Time Enough for Writing a Sonnet

Feeling somewhat frustrated during UK lockdown 3.0, I picked up Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love, to read again.

In the Intermission, Excerpts from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Heinlein’s character sets out a list of skills of the competent man — what he thinks a human being should be able to do.

If I hadn’t already been feeling useless, reading the list certainly would have done it in one fell swoop. It appears on p.264 (at least it does in the first New English Library paperback edition, April 1975) and it goes like this:

Okay, I thought, I can do a few of these. But not enough.

I’m certainly not skilled enough to be pre-selected for shelter in an underground bunker in the event of an impending comet threat (you’ve seen Greenland and Deep Impact). And, as luck probably won’t have it, I doubt I’d win a place in the bunker in the public lottery either. No, I think I’d be left to perish outside with the insects — and with less chance of survival than them.

Granted, I can solve equations, balance accounts and program a computer (well, write a bit of code to get bits and pieces done). I may also be able to do one or two of the less skilled items on the list; I could definitely take orders — even for a meal, perhaps — but I can’t cook a tasty one, apparently.

But what about the sonnet?

Could I write a sonnet? I had never attempted that, but in the prevailing coronavirus lockdown there certainly seemed time enough to try. So I searched online for the first sonnet that came to mind: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18.

As a reminder, Sonnet 18 is the one that starts, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day…” and after spending a bit of time familiarising myself with the content, meaning and structure of the famous sonnet, the time had come to have a go at writing my own.

All I needed was one stanza of three quatrains with a rhyming couplet at the end and all in iambic pentameter. Eh? It sounded way harder than solving an equation…and it was. But I was excited by the structural element and my eager fingers were poised over the keyboard.

Not long into the task, I realised my creativity was also on lockdown. So I decided that for my first time writing a sonnet it would need to be a pastiche of Sonnet 18, and therefore Shakespearean, but with a theme inspired by life as we know it, and therefore Covidian.

And here it is:

The beady-eyed will note that it is not in strict form, with a broken rule here and there. But Shakespeare sometimes did that too — so if anyone asks, I will simply say that the meter is intentionally broken for effect, rather than I couldn’t get it to fit.

So the time has come to tick writing a sonnet off my list.

But it still won’t get me into that bunker. That’s a new problem to analyse.

If you enjoy the work of Robert Heinlein, read my review of The Door into Summer and its 2021 Japanese film adaption.