| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMost glorious Lord of life, that on this day,\nDidst make thy triumph over death and sin:\nAnd having harrow'd hell, didst bring away\nCaptivity thence captive, us to win:\nThis joyous day, dear Lord, with joy begin,\nAnd grant that we for whom thou diddest die,\nBeing with thy dear blood clean wash'd from sin,\nMay live for ever in felicity.\nAnd that thy love we weighing worthily,\nMay likewise love thee for the same again:\nAnd for thy sake, that all like dear didst buy,\nWith love may one another entertain.\nSo let us love, dear love, like as we ought,\nLove is the lesson which the Lord us taught."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWere’t aught to me I bore the canopy,\nWith my extern the outward honouring,\nOr laid great bases for eternity,\nWhich proves more short than waste or ruining?\nHave I not seen dwellers on form and favour\nLose all and more by paying too much rent\nFor compound sweet; forgoing simple savour,\nPitiful thrivers, in their gazing spent?\nNo; let me be obsequious in thy heart,\nAnd take thou my oblation, poor but free,\nWhich is not mix’d with seconds, knows no art,\nBut mutual render, only me for thee.\nHence, thou suborned informer! a true soul\nWhen most impeach’d, stands least in thy control."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAre there two things, of all which men possess,\nThat are so like each other and so near,\nAs mutual Love seems like to Happiness?\nDear Asra, woman beyond utterance dear!\nThis love which ever welling at my heart,\nNow in its living fount doth heave and fall,\nNow overflowing pours thro’ every part\nOf all my frame, and fills and changes all,\nLike vernal waters springing up through snow,\nThis Love that seeming great beyond the power\nOf growth, yet seemeth ever more to grow,\nCould I transmute the whole to one rich Dower\nOf Happy Life, and give it all to Thee,\nThy lot, methinks, were Heaven, thy age, Eternity!"} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWe stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store and the gas station and the green market and Hurry up honey,\nI say, hurry, as she runs along two or three steps behind me her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.\nWhere do I want her to hurry to?\nTo her grave?\nTo mine?\nWhere one day she might stand all grown?\nToday, when all the errands are finally done,\nI say to her,\nHoney I'm sorry I keep saying Hurry— you walk ahead of me.\nYou be the mother.\nAnd,\nHurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking\nback at me, laughing.\nHurry up now darling, she says, hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe world is too much with us; late and soon,\nGetting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—\nLittle we see in Nature that is ours;\nWe have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!\nThis Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;\nThe winds that will be howling at all hours,\nAnd are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;\nFor this, for everything, we are out of tune;\nIt moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be\nA Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;\nSo might I, standing on this pleasant lea,\nHave glimpses that would make me less forlorn;\nHave sight of Proteus rising from the sea;\nOr hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI woke. You were lying beside me in the double bed,\nprone, your long dark hair fanned out over the downy pillow.\nI’d been dreaming we stood on a beach an ocean away\nwatching the waves purl into their troughs and tumble over.\nKnit one, purl two, you said. Something in your voice made me think\nof women knitting by the guillotine. Your eyes met mine.\nThe fetch of a wave is the distance it travels, you said,\nfrom where it is born at sea to where it founders to shore.\nI must go back to where it all began. You waded in\nthigh-deep, waist-deep, breast-deep, head-deep, until you disappeared.\nI lay there and thought how glad I was to find you again.\nYou stirred in the bed and moaned something. I heard a footfall\non the landing, the rasp of a man’s cough. He put his head\naround the door. He had my face. I woke. You were not there."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThis was the winter mother told time by my heart\nticking like a frayed fan belt in my chest.\nThis was the fifties & we were living on nothing\n& what of her, the black girl, my own black nurse,\nwhat of her who arrived on Greyhound in the heart\nof so dramatic a storm it froze the sleeves at her wrists\n& each nostril was rimed with white like salt on a glass,\nwhat of her who came up the dark stair on the limp of her\nown bad ticker, weary, arrogant, thin, her suitcase noosed\nwith rope, in the grip of a rage she came, a black woman,\ninto our white lives, like a splinter, & stayed. Charming\n& brilliantly condescending, she leaned down to kiss “the baby,”\n& hissed my little princess & hushed the Jordan & set the chariots\non the golden streets & Mother, I cried to her, & went out like a light."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nNo longer mourn for me when I am dead\nThan you shall hear the surly sullen bell\nGive warning to the world that I am fled\nFrom this vile world with vilest worms to dwell;\nNay, if you read this line, remember not\nThe hand that writ it; for I love you so,\nThat I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,\nIf thinking on me then should make you woe.\nO, if (I say) you look upon this verse,\nWhen I (perhaps) compounded am with clay,\nDo not so much as my poor name rehearse,\nBut let your love even with my life decay,\nLest the wise world should look into your moan,\nAnd mock you with me after I am gone."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhy is my verse so barren of new pride,\nSo far from variation or quick change?\nWhy with the time do I not glance aside\nTo new-found methods, and to compounds strange?\nWhy write I still all one, ever the same,\nAnd keep invention in a noted weed,\nThat every word doth almost tell my name,\nShowing their birth, and where they did proceed?\nO! know sweet love I always write of you,\nAnd you and love are still my argument;\nSo all my best is dressing old words new,\nSpending again what is already spent:\nFor as the sun is daily new and old,\nSo is my love still telling what is told."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI was reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s new piece\nIn The Atlantic — it was the one about\nPresident Obama’s decision not\nTo be persuaded by a commonplace\nThat our credibility hinges on the use\nOf swift and massive lethal force despite\nPressure even from his own Cabinet\nAppalled that Assad shelled Ghouta with sarin gas —\nWhen I thought of your poem on the way\nOf denial, “Via Negativa,” whose lines\nCelebrated their (your rhyme) reticence.\nWhy am I even talking this way to you?\nI watched you being buried, yet in the end\nI wonder if I had ever been your friend."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nCan it be right to give what I can give?\nTo let thee sit beneath the fall of tears\nAs salt as mine, and hear the sighing years\nRe-sighing on my lips renunciative\nThrough those infrequent smiles which fail to live\nFor all thy adjurations? O my fears,\nThat this can scarce be right! We are not peers\nSo to be lovers; and I own, and grieve,\nThat givers of such gifts as mine are, must\nBe counted with the ungenerous. Out, alas!\nI will not soil thy purple with my dust,\nNor breathe my poison on thy Venice-glass,\nNor give thee any love—which were unjust.\nBeloved, I only love thee! let it pass."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nFarewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,\nAnd like enough thou know’st thy estimate,\nThe charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;\nMy bonds in thee are all determinate.\nFor how do I hold thee but by thy granting?\nAnd for that riches where is my deserving?\nThe cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,\nAnd so my patent back again is swerving.\nThyself thou gav’st, thy own worth then not knowing,\nOr me to whom thou gav’st it, else mistaking;\nSo thy great gift, upon misprision growing,\nComes home again, on better judgement making.\nThus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter,\nIn sleep a king, but waking no such matter."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI will die in Paris with a rainstorm,\non a day I already remember,\nI will die in Paris—and I don't shy away—\nperhaps on a Thursday, as today is, in autumn.\nIt will be Thursday, because today, Thursday, as I prose\nthese lines, I've put on my humeri in a bad mood,\nand, today like never before, I've turned back,\nwith all of my road, to see myself alone.\nCésar Vallejo has died; they kept hitting him,\neveryone, even though he does nothing to them,\nthey gave it to him hard with a club and hard\nalso with a rope; witnesses are\nthe Thursday days and the humerus bones,\nthe solitude, the rain, the roads. . ."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nHow sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame\nWhich, like a canker in the fragrant rose,\nDoth spot the beauty of thy budding name!\nO! in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose.\nThat tongue that tells the story of thy days,\nMaking lascivious comments on thy sport,\nCannot dispraise, but in a kind of praise;\nNaming thy name, blesses an ill report.\nO! what a mansion have those vices got\nWhich for their habitation chose out thee,\nWhere beauty’s veil doth cover every blot\nAnd all things turns to fair that eyes can see!\nTake heed, dear heart, of this large privilege;\nThe hardest knife ill-us’d doth lose his edge."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThen let not winter’s ragged hand deface,\nIn thee thy summer, ere thou be distill’d:\nMake sweet some vial; treasure thou some place\nWith beauty’s treasure ere it be self-kill’d.\nThat use is not forbidden usury,\nWhich happies those that pay the willing loan;\nThat’s for thyself to breed another thee,\nOr ten times happier, be it ten for one;\nTen times thyself were happier than thou art,\nIf ten of thine ten times refigur’d thee:\nThen what could death do if thou shouldst depart,\nLeaving thee living in posterity?\nBe not self-will’d, for thou art much too fair\nTo be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nO! from what power hast thou this powerful might,\nWith insufficiency my heart to sway?\nTo make me give the lie to my true sight,\nAnd swear that brightness doth not grace the day?\nWhence hast thou this becoming of things ill,\nThat in the very refuse of thy deeds\nThere is such strength and warrantise of skill,\nThat, in my mind, thy worst all best exceeds?\nWho taught thee how to make me love thee more,\nThe more I hear and see just cause of hate?\nO! though I love what others do abhor,\nWith others thou shouldst not abhor my state:\nIf thy unworthiness rais’d love in me,\nMore worthy I to be belov’d of thee."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe cruelty of ages past affects us now\nWhoever it was who lived here lived a mean life\nEach door has locks designed for keys unknown\nOur living room was once somebody’s home\nOur bedroom, someone’s only room\nOur kitchen had a hasp upon its door.\nDoor to a kitchen?\nAnd our lives are hasped and boundaried\nBecause of ancient locks and madnesses\nOf slumlord greed and desperate privacies\nWhich one is madness? Depends on who you are.\nWe find we cannot stay, the both of us, in the same room\nDance, like electrons, out of each other’s way.\nThe cruelties of ages past affect us now"} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLike as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,\nSo do our minutes hasten to their end;\nEach changing place with that which goes before,\nIn sequent toil all forwards do contend.\nNativity, once in the main of light,\nCrawls to maturity, wherewith being crown’d,\nCrooked eclipses ’gainst his glory fight,\nAnd Time that gave doth now his gift confound.\nTime doth transfix the flourish set on youth\nAnd delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,\nFeeds on the rarities of nature’s truth,\nAnd nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:\nAnd yet to times in hope, my verse shall stand.\nPraising thy worth, despite his cruel hand."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSeeing photos\nof ancestors\na century past\nis like looking\nat your own\nfingerprints—\ncircles\nand lines\nyou can't\nrecognize\nuntil someone else\nwith a stranger's eye\nlooks close and says\nthat's you."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAfter one moment when I bowed my head\nAnd the whole world turned over and came upright,\nAnd I came out where the old road shone white.\nI walked the ways and heard what all men said,\nForests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed,\nBeing not unlovable but strange and light;\nOld riddles and new creeds, not in despite\nBut softly, as men smile about the dead\nThe sages have a hundred maps to give\nThat trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,\nThey rattle reason out through many a sieve\nThat stores the sand and lets the gold go free:\nAnd all these things are less than dust to me\nBecause my name is Lazarus and I live."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAnd yet, because thou overcomest so,\nBecause thou art more noble and like a king,\nThou canst prevail against my fears and fling\nThy purple round me, till my heart shall grow\nToo close against thine heart henceforth to know\nHow it shook when alone. Why, conquering\nMay prove as lordly and complete a thing\nIn lifting upward, as in crushing low!\nAnd as a vanquished soldier yields his sword\nTo one who lifts him from the bloody earth,\nEven so, Belovëd, I at last record,\nHere ends my strife. If thou invite me forth,\nI rise above abasement at the word.\nMake thy love larger to enlarge my worth!"} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhy do you subdue yourself in golds and purples?\nWhy do you dim yourself with folded silks?\nDo you not see that I can buy brocades in any draper’s shop,\nAnd that I am choked in the twilight of all these colors.\nHow pale you would be, and startling—\nHow quiet;\nBut your curves would spring upward\nLike a clear jet of flung water,\nYou would quiver like a shot-up spray of water,\nYou would waver, and relapse, and tremble.\nAnd I too should tremble,\nWatching.\nMurex-dyes and tinsel—\nAnd yet I think I could bear your beauty unshaded."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThen came the darker sooner,\ncame the later lower.\nWe were no longer a sweeter-here\nhappily-ever-after. We were after ever.\nWe were farther and further.\nMore was the word we used for harder.\nLost was our standard-bearer.\nOur gods were fallen faster,\nand fallen larger.\nThe day was duller, duller\nwas disaster. Our charge was error.\nInstead of leader we had louder,\ninstead of lover, never. And over this river\nbroke the winter’s black weather."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nHuge vapours brood above the clifted shore,\nNight o'er the ocean settles, dark and mute,\nSave where is heard the repercussive roar\nOf drowsy billows, on the rugged foot\nOf rocks remote; or still more distant tone\nOf seamen, in the anchored bark, that tell\nThe watch relieved; or one deep voice alone,\nSinging the hour, and bidding \"strike the bell.\"\nAll is black shadow, but the lucid line\nMarked by the light surf on the level sand,\nOr where afar, the ship-lights faintly shine\nLike wandering fairy fires, that oft on land\nMislead the pilgrim; such the dubious ray\nThat wavering reason lends, in life's long darkling way."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI have lost, and lately, these\nMany dainty mistresses:\nStately Julia, prime of all;\nSappho next, a principal;\nSmooth Anthea, for a skin\nWhite, and heaven-like crystalline;\nSweet Electra, and the choice\nMyrrha, for the lute, and voice;\nNext, Corinna, for her wit,\nAnd the graceful use of it;\nWith Perilla; all are gone;\nOnly Herrick's left alone\nFor to number sorrow by\nTheir departures hence, and die."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nOf this worlds Theatre in which we stay,\nMy love lyke the Spectator ydly sits\nBeholding me that all the pageants play,\nDisguysing diversly my troubled wits.\nSometimes I joy when glad occasion fits,\nAnd mask in myrth lyke to a Comedy:\nSoone after when my joy to sorrow flits,\nI waile and make my woes a Tragedy.\nYet she beholding me with constant eye,\nDelights not in my merth nor rues my smart:\nBut when I laugh she mocks, and when I cry\nShe laughes, and hardens evermore her hart.\nWhat then can move her? if not merth nor mone,\nShe is no woman, but a sencelesse stone."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe twilight is the morning of his day.\nWhile Sleep drops seaward from the fading shore,\nWith purpling sail and dip of silver oar,\nHe cheers the shadowed time with roundelay,\nUntil the dark east softens into gray.\nNow as the noisy hours are coming—hark!\nHis song dies gently—it is growing dark—\nHis night, with its one star, is on the way!\nFaintly the light breaks over the blowing oats—\nSleep, little brother, sleep: I am astir.\nWe worship Song, and servants are of her—\nI in the bright hours, thou in shadow-time:\nLead thou the starlit night with merry notes,\nAnd I will lead the clamoring day with rhyme."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nO how I faint when I of you do write,\nKnowing a better spirit doth use your name,\nAnd in the praise thereof spends all his might,\nTo make me tongue-tied speaking of your fame!\nBut since your worth, wide as the ocean is,\nThe humble as the proudest sail doth bear,\nMy saucy bark, inferior far to his,\nOn your broad main doth wilfully appear.\nYour shallowest help will hold me up afloat,\nWhilst he upon your soundless deep doth ride;\nOr, being wrack’d, I am a worthless boat,\nHe of tall building, and of goodly pride:\nThen if he thrive and I be cast away,\nThe worst was this: my love was my decay."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI accompany this life’s events like a personal journalist:\n“Little did she know when she got in the car that afternoon ...”;\nor “Despite inauspicious beginnings,\nthis was to be their happiest year.”\nLittle did I expect that our horoscopes would prove true.\nAnd how could we foresee an answer to\nthat frankly secular prayer, we with so little faith\nas to be false prophets to our most fortunate gifts.\nI am glad when doom fails. Inept apocalypse\nis a specialty of the times: the suffering of the rich\nat the hand of riches; the second and third comings of wars.\nShouldn’t we refuse prediction\nthat the untried today is guilty, that immeasurable\nas this child’s hope is, it will break tomorrow?"} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe backyard is one white sheet\nWhere we read in the bird tracks\nThe songs we hear. Delicate\nSparrow, heavier cardinal,\nFiligree threads of chickadee.\nAnd wing patterns where one flew\nLow, then up and away, gone\nTo the woods but calling out\nClearly its bright epigrams.\nMore snow promised for tonight.\nThe postal van is stalled\nIn the road again, the mail\nWill be late and any good news\nWill reach us by hand."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nEven now this landscape is assembling.\nThe hills darken. The oxen\nsleep in their blue yoke,\nthe fields having been\npicked clean, the sheaves\nbound evenly and piled at the roadside\namong cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:\nThis is the barrenness\nof harvest or pestilence.\nAnd the wife leaning out the window\nwith her hand extended, as in payment,\nand the seeds\ndistinct, gold, callingCome here\nCome here, little one"} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIn the very night of movement where I\nsought a sequential self –\nThe sea as blood, thought as\nEarth that changes the sea\nChanges the fishes in it\nfor the fortunes of landscapes\nare in the fantasies\nof architecture\nH — taught to sing\nsiren scales by ear\nby rote or immersion\nabroad\nIn the discrepancy of double exposure\nCasts of light crack time’s microscope"} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nNo more be griev’d at that which thou hast done:\nRoses have thorns, and silver fountains mud:\nClouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,\nAnd loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.\nAll men make faults, and even I in this,\nAuthorizing thy trespass with compare,\nMyself corrupting, salving thy amiss,\nExcusing thy sins more than thy sins are;\nFor to thy sensual fault I bring in sense;\nThy adverse party is thy advocate,\nAnd ’gainst myself a lawful plea commence:\nSuch civil war is in my love and hate,\nThat I an accessary needs must be,\nTo that sweet thief which sourly robs from me."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhen my love swears that she is made of truth,\nI do believe her though I know she lies,\nThat she might think me some untutor’d youth,\nUnlearned in the world’s false subtleties.\nThus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,\nAlthough she knows my days are past the best,\nSimply I credit her false-speaking tongue:\nOn both sides thus is simple truth suppressed:\nBut wherefore says she not she is unjust?\nAnd wherefore say not I that I am old?\nO! love’s best habit is in seeming trust,\nAnd age in love, loves not to have years told:\nTherefore I lie with her, and she with me,\nAnd in our faults by lies we flatter’d be."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSurvival is the final offer\nthat arrives at the eleventh hour\njust when pain to the tenth power\nwould kill you with another ninth degree.\nBy then, relief strikes you brief as an eighth note;\nyou wear doom proudly; it's your seventh seal.\nBut life whispers through your sixth sense\nof what might await you in some fifth dimension\nwhere miracle is saved for the fourth quarter.\nTricked, you sigh and rise on the third day.\nYou know better, but with no second thought,\nrisk that first step—absurd as first love at first sight—\nas if you were back at ground zero, as if it cost\nnothing, as if this were not the last laugh."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nA personal lens: glass bending rays\nThat gave one that day’s news\nSaying each and every day,\nJust remember you are standing\nOn a planet that’s evolving.\nHow beautiful, she thought, what distance does\nFor water, the view from above or afar.\nIn last night’s dream, they were back again\nAt the beginning. She was a child\nAnd he was a child.\nA plane lit down and left her there.\nCold whitening the white sky whiter.\nThen a scalpel cut her open for all the world\nTo be a sea."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI grant thou wert not married to my Muse,\nAnd therefore mayst without attaint o’erlook\nThe dedicated words which writers use\nOf their fair subject, blessing every book.\nThou art as fair in knowledge as in hue,\nFinding thy worth a limit past my praise;\nAnd therefore art enforced to seek anew\nSome fresher stamp of the time-bettering days.\nAnd do so, love; yet when they have devis’d,\nWhat strained touches rhetoric can lend,\nThou truly fair, wert truly sympathiz’d\nIn true plain words, by thy true-telling friend;\nAnd their gross painting might be better us’d\nWhere cheeks need blood; in thee it is abus’d."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nYou would extend the mind beyond the act,\nFurious, bending, suffering in thin\nAnd unpoetic dicta; you have been\nForced by hypothesis to fiercer fact.\nAs metal singing hard, with firmness racked,\nYou formulate our passion; and behind\nIn some harsh moment nowise of the mind\nLie the old meanings your advance has packed.\nNo man can hold existence in the head.\nI, too, have known the anguish of the right\nAmid this net of mathematic dearth,\nAnd the brain throbbing like a ship at night:\nHave faced with old unmitigated dread\nThe hard familiar wrinkles of the earth."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAgainst my love shall be as I am now,\nWith Time’s injurious hand crush’d and o’erworn;\nWhen hours have drain’d his blood and fill’d his brow\nWith lines and wrinkles; when his youthful morn\nHath travell’d on to age’s steepy night;\nAnd all those beauties whereof now he’s king\nAre vanishing, or vanished out of sight,\nStealing away the treasure of his spring;\nFor such a time do I now fortify\nAgainst confounding age’s cruel knife,\nThat he shall never cut from memory\nMy sweet love’s beauty, though my lover’s life:\nHis beauty shall in these black lines be seen,\nAnd they shall live, and he in them still green."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWe meet—sometimes—between the dry hours,\nBetween clefts in the involuntary plan,\nRefusing to think of rent or food—how\nCivic the slick to satisfied from man.\nAnd Democratic. A Lucky Strike each, we\nSponge each other off, while what's greyed\nIn and grey slinks ashamed down the drain.\nNo need to articulate great restraint,\nNo need to see each other's mouth lip\nThe obvious. Giddy. Fingers garnished\nWith fumes of onions and garlic, I slip\nBack into my shift, then watch her hands—wordless—\nReattach her stockings to the martyred\nRubber moons wavering at her garter."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe land was there before us\nWas the land. Then things\nBegan happening fast. Because\nThe bombs us have always work\nSometimes it makes me think\nGod must be one of us. Because\nUs has saved the world. Us gave it\nA particular set of regulations\nBased on 1) undisputable acumen.\ncarnivorous fortunes, delicately\nReferred to here as “bull market”\nAnd (of course) other irrational factors\nDeadly smoke thick over the icecaps,\nOur man in Saigon Lima Tokyo etc etc"} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhen to the sessions of sweet silent thought\nI summon up remembrance of things past,\nI sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,\nAnd with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:\nThen can I drown an eye, unused to flow,\nFor precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,\nAnd weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,\nAnd moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight:\nThen can I grieve at grievances foregone,\nAnd heavily from woe to woe tell o’er\nThe sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,\nWhich I new pay as if not paid before.\nBut if the while I think on thee, dear friend,\nAll losses are restor’d and sorrows end."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSome glory in their birth, some in their skill,\nSome in their wealth, some in their body’s force,\nSome in their garments though new-fangled ill;\nSome in their hawks and hounds, some in their horse;\nAnd every humour hath his adjunct pleasure,\nWherein it finds a joy above the rest:\nBut these particulars are not my measure,\nAll these I better in one general best.\nThy love is better than high birth to me,\nRicher than wealth, prouder than garments’ costs,\nOf more delight than hawks and horses be;\nAnd having thee, of all men’s pride I boast:\nWretched in this alone, that thou mayst take\nAll this away, and me most wretched make."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nHad I a man’s fair form, then might my sighs\nBe echoed swiftly through that ivory shell\nThine ear, and find thy gentle heart; so well\nWould passion arm me for the enterprise;\nBut ah! I am no knight whose foeman dies;\nNo cuirass glistens on my bosom’s swell;\nI am no happy shepherd of the dell\nWhose lips have trembled with a maiden’s eyes.\nYet must I dote upon thee—call thee sweet,\nSweeter by far than Hybla’s honied roses\nWhen steep’d in dew rich to intoxication.\nAh! I will taste that dew, for me ‘tis meet,\nAnd when the moon her pallid face discloses,\nI’ll gather some by spells, and incantation."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThere is a silence where hath been no sound,\nThere is a silence where no sound may be,\nIn the cold grave—under the deep deep sea,\nOr in the wide desert where no life is found,\nWhich hath been mute, and still must sleep profound;\nNo voice is hush’d—no life treads silently,\nBut clouds and cloudy shadows wander free,\nThat never spoke, over the idle ground:\nBut in green ruins, in the desolate walls\nOf antique palaces, where Man hath been,\nThough the dun fox, or wild hyena, calls,\nAnd owls, that flit continually between,\nShriek to the echo, and the low winds moan,\nThere the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI'm sitting here on the old patio\nbeside your absence. It is a black well.\nWe'd be playing, now. . . I can hear Mama yell\n\"Boys! Calm down!\" We'd laugh, and off I'd go\nto hide where you'd never look. . . under the stairs,\nin the hall, the attic. . . Then you'd do the same.\nMiguel, we were too good at that game.\nEverything would always end in tears.\nNo one was laughing on that August night\nyou went to hide away again, so late\nit was almost dawn. But now your brother's through\nwith this hunting and hunting and never finding you.\nThe shadows crowd him. Miguel, will you hurry\nand show yourself? Mama will only worry."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nBut do thy worst to steal thyself away,\nFor term of life thou art assured mine;\nAnd life no longer than thy love will stay,\nFor it depends upon that love of thine.\nThen need I not to fear the worst of wrongs,\nWhen in the least of them my life hath end.\nI see a better state to me belongs\nThan that which on thy humour doth depend:\nThou canst not vex me with inconstant mind,\nSince that my life on thy revolt doth lie.\nO! what a happy title do I find,\nHappy to have thy love, happy to die!\nBut what’s so blessed-fair that fears no blot?\nThou mayst be false, and yet I know it not."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMy cousin, Milton, worked for a cable company.\nThe boy I knew when we were children\nhad fists that were often clenched, his face set like\nan old man whose life had been so hard,\nit hardened him. But the man's hands opened to let\nmore of the world in. He sent the funniest\ncards to family and friends at Christmas, laid down\ncable so others could connect. Yet, he lived\nalone, kept to himself much of the time, so when\nhis sister found his body, he'd been gone\na good while. He died young at fifty-seven, without\nfuss or bother. No sitting by the bedside\nor feeding him soup. He just laid himself down like\na trunk line and let the signal pass through."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nBlessed assurance,\nJesus is mine!\nO what a foretaste of glory divine!\nHeir of salvation, purchase of God,\nBorn of His Spirit, washed in His blood!\nChorus:\nThis is my story, this is my song,\nPraising my Saviour all the day long.\nPerfect submission, perfect delight,\nVisions of rapture now burst on my sight;\nAngels descending bring from above Echoes of mercy, whispers of love.\nPerfect submission, all is at rest,\nI in my Saviour am happy and blest,— Watching and waiting, looking above,\nFilled with His goodness, lost in His love."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWith her hair closely cropped up to the nape\nLike Dorian Apollo’s, the girl lay on the narrow\nPallet, keeping her limbs stiffly frozen\nWithin a heavy cloud she could not escape...\nArtemis emptied her quiver—every arrow\nShot through her body. And though very soon\nShe’d be no virgin, like cold honeycomb,\nHer virgin thighs still kept her pleasure sealed...\nAs if to the arena, the youth came\nOiled with myrrh, and like a wrestler kneeled\nTo pin her down; and although he broke past\nHer arms that she had thrust against his chest,\nOnly much later, with one cry, face to face,\nDid they join lips, and out of their sweat, embrace..."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nEurope: 1944\nas regarded from a great distance\nImpersonal the aim\nWhere giant movements tend;\nEach man appears the same;\nFriend vanishes from friend.\nIn the long path of lead\nThat changes place like light\nNo shape of hand or head\nMeans anything tonight.\nOnly the common will\nFor which explosion spoke;\nAnd stiff on field and hill\nThe dark blood of the folk."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nAs a decrepit father takes delight\nTo see his active child do deeds of youth,\nSo I, made lame by Fortune’s dearest spite,\nTake all my comfort of thy worth and truth;\nFor whether beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit,\nOr any of these all, or all, or more,\nEntitled in thy parts, do crowned sit,\nI make my love engrafted, to this store:\nSo then I am not lame, poor, nor despis’d,\nWhilst that this shadow doth such substance give\nThat I in thy abundance am suffic’d,\nAnd by a part of all thy glory live.\nLook what is best, that best I wish in thee:\nThis wish I have; then ten times happy me!"} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThis holy season, fit to fast and pray,\nMen to devotion ought to be inclin'd:\nTherefore I likewise on so holy day,\nFor my sweet saint some service fit will find.\nHer temple fair is built within my mind,\nIn which her glorious image placed is,\nOn which my thoughts do day and night attend,\nLike sacred priests that never think amiss.\nThere I to her as th' author of my bliss,\nWill build an altar to appease her ire:\nAnd on the same my heart will sacrifice,\nBurning in flames of pure and chaste desire:\nThe which vouchsafe, O goddess, to accept,\nAmongst thy dearest relics to be kept."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI joy to see how in your drawen work,\nYour selfe unto the Bee ye doe compare;\nAnd me unto the Spyder that doth lurke,\nIn close awayt to catch her unaware.\nRight so your selfe were caught in cunning snare\nOf a deare for, and thralled to his love:\nIn whose streight bands ye now captived are\nSo firmely, that ye never may remove.\nBut as your whole worke is woven all about,\nWith woodbynd flowers and fragrant Enlantine:\nSo sweet your prison you in time shall prove,\nWith many deare delights bedecked fyne,\nAnd all thensforth eternall peace shall see\nBetweene the Spyder and the gentle Bee."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAs apparent as the rest, the asphalt cracks\nare crowded with yellow weeds, the rust goes\nbeyond its bleeding color, and the lot's rails,\nbattered by cars, cast larger bars by noon.\nOn one side of the market someone painted\na row of flower pots, hanging geraniums\nfor the locals who must now go across town.\nAs apparent as the rest, El Tigre walks upright,\nwears a tiny sombrero and sarape, and pushes\na grocery cart full of food. His painted stripes\nare starting to flake like the bounty he wheels\nfor the families drifting into the parking lot\noff 3rd Street and next to the train station\nstill waiting to the retrofitted for the big one."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nTo push and push with raw pink claws like\nhands of shin. To tunnel my love through wet\nearth, wet stars — no one needs the underneath\nlike me. I give you permission to\ngrip me. To patrol the worm-drench of\nmy thinking. To bite a worm’s head and cure\nthe rest as cache. Your flesh, my flesh, your dead\nas dead, buried like a feeling. To push through\nthat wet, a scrum of worms whittling\nmy skin like a premonition. To have pushed\nmountains into hills, ragged sooth from the\nslid wall of healing. “Nothing,”\nsaid the suicide, “is as sad as recovery.”\nTo work myself forward like a noun or an entry."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nBe wise as thou art cruel; do not press\nMy tongue-tied patience with too much disdain;\nLest sorrow lend me words, and words express\nThe manner of my pity-wanting pain.\nIf I might teach thee wit, better it were,\nThough not to love, yet love to tell me so,\nAs testy sick men, when their deaths be near,\nNo news but health from their physicians know.\nFor, if I should despair, I should grow mad,\nAnd in my madness might speak ill of thee;\nNow this ill-wresting world is grown so bad,\nMad slanderers by mad ears believed be.\nThat I may not be so, nor thou belied,\nBear thine eyes straight, though thy proud heart go wide."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhatever it may be, we may suppose\nit is not love, for love must leave its trace\nlike contraband seized and displayed in rows;\nis not sufficient reason to erase\nthe careful lives we have so far lived through—\nthere is no call for us to undermine\nthe walls we've built; no need to think anew\nof all the chains and choices that define\nus still. And yet for all our fine intent\na single touch ignites the night and tries\nresolve past all resisting. What we meant\nbefore we mean again; fidelities\nhave yet been known to shift and come undone\nand all good reasons fail us, one by one."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nTime does not bring relief; you all have lied\nWho told me time would ease me of my pain!\nI miss him in the weeping of the rain;\nI want him at the shrinking of the tide;\nThe old snows melt from every mountain-side,\nAnd last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;\nBut last year’s bitter loving must remain\nHeaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.\nThere are a hundred places where I fear\nTo go,—so with his memory they brim.\nAnd entering with relief some quiet place\nWhere never fell his foot or shone his face\nI say, “There is no memory of him here!”\nAnd so stand stricken, so remembering him."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIn the old neighborhood, each funeral parlor\nis more elaborate than the last.\nThe alleys smell of cops, pistols bumping their thighs,\neach chamber steeled with a slim blue bullet.\nLow-rent balconies stacked to the sky.\nA boy plays tic-tac-toe on a moon\ncrossed by TV antennae, dreams\nhe has swallowed a blue bean.\nIt takes root in his gut, sprouts\nand twines upward, the vines curling\naround the sockets and locking them shut.\nAnd this sky, knotting like a dark tie?\nThe patroller, disinterested, holds all the beans.\nAugust. The mums nod past, each a prickly heart on a sleeve."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWas it the proud full sail of his great verse,\nBound for the prize of all too precious you,\nThat did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,\nMaking their tomb the womb wherein they grew?\nWas it his spirit, by spirits taught to write,\nAbove a mortal pitch, that struck me dead?\nNo, neither he, nor his compeers by night\nGiving him aid, my verse astonished.\nHe, nor that affable familiar ghost\nWhich nightly gulls him with intelligence,\nAs victors of my silence cannot boast;\nI was not sick of any fear from thence:\nBut when your countenance fill’d up his line,\nThen lacked I matter; that enfeebled mine."} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI that have been a lover, and could show it,\nThough not in these, in rithmes not wholly dumb,\nSince I exscribe your sonnets, am become\nA better lover, and much better poet.\nNor is my Muse or I ashamed to owe it\nTo those true numerous graces, whereof some\nBut charm the senses, others overcome\nBoth brains and hearts; and mine now best do know it:\nFor in your verse all Cupid’s armory,\nHis flames, his shafts, his quiver, and his bow,\nHis very eyes are yours to overthrow.\nBut then his mother’s sweets you so apply,\nHer joys, her smiles, her loves, as readers take\nFor Venus’ ceston every line you make."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nO! call not me to justify the wrong\nThat thy unkindness lays upon my heart;\nWound me not with thine eye, but with thy tongue:\nUse power with power, and slay me not by art,\nTell me thou lov’st elsewhere; but in my sight,\nDear heart, forbear to glance thine eye aside:\nWhat need’st thou wound with cunning, when thy might\nIs more than my o’erpress’d defence can bide?\nLet me excuse thee: ah! my love well knows\nHer pretty looks have been mine enemies;\nAnd therefore from my face she turns my foes,\nThat they elsewhere might dart their injuries:\nYet do not so; but since I am near slain,\nKill me outright with looks, and rid my pain."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLike as a huntsman after weary chase,\nSeeing the game from him escap'd away,\nSits down to rest him in some shady place,\nWith panting hounds beguiled of their prey:\nSo after long pursuit and vain assay,\nWhen I all weary had the chase forsook,\nThe gentle deer return'd the self-same way,\nThinking to quench her thirst at the next brook.\nThere she beholding me with milder look,\nSought not to fly, but fearless still did bide:\nTill I in hand her yet half trembling took,\nAnd with her own goodwill her firmly tied.\nStrange thing, me seem'd, to see a beast so wild,\nSo goodly won, with her own will beguil'd."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nBe still. The Hanging Gardens were a dream\nThat over Persian roses flew to kiss\nThe curlèd lashes of Semiramis.\nTroy never was, nor green Skamander stream.\nProvence and Troubadour are merest lies\nThe glorious hair of Venice was a beam\nMade within Titian’s eye. The sunsets seem,\nThe world is very old and nothing is.\nBe still. Thou foolish thing, thou canst not wake,\nNor thy tears wedge thy soldered lids apart,\nBut patter in the darkness of thy heart.\nThy brain is plagued. Thou art a frighted owl\nBlind with the light of life thou ’ldst not forsake,\nAnd Error loves and nourishes thy soul."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nRecall the carousel.\nIts round and round.Its pink lights blinking off and on.\nThe children’s faces painted garish colors againstan institutional wall.\nAnd the genetics.\nThe We won’t be here too long ...\nDo not step off ...The carousel?\nDo you recall?\nAs ifwe were our own young parents suffering againafter so many hundreds of hours of bliss.\nAnd even the startling fact that what had always been feared might come to pass:\nA familiar sweater in a garbage can.A surgeon bent over our baby, wearing a mask.\nBut surely you recall how happily and for how longwe watched our pretty hostages go round.\nThey waved at us too many times to count.Their dancing foals.\nTheir lacquered mares.\nEven a blue-eyed hunting hound was still allowed back then."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nO truant Muse what shall be thy amends\nFor thy neglect of truth in beauty dy’d?\nBoth truth and beauty on my love depends;\nSo dost thou too, and therein dignified.\nMake answer Muse: wilt thou not haply say,\n‘Truth needs no colour, with his colour fix’d;\nBeauty no pencil, beauty’s truth to lay;\nBut best is best, if never intermix’d’?\nBecause he needs no praise, wilt thou be dumb?\nExcuse not silence so, for’t lies in thee\nTo make him much outlive a gilded tomb\nAnd to be prais’d of ages yet to be.\nThen do thy office, Muse; I teach thee how\nTo make him seem long hence as he shows now."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAt the age of nine, Pa drove me\nto the river. The pastor & deacons\nawaited. I donned a white robe,\ntransparent, self-conscious\nof my fresh nubs.\nFather Jonas reached beneath me,\nplaced a hand over my nose & mouth.\nI resisted.\nHe pushed me hard until my feet released\n& rose to the surface, like a corpse.\nI cried afterward, cold & clammy,\nwet hair plaited back.\nAll the men thought I was full\nof the Holy Ghost."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSay that thou didst forsake me for some fault,\nAnd I will comment upon that offence:\nSpeak of my lameness, and I straight will halt,\nAgainst thy reasons making no defence.\nThou canst not love disgrace me half so ill,\nTo set a form upon desired change,\nAs I’ll myself disgrace; knowing thy will,\nI will acquaintance strangle, and look strange;\nBe absent from thy walks; and in my tongue\nThy sweet beloved name no more shall dwell,\nLest I, too much profane, should do it wrong,\nAnd haply of our old acquaintance tell.\nFor thee, against my self I’ll vow debate,\nFor I must ne’er love him whom thou dost hate."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIt is not pain that holds me back, but time\nWith its sad prefigurations and smell,\nIts flowers and echoes, rivers and crime.\nEven now, without a future, I tell\nMyself lies in future tense. As my hair\nThins, I collect combs. When clocks chime, I groan.\nThe falling world finds pleasure in despair\nBecause to suffer means to be alone,\nAnd I suffer through all the accidents\nOf change as though I were settling a score,\nAs if to disinvent what death invents.\nI once built a castle, now I do chores.\nTo pass the time I rearrange my things.\nTo fall asleep I recite names of kings."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nThe stone dolls, found in an Egyptian tomb,\nare eyeless, armless, heavy for a child\nto hold. Not like the dolls that lined the room\nmy sister and I shared, their bodies light\nand made for being bent, their eyelids mobile,\nhair that tangled with our own. \"At night,\"\nour father winked at us, \"they come to life.\"\nWe never pressed our cheeks against cold stone\nas pharoah's daughters did. The doctor's knife\ncould not have caught my sister more off-guard\nor left me less alone; I had my dolls.\nThough, soon, they lay on tables in the yard\nwith price tags. Even then they looked alive,\nsurvivors with no sickness to survive."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nHow oft when thou, my music, music play’st,\nUpon that blessed wood whose motion sounds\nWith thy sweet fingers when thou gently sway’st\nThe wiry concord that mine ear confounds,\nDo I envy those jacks that nimble leap,\nTo kiss the tender inward of thy hand,\nWhilst my poor lips which should that harvest reap,\nAt the wood’s boldness by thee blushing stand!\nTo be so tickled, they would change their state\nAnd situation with those dancing chips,\nO’er whom thy fingers walk with gentle gait,\nMaking dead wood more bless’d than living lips.\nSince saucy jacks so happy are in this,\nGive them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nBeing your slave what should I do but tend,\nUpon the hours, and times of your desire?\nI have no precious time at all to spend;\nNor services to do, till you require.\nNor dare I chide the world-without-end hour,\nWhilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,\nNor think the bitterness of absence sour,\nWhen you have bid your servant once adieu;\nNor dare I question with my jealous thought\nWhere you may be, or your affairs suppose,\nBut, like a sad slave, stay and think of nought\nSave, where you are, how happy you make those.\nSo true a fool is love, that in your will,\nThough you do anything, he thinks no ill."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nYou're presenting me with a telescopic line of reasoning.\nYou think because one dies then to die must be a good idea.\nLet me get this straight. So you think to follow suit is what's\nIn the cards and the works and the stars. It may be that's\nThe next step that's clear or it may be there's another way.\nYou may find a friend for whom to die is not the be-all\nOr the end. There were ten rooms and a thousand shelves\nAnd ten thousand bottles filled with ten million tickets. You\nWere on the end of the ladder in a blue sky filled with litter.\nIt was tantamount to a ticker tape parade on the streets of\nA stunned city. Staccato ropes couldn't hold you any longer.\nAnd in the evening's sudden stillness I breathed in your ear.\nFrom now on out everything gets said in a whisper. If you like\nIf you want if you care to come closer. This way is better."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nTo all those happy blessings which ye have,\nWith plenteous hand by heaven upon you thrown:\nThis one disparagement they to you gave,\nThat ye your love lent to so meane a one.\nYee whose high worths surpassing paragon,\nCould not on earth have found one fit for mate,\nNe but in heaven matchable to none,\nWhy did ye stoup unto so lowly state.\nBut ye thereby much greater glory gate,\nThen had ye sorted with a princes pere:\nFor now your light doth more it selfe dilate,\nAnd in my darknesse greater doth appeare.\nYet since your light hath once enlumind me,\nWith my reflex yours shall encreased be."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nGrief dies like joy; the tears upon my cheek\nWill disappear like dew. Dear God! I know\nThy kindly Providence hath made it so,\nAnd thank thee for the law. I am too weak\nTo make a friend of Sorrow, or to wear,\nWith that dark angel ever by my side\n(Though to thy heaven there be no better guide),\nA front of manly calm. Yet, for I hear\nHow woe hath cleansed, how grief can deify,\nSo weak a thing it seems that grief should die,\nAnd love and friendship with it, I could pray,\nThat if it might not gloom upon my brow,\nNor weigh upon my arm as it doth now,\nNo grief of mine should ever pass away."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLike labour-laden moonclouds faint to flee\nFrom winds that sweep the winter-bitten wold,—\nLike multiform circumfluence manifold\nOf night's flood-tide,—like terrors that agree\nOf hoarse-tongued fire and inarticulate sea,—\nEven such, within some glass dimm'd by our breath,\nOur hearts discern wild images of Death,\nShadows and shoals that edge eternity.\nHowbeit athwart Death's imminent shade doth soar\nOne Power, than flow of stream or flight of dove\nSweeter to glide around, to brood above.\nTell me, my heart,—what angel-greeted door\nOr threshold of wing-winnow'd threshing-floor\nHath guest fire-fledg'd as thine, whose lord is Love?"} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nDid a slave song at a master’s bidding\nmark Tom while asleep in Charity's womb?\nThe whole plantation would be called to sing\nand dance in Master Epps’ large parlor room—\nafter work sprung from dawn and dragged past dusk,\nafter children auctioned to parts unknown,\nafter funerals and whippings. Thus\nwas the whim of the patriarch. No groans\nallowed, just high steppin’ celebration,\ngrins all around, gritted or sincere.\nCharity threw feet, hips, arms into motion\nto please the tyrant piano. Was it here\nTom learned how music can prove the master?\nWhile he spun in a womb of slavish laughter?"} |
| {"text": "Compose a 14-line sonnet.\nSonnet:\nCarried her unprotesting out the door.\nKicked back the casket-stand. But it can't hold her,\nThat stuff and satin aiming to enfold her,\nThe lid's contrition nor the bolts before.\nOh oh. Too much. Too much. Even now, surmise,\nShe rises in the sunshine. There she goes,\nBack to the bars she knew and the repose\nIn love-rooms and the things in people's eyes.\nToo vital and too squeaking. Must emerge.\nEven now she does the snake-hips with a hiss,\nSlops the bad wine across her shantung, talks\nOf pregnancy, guitars and bridgework, walks\nIn parks or alleys, comes haply on the verge\nOf happiness, haply hysterics. Is."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nI sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers,\nOf April, May, of June, and July flowers.\nI sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes,\nOf bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes.\nI write of youth, of love, and have access\nBy these to sing of cleanly wantonness.\nI sing of dews, of rains, and piece by piece\nOf balm, of oil, of spice, and ambergris.\nI sing of Time's trans-shifting; and I write\nHow roses first came red, and lilies white.\nI write of groves, of twilights, and I sing\nThe court of Mab, and of the fairy king.\nI write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall)\nOf Heaven, and hope to have it after all."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nthe difference between a cigarette holder\nand cigarette case,the pleasure of a lorgnette over spectacles,\nof a fortnight overtwo weeks, of a spiral over graduated stairs,\nof the frisson of cryinglike pouty boys, and of the way to walk a lobster\non a leash: drag it,its exoskeleton rapping on the cobbles\nthrough the rabbleof Montparnasse, as if lugging luggage.\nWe did what could notgain us a week of rent or even a plate of fish,\nyet we managed to eatsickening amounts, to hate on our patroness,\nthe Princess de Polignac,though, and I am sorry, she had bought us wine.\nOnce, in the chamberbefore an evening concert,\nI hid a sack of bees\nin the white baby grand,and when ball-gowned Polignac raised the leaf\nthey swarmed through the stringsto the chandelier and the Princess saw a living sun\nand felt a little less drearyand a little less proud of being bored."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nOnce again you’ve fallen for the lure\nof his deferral, his quick eyes’ brightness\nslinking from the pantry of the righteous.\nNothing half so sleek as self-licked fur.\nNot that he forgot your boots, or left\nA single high-aimed compliment unturned.\nHe’ll double back, affect to be concerned\nwhen he’s the secret reason you’re bereft,\nembracing you with his Houdini hold,\nrepeating chewed-off bits of what you say\nso he seems loyal, you the turncoat jay.\nYou’d think by now you’d learn to be consoled\nto know the soul he sold’s not yours but his,\nthough where yours was a hollow feeling is."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWho I know knows why all those lush-boned worn-out girls are\nWhooping at where the moon should be, an eyelid clamped\nOn its lightness. Nobody sees her without the hoops firing in her\nEars because nobody sees. Tattooed across her chest she claims\nIs BRING ME TO WHERE MY BLOOD RUNS and I want that to be here\nWhere I am her son, pent in blackness and turning the night's calm\nLoose and letting the same blood fire through me. In her bomb hair:\nShells full of thunder; in her mouth: the fingers of some calamity,\nSomebody foolish enough to love her foolishly. Those who could hear\nNo music weren't listening—and when I say it, it's like claiming\nShe's an elegy. It rhymes, because of her, with effigy. Because of her,\nIf there is no smoke, there is no party. I think of you, Miss Calamity,\nEvery Sunday. I think of you on Monday. I think of you hurling hurt\nWhere the moon should be and stomping into our darkness calmly."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThou hast thy calling to some palace-floor,\nMost gracious singer of high poems! where\nThe dancers will break footing, from the care\nOf watching up thy pregnant lips for more.\nAnd dost thou lift this house’s latch too poor\nFor hand of thine? and canst thou think and bear\nTo let thy music drop here unaware\nIn folds of golden fulness at my door?\nLook up and see the casement broken in,\nThe bats and owlets builders in the roof!\nMy cricket chirps against thy mandolin.\nHush, call no echo up in further proof\nOf desolation! there’s a voice within\nThat weeps . . . as thou must sing . . . alone, aloof."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWe danced to rancorous tunes on spiked ground and\nour knees sang with each puncture, so that several\nagouti colonies, melanic in our russet strengths,\nlearned as wild rats to scurry or guard ourselves from\nskin-spite. Immune from nocturnal drowsiness\nwe strong-bellied creatures assembled, campaigned;\ngyrated to blowed trumpets and cradled songs, but,\nus black rats with our rogue swagger that spoke\nof foreign ports, pranced our survival shuffle in\nnight’s murky dance halls. Each step our single\nprayer, each jab our benediction. This tart sermon\ncontainered our septic hurts and lean swaggers. On\nthe strike of dawn, we skittered from shadows, the\nredeemed walking day’s straight-road into warpland."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLove is too young to know what conscience is,\nYet who knows not conscience is born of love?\nThen, gentle cheater, urge not my amiss,\nLest guilty of my faults thy sweet self prove:\nFor, thou betraying me, I do betray\nMy nobler part to my gross body’s treason;\nMy soul doth tell my body that he may\nTriumph in love; flesh stays no farther reason,\nBut rising at thy name doth point out thee,\nAs his triumphant prize. Proud of this pride,\nHe is contented thy poor drudge to be,\nTo stand in thy affairs, fall by thy side.\nNo want of conscience hold it that I call\nHer ‘love,’ for whose dear love I rise and fall."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI see thine image through my tears to-night,\nAnd yet to-day I saw thee smiling. How\nRefer the cause?—Belovëd, is it thou\nOr I, who makes me sad? The acolyte\nAmid the chanted joy and thankful rite\nMay so fall flat, with pale insensate brow,\nOn the altar-stair. I hear thy voice and vow,\nPerplexed, uncertain, since thou art out of sight,\nAs he, in his swooning ears, the choir’s amen.\nBelovëd, dost thou love? or did I see all\nThe glory as I dreamed, and fainted when\nToo vehement light dilated my ideal,\nFor my soul’s eyes? Will that light come again,\nAs now these tears come—falling hot and real?"} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI shall go back again to the bleak shore\nAnd build a little shanty on the sand,\nIn such a way that the extremest band\nOf brittle seaweed will escape my door\nBut by a yard or two; and nevermore\nShall I return to take you by the hand;\nI shall be gone to what I understand,\nAnd happier than I ever was before.\nThe love that stood a moment in your eyes,\nThe words that lay a moment on your tongue,\nAre one with all that in a moment dies,\nA little under-said and over-sung.\nBut I shall find the sullen rocks and skies\nUnchanged from what they were when I was young."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhen on my bed the moonlight falls,\nI know that in thy place of rest\nBy that broad water of the west,\nThere comes a glory on the walls:\nThy marble bright in dark appears,\nAs slowly steals a silver flame\nAlong the letters of thy name,\nAnd o'er the number of thy years.\nThe mystic glory swims away;\nFrom off my bed the moonlight dies;\nAnd closing eaves of wearied eyes I sleep till dusk is dipt in gray:\nAnd then I know the mist is drawn\nA lucid veil from coast to coast,\nAnd in the dark church like a ghost Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nSweet love, renew thy force; be it not said\nThy edge should blunter be than appetite,\nWhich but to-day by feeding is allay’d,\nTo-morrow sharpened in his former might:\nSo, love, be thou, although to-day thou fill\nThy hungry eyes, even till they wink with fulness,\nTo-morrow see again, and do not kill\nThe spirit of love, with a perpetual dulness.\nLet this sad interim like the ocean be\nWhich parts the shore, where two contracted new\nCome daily to the banks, that when they see\nReturn of love, more blest may be the view;\nOr call it winter, which being full of care,\nMakes summer’s welcome, thrice more wished, more rare."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nHe brings me chocolate from the Pentagon,\ndark chocolates shaped like tanks and fighter jets,\nmilk chocolate tomahawks, a bonbon\nlike a kirsch grenade, mint chocolate bayonets.\nHe brings me chocolate ships, a submarine\ndescending in a chocolate sea, a drone\nunmanned and filled with hazelnut praline.\nHe brings me cocoa powder, like chocolate blown\nto bits. Or chocolate squares of pepper heat.\nOr if perhaps we've fought, he brings a box\nof truffles home, missiles of semisweet\ndissolving on the tongue. He brings me Glocks\nand chocolate mines, a tiny transport plane,\na bomb that looks delicious in its cellophane."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nBelovëd, my Belovëd, when I think\nThat thou wast in the world a year ago,\nWhat time I sat alone here in the snow\nAnd saw no footprint, heard the silence sink\nNo moment at thy voice, but, link by link,\nWent counting all my chains as if that so\nThey never could fall off at any blow\nStruck by thy possible hand,—why, thus I drink\nOf life’s great cup of wonder! Wonderful,\nNever to feel thee thrill the day or night\nWith personal act or speech,—nor ever cull\nSome prescience of thee with the blossoms white\nThou sawest growing! Atheists are as dull,\nWho cannot guess God’s presence out of sight."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nGive me more love or more disdain;\nThe torrid, or the frozen zone,\nBring equal ease unto my pain;\nThe temperate affords me none;\nEither extreme, of love, or hate,\nIs sweeter than a calm estate.\nGive me a storm; if it be love,\nLike Danae in that golden show'r\nI swim in pleasure; if it prove\nDisdain, that torrent will devour\nMy vulture-hopes; and he's possess'd\nOf heaven, that's but from hell releas'd.\nThen crown my joys, or cure my pain;\nGive me more love, or more disdain."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThey that have power to hurt, and will do none,\nThat do not do the thing they most do show,\nWho, moving others, are themselves as stone,\nUnmoved, cold, and to temptation slow;\nThey rightly do inherit heaven’s graces,\nAnd husband nature’s riches from expense;\nThey are the lords and owners of their faces,\nOthers, but stewards of their excellence.\nThe summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,\nThough to itself, it only live and die,\nBut if that flower with base infection meet,\nThe basest weed outbraves his dignity:\nFor sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;\nLilies that fester, smell far worse than weeds."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe sun sets behind the market square, and the nettle leaves reflect\nthe small town’s imperfections.\nTeapots whistle in the houses,\nlike many trains departing simultaneously.\nBonfires flame on meadows and their long sighs\nweave above the trees like drifting kites.\nThe last pilgrims return from the church uncertainly.\nTV sets awaken, and instantly know all,\nlike the demons of Alexandria with swindlers’ swarthy faces.\nKnives descend on bread, on sausage, on wood, on offerings.\nThe sky grows darker; angels used to hide there,\nbut now it’s just the police sergeant and his dear departed motorcycle.\nRain falls, the cobbled streets grow black.\nLittle abysses open between the stones."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI, being born a woman and distressed\nBy all the needs and notions of my kind,\nAm urged by your propinquity to find\nYour person fair, and feel a certain zest\nTo bear your body’s weight upon my breast:\nSo subtly is the fume of life designed,\nTo clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,\nAnd leave me once again undone, possessed.\nThink not for this, however, the poor treason\nOf my stout blood against my staggering brain,\nI shall remember you with love, or season\nMy scorn with pity,—let me make it plain:\nI find this frenzy insufficient reason\nFor conversation when we meet again."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhere I live distance is the primal fact\nThe world is mostly far away and small\nDrifting along through cause and effect like sleep\nAs when the distance unlikeliest of stems\nBears the unlikely blossom of the wind\nEngendering our only weather dry\nExcept in winter pine trees live on snow\nSo greedy pulling down these drifts that bury\nThe fences snap the trunks of smaller trees\nIf the forest wants to go somewhere it spreads\nLike a prophecy its snow before it\nTechnology a distant windy cause\nThere is no philosophy of death where I live\nOnly philosophies of suffering"} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI don’t know what to say to you, neighbor,\nas you shovel snow from your part of our street\nneat in your Greek black. I’ve waited for\nchance to find words; now, by chance, we meet.\nWe took our boys to the same kindergarten,\nthirteen years ago when our husbands went.\nBoth boys hated school, dropped out feral, dropped in\nto separate troubles. You shift snow fast, back bent,\nbut your boy killed himself, six days dead.\nMy boy washed your wall when the police were done.\nHe says, “We weren’t friends?” and shakes his head,\n“I told him it was great he had that gun,”\nand shakes. I shake, close to you, close to you.\nYou have a path to clear, and so you do."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nShunning the British tourist bus, we walk,\nMy child and I, the West Woods where, like dogs\nWho know their death is due, the wounded took\nThemselves to give up hope. The horror begs\nImagining—the soldiers hauling limbs\nHacked off or messmates dead, and everywhere,\nMixed with the summer scent of swelling plums,\nA stench of putrid flesh and burning hair.\nHere Lee was turned. That night the forest filled\nWith muttered names of loved ones left, and cries\nFrom mangled soldiers pleading to be killed.\nSeeing my distant look, my daughter tries\nMy sleeve: “What is it, what?” she asks, and I\nSay “nothing, nothing”—though “nothing” is a lie."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nbanging around in a cigarette she isn’t “in love”\nmy dream a drink with Ira Hayes we discuss the code of the west\nmy hands make love to my body when my arms are around you\nyou never tell me your name\nand I am forced to write “belly” when I mean “love”\nAu revoir, scene!\nI waken, read, write long letters and\nwander restlessly when leaves are blowing\nmy dream a crumpled horn\nin advance of the broken arm\nshe murmurs of signs to her fingers\nweeps in the morning to waken so shackled with love\nNot me. I like to beat people up.\nMy dream a white tree"} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\n’Tis better to be vile than vile esteem’d,\nWhen not to be receives reproach of being;\nAnd the just pleasure lost, which is so deem’d\nNot by our feeling, but by others’ seeing:\nFor why should others’ false adulterate eyes\nGive salutation to my sportive blood?\nOr on my frailties why are frailer spies,\nWhich in their wills count bad what I think good?\nNo, I am that I am, and they that level\nAt my abuses reckon up their own:\nI may be straight though they themselves be bevel;\nBy their rank thoughts, my deeds must not be shown;\nUnless this general evil they maintain,\nAll men are bad and in their badness reign."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhy is it, in Bristol Bay, a sea cormorant\nhovers, sings a two-fold song with a hinged cover\nfor a mouth, teeth set in sockets, with a hissing grind\nof spikelets biting the air? Dip one.\nThe lips of vanished flames in lava coals\nglow vermillion as an egg cracks. Dip two.\nShe/I feel/s a chimera leaving the eider duck. Dip three.\nWhile still in the embryo, separating the body\nfrom death she/I smell/s of arsenic, the Chugach Range\nin unnatural bitterness. Why is it, man’s/woman’s nerve scarcely\nstifled and sane, comes to prey? While they swoon\nminerals of crude oil and sea spiders for tricking a way for gold.\nWill they crawl around her/me, sink their eyeteeth in the sea,\nravaging the ecosphere and the ore gold for fuel. Drill."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI thank you, kind and best beloved friend,\nWith the same thanks one murmurs to a sister,\nWhen, for some gentle favor, he hath kissed her,\nLess for the gifts than for the love you send,\nLess for the flowers, than what the flowers convey;\nIf I, indeed, divine their meaning truly,\nAnd not unto myself ascribe, unduly,\nThings which you neither meant nor wished to say,\nOh! tell me, is the hope then all misplaced?\nAnd am I flattered by my own affection?\nBut in your beauteous gift, methought I traced\nSomething above a short-lived predilection,\nAnd which, for that I know no dearer name,\nI designate as love, without love’s flame."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe Augsburg poet once said he had tacked\nan image of the Man of Doubt\nto the wall of his room. A Chinese print.\nThe image asked: how ought one to act?\nI have a photo on my wall. Twenty years ago\nseven Chinese workers looked into my lens.\nThey look wary or ironic or tense.\nThey know I do not write for them. I know\nthey didn’t live for me. Yet sometimes I feel\nI’m being asked for more candid words,\nmore credible deeds, by their doubtfulness.\nIn turn I ask their help in making visible\nthe contradictions and identities among us.\nIf there’s a point, it’s this."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhere art thou Muse that thou forget’st so long,\nTo speak of that which gives thee all thy might?\nSpend’st thou thy fury on some worthless song,\nDarkening thy power to lend base subjects light?\nReturn forgetful Muse, and straight redeem,\nIn gentle numbers time so idly spent;\nSing to the ear that doth thy lays esteem\nAnd gives thy pen both skill and argument.\nRise, resty Muse, my love’s sweet face survey,\nIf Time have any wrinkle graven there;\nIf any, be a satire to decay,\nAnd make time’s spoils despised every where.\nGive my love fame faster than Time wastes life,\nSo thou prevent’st his scythe and crooked knife."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIt is snowing in southwest Michigan.\nSuch weather is unusual so late.\nThe trees are squirting buds that advocate\nFor green profusions that yesterday began\nTo grunt and poke and strain toward full-blown spring.\nNow fleeced, the trees are January stark.\nThough clocks, sprung forward, hedge against the dark,\nWe hear the arias our miseries sing\nWhen darkness is a slave to all that white.\nIf global warming is the fangs of doom\nI see its poison wafting, from this room.\nThe future will be mottled if not bright.\nPerhaps I’ll die before the killing trend.\nI hear my children’s voices on this wind."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nDevouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws,\nAnd make the earth devour her own sweet brood;\nPluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws,\nAnd burn the long-liv'd Phoenix in her blood;\nMake glad and sorry seasons as thou fleets,\nAnd do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,\nTo the wide world and all her fading sweets;\nBut I forbid thee one more heinous crime:\nO, carve not with the hours my love's fair brow,\nNor draw no lines there with thine antique pen!\nHim in thy course untainted do allow\nFor beauty's pattern to succeeding men.\nYet do thy worst, old Time! Despite thy wrong\nMy love shall in my verse ever live young."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nSince brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,\nBut sad mortality o’ersways their power,\nHow with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,\nWhose action is no stronger than a flower?\nO! how shall summer’s honey breath hold out,\nAgainst the wrackful siege of battering days,\nWhen rocks impregnable are not so stout,\nNor gates of steel so strong but Time decays?\nO fearful meditation! where, alack,\nShall Time’s best jewel from Time’s chest lie hid?\nOr what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?\nOr who his spoil of beauty can forbid?\nO! none, unless this miracle have might,\nThat in black ink my love may still shine bright."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAmazing to believe that nothingness\nSurrounds us with delight and lets us be,\nAnd that the meekness of nonentity,\nDespite the friction of the world of sense,\nDespite the leveling of violence,\nIs all that matters. All the energy\nWe force into the matchhead and the city\nExplodes inside a loving emptiness.\nNot Dante’s rings, not the Zen zero’s mouth,\nOut of which comes and into which light goes,\nThis God recedes from every metaphor,\nTurns the hardest data into untruth,\nAnd fills all blanks with blankness. This love shows\nItself in absence, which the stars adore."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nyour black inscriptions cite a kino lau,\nwhose feathered wingspan, nighttime eyes & pun-\nishing beak comprise mo‘okū‘auhau.\nw/my oiled hands, I greet her, w/hun-\ngering for mo‘opuna. “mai,” she says,\nreciting from your thigh. “mai, mai e ‘ai.”\nI have traveled from Maui a lizard, mes-\nmerized by dreams of ‘ōhi‘a & ai-\nkāne, lizard filled w/smoke. arrived, I eat\ntransforming in the forest of your grand-\nmother’s memory: from lizard: woman\ndreaming: licking tattoo: permission land:\nskin. traveling the night of your kino\nto sleep your thighs, ho‘āo, ho‘āo, and wake."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhen it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful\nand terrible thing, needful to man as air,\nusable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,\nwhen it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,\nreflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more\nthan the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:\nthis man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro\nbeaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world\nwhere none is lonely, none hunted, alien,\nthis man, superb in love and logic, this man\nshall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,\nnot with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,\nbut with the lives grown out of his life, the lives\nfleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nIt's not about the sex, really, it's not\nthe ache of the bruised nipple or the burn\nleft by his two-day-old beard in the crook\nof my neck where the pulse is taken, it's\nhis breathing when asleep that draws me near.\nWhen I was seventeen, I'd check beside me,\nhope I hadn't rolled and squashed flat\nmy one-year-old brother. His sigh on my ear,\nthe rise and fall of air beneath his ribs,\nwas a miracle to me. The nightly\nsurprise of what I saw under the bulb's\ndim glow: I saw the small heart beating\nlike wings unfolding in the body. Here,\nwith this man, ideas of flight return."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nNow is before he was born. Days of air\nshaken by bees, crow song probing eaves\nand quays. Maker of the future a perfect\nterra-cotta tense, a tense which sings.\nThe absence of push in his education\nwas unpresaged by the door’s lack of wired\nSesame. He waits and waits for egress.\nThe door needs only his touch.\nIts only desire is to swing. He waits\nfor it to open itself, as the cloud\nopens for the melting press of the sun.\nHe is ready to rot where he leans, leaving\na breeze-blown blemish long after he has arrived.\nLong before he has come into being."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nThe weary yeare his race now having run,\nThe new begins his compast course anew:\nWith shew of morning mylde he hath begun,\nBetokening peace and plenty to ensew.\nSo let us, which this chaunge of weather vew,\nChaunge eeke our mynds and former lives amend,\nThe old yeares sinnes forepast let us eschew,\nAnd fly the faults with which we did offend.\nThen shall the new yeares joy forth freshly send,\nInto the glooming world his gladsome ray:\nAnd all these stormes which now his beauty blend,\nShall turne to caulmes and tymely cleare away.\nSo likewise love cheare you your heavy spright,\nAnd chaunge old yeares annoy to new delight."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAnd wilt thou have me fashion into speech\nThe love I bear thee, finding words enough,\nAnd hold the torch out, while the winds are rough,\nBetween our faces, to cast light on each?—\nI drop it at thy feet. I cannot teach\nMy hand to hold my spirits so far off\nFrom myself—me—that I should bring thee proof\nIn words, of love hid in me out of reach.\nNay, let the silence of my womanhood\nCommend my woman-love to thy belief,—\nSeeing that I stand unwon, however wooed,\nAnd rend the garment of my life, in brief,\nBy a most dauntless, voiceless fortitude,\nLest one touch of this heart convey its grief."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nOne face looks out from all his canvases,\nOne selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:\nWe found her hidden just behind those screens,\nThat mirror gave back all her loveliness.\nA queen in opal or in ruby dress,\nA nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,\nA saint, an angel — every canvas means\nThe same one meaning, neither more or less.\nHe feeds upon her face by day and night,\nAnd she with true kind eyes looks back on him,\nFair as the moon and joyful as the light:\nNot wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;\nNot as she is, but was when hope shone bright;\nNot as she is, but as she fills his dream."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe unsympathetic wind, how she has evaded me for years now,\nleaving a guileless shell and no way to navigate. Once when I stood\non a plateau of earth just at the moment before the dangerous,\njutting peaks converged upon the lilting sway of grasslands, I almost\nfound a way back. There, the sky, quite possibly all the elements,\ncaused the rock and soil and vegetation to congregate. Their prayer\nwas not new and so faint I could hardly discern. Simple remembrances,\nlike a tiny, syncopated chorus calling everyone home: across\na thousand eastward miles, and what little wind was left at my back.\nBut I could not move. And then the music was gone.\nAll that was left were the spring time faces of mountains, gazing down,\ntheir last patches of snow, luminous. I dreamed of becoming snow melt,\ngliding down the slope and in to the valley. With the promise,\nan assurance, that there is always a way to become bird, tree, water again."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMy Love is like to ice, and I to fire:\nHow comes it then that this her cold so great\nIs not dissolved through my so hot desire,\nBut harder grows the more I her entreat?\nOr how comes it that my exceeding heat\nIs not allayed by her heart-frozen cold,\nBut that I burn much more in boiling sweat,\nAnd feel my flames augmented manifold?\nWhat more miraculous thing may be told,\nThat fire, which all things melts, should harden ice,\nAnd ice, which is congeal’d with senseless cold,\nShould kindle fire by wonderful device?\nSuch is the power of love in gentle mind,\nThat it can alter all the course of kind."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe expense of spirit in a waste of shame\nIs lust in action: and till action, lust\nIs perjur’d, murderous, bloody, full of blame,\nSavage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;\nEnjoy’d no sooner but despised straight;\nPast reason hunted; and no sooner had,\nPast reason hated, as a swallow’d bait,\nOn purpose laid to make the taker mad:\nMad in pursuit and in possession so;\nHad, having, and in quest, to have extreme;\nA bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;\nBefore, a joy propos’d; behind a dream.\nAll this the world well knows; yet none knows well\nTo shun the heaven that leads men to this hell."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nI fear dispersal but the resounding really sounds may be full of echo\nor echolocation for the next round\nEye rowed in the guest book of God my many sacred tongues\nbody and bow\nFingers spell now all the spaces I open\nYou now verse now open oh pen\nCacti quiver for a century\nIn the desert I swam myself earthword to know\nNo time on earth and no breath no dearth\nHollowed out into architecture eternal\nWho argues with rhyme or snow\nWho knows the space in your here\nThe space in the storm so finely bowed\nThe space in snow no one nears"} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nNature remains\nfaithful by\nnatural light,only.\nImmeasurable,\ninvisible in the wind.\nVisible whenblades\nand branches bend.\nThe windspeaks fluent\nrain.\nDespite it\nthe rainfalls straight.\nAnd beyond itabandoned barns\ndefend\nabandonedmen."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nCosta Rica\nI finally find the witch. She is branch-\nboned, old, with knowing fingers.\nShe says nothing. Walks me to a tall tree,\na gourd hanging from a long line of jute.\nShe pulls out a phone, asks me to type\na note to my family. I do it, but can’t see\nhow it can be sent from somewhere\nso deep. She scolds me, says that only\ntourists think the world can be escaped.\nThe jungle’s green is the wild mind\nof God. The witch puts the phone into\nthe gourd. Hand-over-hand, she raises\nthis cradle to the top of the holy canopy."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nIn the early afternoon my mother\nwas doing the dishes. I climbed\nonto the kitchen table, I suppose\nto play, and fell asleep there.\nI was drowsy and awake, though,\nas she lifted me up, carried me\non her arms into the living room,\nand placed me on the davenport,\nbut I pretended to be asleep\nthe whole time, enjoying the luxury—\nI was too big for such a privilege\nand just old enough to form\nmy only memory of her carrying me.\nShe’s still moving me to a softer place."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nStripped in a flamedance, the bluff backing our houses\nquivered in wet-black skin. A shawl of haze tugged tight\naround the starkness. We could have choked on August.\nSmoke thick in our throats, nearly naked as the earth,\nwe played bare feet over the heat caught in asphalt.\nCould we, green girls, have prepared for this? Yesterday,\nwe played in sand-carpeted caves. The store we built\nsold broken bits of ice plant, empty snail shells, leaves.\nOur school’s walls were open sky. We reeled in wonder\nfrom the hills, oblivious to the beckoning\ncrescendo and to our parent’s hushed communion.\nWhen our bluff swayed into the undulation, we ran\ninto the still streets of our suburb, feet burning\nagainst a fury that we did not know was change."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nHas it turned out we’ve wasted our time?\nWe’ve wasted our time.\nOur magnificent bodies on the dissecting table.\nOur day after tomorrow.\nOur what to do now.\nThe stink of us so undignified.\nThe end game of bloom.\nWe will lose the sun\nstruck and disassembled\nlightly down and crawling like a worm.\nThis earth it is a banquet and laid on its table we.\nA puncture in the wound room, crude and obvious.\nThe raving lunatics they are upon us,\nbut we are raving too."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nYour love and pity doth the impression fill,\nWhich vulgar scandal stamp’d upon my brow;\nFor what care I who calls me well or ill,\nSo you o’er-green my bad, my good allow?\nYou are my all-the-world, and I must strive\nTo know my shames and praises from your tongue;\nNone else to me, nor I to none alive,\nThat my steel’d sense or changes right or wrong.\nIn so profound abysm I throw all care\nOf others’ voices, that my adder’s sense\nTo critic and to flatterer stopped are.\nMark how with my neglect I do dispense:\nYou are so strongly in my purpose bred,\nThat all the world besides methinks are dead."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\neach night I count ghostlets of how my body was\nwanted / behind with deadheading / rose hips have\ncome / behind with actions that count only / when\nthe timing is right / I took out a contract / it was\nimprudent in value / behind with asepsis / hello\nmicrobes of my body / we sleep together / hello\ncats / I make my bed daily / of the three types of\nhair on the sheets / only one is human / I count the\nbedrooms / I never had sex in / but there were cars\n/ wild woods / blackfly has got to all the\nnasturtiums / you cannot dig up a grapevine / and\nexpect shelter to come / I am touched by your letter\n/ writes a friend / you prevaricate desire / says\nmessage / all this fucking / with no hands on me"} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhy am I if I am uncertain reasons may inclose.\nRemain remain propose repose chose.\nI call carelessly that the door is open\nWhich if they may refuse to open\nNo one can rush to close.\nLet them be mine therefor.\nEverybody knows that I chose.\nTherefor if therefore before I close.\nI will therefore offer therefore I offer this.\nWhich if I refuse to miss may be miss is mine.\nI will be well welcome when I come.\nBecause I am coming.\nCertainly I come having come.\nThese stanzas are done."} |
| {"text": "Write a poetic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nShe turns the bedlamp on. The book falls open\nin her mottled hands, and while she reads\nher mouth begins to quiver, forming words\nlike Breathless. Promises. Elope.\nAs she turns the leaves, Eudora's cheek\ntakes on a bit of bloom. Her frowzy hair\nthickens and turns gold, her dim eyes clear,\nthe wattles vanish from her slender neck.\nHer waist, emerging from its ring of flesh,\nbends to the side. Breasts that used to hang\nlike pockets rise and ripen; her long legs\ntremble. Her eyes close, she holds her breath—\nthe steamy pages flutter by, unread,\nas lover after lover finds her bed."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nThe world weeps. There are no tears\nTo be found. It is deemed a miracle.\nThe president appears on screens\nIn villages and towns, in cities in jungles\nAnd jungles still affectionately called cities.\nHe appears on screens and reads a story.\nWhose story is he reading and why?\nWhat lessons are to be learned from this story\nAbout a time that has not arrived, will not arrive, is here?\nTime of fire and images of fire climbing toward the sun\nTime of precious and semi-precious liquids\nTime of a man and a woman doused in ink\nRolling across streams and down valleys\nTrying to leave some string of words behind."} |
| {"text": "Create a beautiful sonnet.\nSonnet:\nEven C.P. Cavafy–\ncynical, ascetic,\nunknown in his day–\nprinted at his own expense\npoems no one would publish,\npoems intimate, personal,\nto share with readers\nhe called friends.\nBut I have hundreds of poems\nhidden away in a box.\nEven when I know\nCavafy once wrapped verse\nwith black and gold ribbons\nto give away as a gift."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nIs it thy will, thy image should keep open\nMy heavy eyelids to the weary night?\nDost thou desire my slumbers should be broken,\nWhile shadows like to thee do mock my sight?\nIs it thy spirit that thou send’st from thee\nSo far from home into my deeds to pry,\nTo find out shames and idle hours in me,\nThe scope and tenure of thy jealousy?\nO, no! thy love, though much, is not so great:\nIt is my love that keeps mine eye awake:\nMine own true love that doth my rest defeat,\nTo play the watchman ever for thy sake:\nFor thee watch I, whilst thou dost wake elsewhere,\nFrom me far off, with others all too near."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhen my love swears that she is made of truth,\nI do believe her, though I know she lies,\nThat she might think me some untutored youth,\nUnlearnèd in the world’s false subtleties.\nThus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,\nAlthough she knows my days are past the best,\nSimply I credit her false-speaking tongue:\nOn both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.\nBut wherefore says she not she is unjust?\nAnd wherefore say not I that I am old?\nOh, love’s best habit is in seeming trust,\nAnd age in love loves not to have years told.\nTherefore I lie with her and she with me,\nAnd in our faults by lies we flattered be."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nBefore clock hands showed the time\ntime ceased, and looking glasses\nwere veiled as if they still held\nfamiliar faces, in those\nlast moments when breath shallowed\nlike a wellspring running dry,\nGod-words quickened, only then\nthe dying left death-beds borne\non the arms of the gathered,\nlowered to the floor so they\nmight press close, as though a door\nthrough which to listen and know\nthe earth's old secrets before\nit opened, and they entered."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhy speak of hate, when I do bleed for love?\nNot hate, my love, but Love doth bite my tongue\nTill I taste stuff that makes my rhyming rough\nSo flatter I my fever for the one\nFor whom I inly mourn, though seem to shun.\nA rose is arrows is eros, so what\nIf I confuse the shade that I’ve become\nWith winedark substance in a lover’s cup?\nBut stop my tonguely wound, I’ve bled enough.\nIf I be fair, or false, or freaked with fear\nIf I my tongue in lockèd box immure\nBlame not me, for I am sick with love.\nYet would I be your friend most willingly\nSince friendship would infect me killingly."} |
| {"text": "Write a classic sonnet.\nSonnet:\nNo more be grieved at that which thou hast done:\nRoses have thorns, and silver fountains mud,\nClouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,\nAnd loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.\nAll men make faults, and even I in this,\nAuthórizing thy trespass with compare,\nMyself corrupting salving thy amiss,\nExcusing thy sins more than thy sins are:\nFor to thy sensual fault I bring in sense—\nThy adverse party is thy advocate—\nAnd ‘gainst myself a lawful plea commence.\nSuch civil war is in my love and hate,\nThat I an áccessory needs must be\nTo that sweet thief which sourly robs from me."} |
| {"text": "Write a sonnet in 14 lines.\nSonnet:\nAs fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou grow’st,\nIn one of thine, from that which thou departest;\nAnd that fresh blood which youngly thou bestow’st,\nThou mayst call thine when thou from youth convertest,\nHerein lives wisdom, beauty, and increase;\nWithout this folly, age, and cold decay:\nIf all were minded so, the times should cease\nAnd threescore year would make the world away.\nLet those whom nature hath not made for store,\nHarsh, featureless, and rude, barrenly perish:\nLook, whom she best endow’d, she gave thee more;\nWhich bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish:\nShe carv’d thee for her seal, and meant thereby,\nThou shouldst print more, not let that copy die."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nWhen, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,\nI all alone beweep my outcast state,\nAnd trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,\nAnd look upon myself and curse my fate,\nWishing me like to one more rich in hope,\nFeatured like him, like him with friends possessed,\nDesiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,\nWith what I most enjoy contented least;\nYet in these thoughts myself almost despising,\nHaply I think on thee, and then my state,\n(Like to the lark at break of day arising\nFrom sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;\nFor thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings\nThat then I scorn to change my state with kings."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nBelow the gardens and the darkening pines\nThe living water sinks among the stones,\nSinking yet foaming till the snowy tones\nMerge with the fog drawn landward in dim lines.\nThe cloud dissolves among the flowering vines,\nAnd now the definite mountain-side disowns\nThe fluid world, the immeasurable zones.\nThen white oblivion swallows all designs.\nBut still the rich confusion of the sea,\nUnceasing voice, sombre and solacing,\nRises through veils of silence past the trees;\nIn restless repetition bound, yet free,\nWave after wave in deluge fresh releasing\nAn ancient speech, hushed in tremendous ease."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nLast time I had stamina and calluses and a bag of chalk.\nIt hung from my lumbar like a bunny tail.\nLast time I was lighter and the ether better-emptied.\nNow blood is so close to my surface I slip off the walls.\nTonight is the night of a massacre I do not look at.\nAlthough I have been to that city of bricks and black blooms.\nTherein I kissed a grave a million others kissed.\nA woman with a cigarette asked me for fire there and I provided it.\nI had been asked for light before but never fire.\nTonight I climb three hundred stairs toward the light of my device.\nMaybe we’ll be wartime people leading wartime lives.\nSkirmishes have sprung from the heads of lesser gods.\nThis is the light no one reads by we just stare into it.\nWe wait for the glyphs that mean it is safe."} |
| {"text": "Compose a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nMy own Belovëd, who hast lifted me\nFrom this drear flat of earth where I was thrown,\nAnd, in betwixt the languid ringlets, blown\nA life-breath, till the forehead hopefully\nShines out again, as all the angels see,\nBefore thy saving kiss! My own, my own,\nWho camest to me when the world was gone,\nAnd I who looked for only God, found thee!\nI find thee; I am safe, and strong, and glad.\nAs one who stands in dewless asphodel,\nLooks backward on the tedious time he had\nIn the upper life,—so I, with bosom-swell,\nMake witness, here, between the good and bad,\nThat Love, as strong as Death, retrieves as well."} |
| {"text": "Produce a sonnet.\nSonnet:\nO! for my sake do you with Fortune chide,\nThe guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,\nThat did not better for my life provide\nThan public means which public manners breeds.\nThence comes it that my name receives a brand,\nAnd almost thence my nature is subdu’d\nTo what it works in, like the dyer’s hand:\nPity me, then, and wish I were renew’d;\nWhilst, like a willing patient, I will drink,\nPotions of eisel ’gainst my strong infection;\nNo bitterness that I will bitter think,\nNor double penance, to correct correction.\nPity me then, dear friend, and I assure ye,\nEven that your pity is enough to cure me."} |
| {"text": "Write an English sonnet.\nSonnet:\nAs Hermes once took to his feathers light,\nWhen lulled Argus, baffled, swoon’d and slept,\nSo on a Delphic reed, my idle spright\nSo play’d, so charm’d, so conquer’d, so bereft\nThe dragon-world of all its hundred eyes;\nAnd seeing it asleep, so fled away,\nNot to pure Ida with its snow-cold skies,\nNor unto Tempe where Jove griev’d that day;\nBut to that second circle of sad Hell,\nWhere in the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw\nOf rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell\nTheir sorrows—pale were the sweet lips I saw,\nPale were the lips I kiss’d, and fair the form\nI floated with, about that melancholy storm."} |
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