Mind Your Language
by cricketjeff on December 4, 2011. © Jeff Green, All rights reserved
I like my sonnets written as I chat
And never mind a little bit of slang,
I sometimes drop my consonan’s, like that,
And let the die-hard archaists go hang.
To “thee” and “thou” is fine in Yorkshire’s Dales
And Shakespeare could put stresses on the “-ed”.
But he’d compose a verse for killer whales
More easily than I’d get in his head.
But write like that and I can’t say I’ll mind
I’m not averse to other writers’ ways
But I prefer to leave the past behind
And write my verse to fit with modern days.
Those other centuries were not the worst
But I like writing for the twenty-first!
Author notes
A sonnetteer was advised in a comment to use more Shakespearean language, I
cannot agree, some people do that beautifully, but if you wanna write in a
modern idiom, that is exactly what Shakespeare was doing!
English