronger answer and goes into more depth.

Of course, don't worry if you didn't write exactly what we have on the slide here.

If you've got the general gist and the keywords are there, then you're doing very, very well.

If you were not a million miles away, but you want to recap your learning, you can, of course, always go back in the video and recap what you've learned so far.

Let's move on to sentence two.

Sentence two, Shakespeare uses an ABAB rhyme scheme in his sonnets because it symbolises the romance between the two lovers.

Again, this is a perfectly acceptable answer.

The ABAB rhyme scheme does symbolise the romance between the two lovers and therefore, this would be why Shakespeare's chosen to use it.

However, we could, of course, gone into more depth by explaining why.

Shakespeare uses ABAB rhyme scheme in his sonnets because the alternating lines symbolise the wooing between the speaker and the object of their love.

Here we mentioned the alternating lines in the rhyme scheme, the ABAB, and also we refer to this not just symbolising romance but also symbolising the wooing.

The idea that these two lovers have not yet come together, but they are going to.

This is almost the romantic dating, if you like, before the actual relationship begins.

Again, don't worry too much if your words and language aren't identical to what you see on the slide as long as the language is similar, the key words are there, and you understand the gist of what's happening.

Then you're doing a very, very good job.

Let's move on sentence three then.

Shakespeare uses a rhyming couplet at the end of his sonnet because the couplet represents the love of the couple at the end of the poem.

This would be an acceptable answer.

It covers the key elements here that the couple have come together at the end of the poem, and this is the rhyming couplet or romantic couplet explaining why this is the case.

However, as always, we could go into more detail and we could say Shakespeare uses the rhyming couplet at the end of his sonnets because it symbolises the wooing has come to an end and the speaker's declared their love for the object of their love.

Here we go into the deeper meaning and understanding that the wooing of the ABAB rhyme structure of the first three quatrains has come to an end and here we have the combination, the speaker and the object of their love, the subject of their love, coming together in that final romantic couplet.

Hopefully you had something similar to this and had a good understanding of what this means.

If you were struggling a little, do obviously feel free to go back to earlier in our video and recap your learning.

Otherwise a fantastic effort.

Okay, so we've reached the end of lesson three there today of all about Sonnet 18 and the structure of Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare.

You've done a fantastic job, and I'm really pleased to see you working so hard.

In a second when the video ends, I want you to do a couple of things to make sure you review your learning.

It's a good idea to do this immediately after ending the video, but also in a couple of days time to go back and just review your learning and make sure that it's embedding that knowledge and that understanding so that you can always have it at your fingertips when you need it.

The couple of things you can do to help you review your learning are firstly, look at any piece of new vocabulary from this lesson.

That might be something brand new that you've never heard of before or it might be something that we're covering again from a previous lesson and going into a bit more depth about.

Make sure that you write that down.

Write a definition, and really understand what a vocabulary means.

Secondly, review the key learning from today's lesson.

Today we looked at structure.

We learned about iambic pentameter, rhyming couplets, and the rhyme scheme ABAB.

Make sure that you list those things.

Perhaps do some drawings or think about the key ideas that represent those key elements of learning.

Make sure that you've got them and revisit them in a few days time once again.

And finally, don't forget to complete those exercises, particularly those three sentence expansion activities.

There were really challenging, and I want to make sure that you understand and are recapping your learning to make sure that you've got the most out of this particular lesson.

Beyond this, we're going to see you in lesson four for the final lesson in our Sonnet 18 series, where we're going to be looking about how we write about language and structure in Sonnet 18 and the theme of love in general.

But until then, excellent work today and see you next time.