Practicing Poetic Themes: For the Love of Nature with Personal Perspective

I had a difficult time choosing a poem for this week because, to be honest, sonnets are not a go-to form for me. Yet, what often happens for me when I am reading about poets and their works is that I begin to imitate them, which is often what practicing poetic themes entails.

Here is a poem I wrote this week about the common poetic themes of nature and love (albeit parental love) that provides a more contemporary perspective while playing with the traditional form of the sonnet. Confession: I absolutely broke the rules with my sonnet. Feel free to look at my post from yesterday and catch the many ways I personalized this form for my own purposes. I also worked from a prompt in Robert Lee Brewer's Smash Poetry Journal. The prompt was to title a poem as "Three [Blank]." So, although I broke the rules for a traditional sonnet, I did so for specific reasons as I hope will be seen.

Like Edna St. Vincent Millay, we can incorporate the traditional forms of the past with current personal perspective. We are often better poets when we take up the challenge of "burning the candle at both ends" in our writing.