Shakespeare's Favorite Poems
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 ก.พ. 2025
- Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Poetry is at the heart of music in a lot of ways, from obvious connections like lyrics to deeper points like their shared love of rhythms, so I thought we could take a look at Shakespeare's favorite kind of poem, the Sonnet! Writing a good sonnet takes a deep understanding of language, meter, and rhyme, and understanding how they work won't just make us better poets, it'll make us better musicians too!
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Also, thanks to Jareth Arnold and Inés Dawson for proofreading the script to make sure this all makes sense hopefully!
Thank you for recapping 11th grade English. Didn't care about it back then, but it's pretty rad now that I give a damned about things.
I'm glad I know that it's rad now that I'm in that class. Maybe I'll be more interested.
Thanks!
As a theatre major, I applaud your knowledge of Shakespearean pronunciation. Good shit.
Aw, thanks!
"Poets are the original punk-rockers." :D
These commercials are killing me
They’re so long
And now it’s multiple commercials
We’re back to TV folks
We’ve finally come full circle
They're not nearly as long.
why haven't you downloaded adblock?
Its literally 10 seconds tops, get over it or buy adblock
What you do is skip to the end until the last commercial. Then when the vid is over you replay it and all the commercials disappear. It works.
@TERROR BILLY fuck that
I started trying to write verse at age 14, when I thought one day "hey I know music, I should be able to write a song." And I tried, not very successfully, for several years, both songs and poems. But at the time, I was fairly sheltered and didn't have a lot of songs or poems in my experience, and certainly no deep understanding of them. But thruout college I became much more competent writing songs after I did two things. First, i exposed myself to a broad range of music and poetry, and second, I gave up on structured verse and focused instead on word behavior and meaning, as well as more visual effects in arranging words on the page. After a few years of this, I suddenly found myself spontaneously writing songs with a much clearer understanding of what a song was supposed to be, and it all came from having a deeper understanding of how to use words and language for effect. It also helped that I studied music formally and that I had much more life experience by then. And I love sonnets, but I still suck at writing them. Go figure.
I started watching you for songwriting information, left to check out poetry, and then found myself back here on sonnets
Meter: where the accents fall to make a rythm.
Feet: short repeating pattern, like a time signature for words.
Iamb: Two syllables with accent on 2nd syllable = Explode
Trochee: Two Syllables accent on 1st = Summer
Iambic pentameter: structure of 5 iambs (can combine across words)
sonnets are 14 lines long usually
A Shakespearian sonnet is 3 groups of 4 lines (A quatrain [has the scheme ABAB]) with an extra 2 at the end
And thats were i stopped taking notes
😂
There's also the German sonnet, which is similar to the Petrarchan sonnet, except the octave is split into two quatrains and the sestet is split into two triplets.
There's also the French sonnet, which has pretty much the same rhyme scheme as the German sonnet, but the French count syllables instead of feet (because their language doesn't really have stressed syllables), so each line is 12 syllables long, usually in two groups of six.
Interesting! I hadn't encountered those, thanks for sharing!
Oh and I almost forgot, the German sonnet i described above is the classical one, the baroque German sonnet is more similar to the French sonnet, since it uses iambic hexameter, usually split in half.
p.s. did you know that i am a nerd who wants to know everything?
thanks for the video! I'm gonna try it right now!
Hello I am new to this Channel, I am a beginner musician I play the guitar/ rhythm guitar to be specific. Anyways I used to write poetry and I had stopped for a long time and now trying to again because I really want to write my own music but having trouble writing lyrics to a song. This was informative and I appreciate your videos and explanations on music keep it up!!! Also not sure how much of these comments you or your editor get to read but I would love to hear you breakdown any Bright Eyes song or a Conor Oberst songs especially the song “A Perfect Sonnet”
Anyways thank you for your content!! Have a great bad ass “Punk Rock” day lol
Double double toil and trouble
Fire burn and cauldron bubble
That's all I got...
Poetry helps: music lyrics, diologue in books/film, and how to create emotion either engaging in a positive or negative, strong or weak, and loud and soft voice combos
2:40 him literally drawing the trifurcation from zelda
I put triforce but it corrected me and the edit button isn’t working
This channel is great. I'm glad I found it!
Fuck-ups in meter is why most of my lyrics end in the shitter.
Give them to a prog rock band. They'll love them!
Yeah, good meter is one of the hardest things to do with lyrics. It's so easy to convince yourself that it's good enough, but the difference between alright meter and perfect meter is just so huge.
Oh shit this is harder than I thought
WOW, that well explains... I had to listen to this video because I did not know some terms like Octave for poetry and sonnet... I understood the different ways to rhyme but did not know how to categorize them. very educative. Also, it would seem that Shakespeare's mastery of the English language was complimented by the understanding of many other languages.
Great video. I'd love to see more like this! I find the connection between meter and rhythm very interesting and would love to learn more. Thanks!
Thanks! I'll definitely look into doing more, but in the meantime, my friends over at the Ling Space did a bit on that topic as well: th-cam.com/video/MdId9wnMNg8/w-d-xo.html
Shakespeare with that quintuplet flow lol
Could you, way off-topic, parody this video by overdubbing a funny narrative about your drawings. silly me.
Poetry may very well share Music birthday. I feel that today's poetry and music both could be by themselves, for... When Music is alone poetry still hears her and so it is true for poetry when music stands alone, it is said they share the same heartbeat.
There is also such thing as "Crown of sonnets". It's 14 sonnets linked together so that last line of a previous sonnet is a first line of a next one. And the last line of last sonnet is a first line of a first sonnet. And there is 15'th sonnet made up of this repeated lines! "Corona astralis" by Maximilian Voloshin is an example of stunning beauty and complexity of such poetic form.
I'd never heard of that, but it sounds amazing! I'll have to look it up, thanks!
I am a little late to the party, having just come across this video. But, as an English major, I was so very excited to see this on my favorite theory channel. :)
Me: ok time to learn how to write poems.
Also me: oOh squigglies!
I gotta watch this at .75 playback speed
Love the Prisoner reference at 3:55
Nice, I was pretty sure no one was gonna get that one!
Were you trying to draw the Mandelbrot set at 3:27...? That just made me so happy. Thanks for this great video.
I was! Thanks!
Are you at all familiar with Leonard Bernstein's lectures at Harvard from 1973? In them he discusses the relationship between poetry and music extensively. I think you might enjoy it, although you should be prepared to devote A LOT of time to watching/listening.
By the way yesterday was Lenny's birthday.
on occasion i sit and wait
for a girl to hit my line
but although it's a girl i hate
she pushes through, like a vine
i long for the day she takes a hint
after what she's done to me, she's nothing more than lint
first "sonnet" i suppose, can't imagine it's good but I'm striving to get better
Dude, I want to hear you sing. I'm putting together the TH-cam Super Group. You'll sing. Samurai Guitarist on guitar. Adam Neeley on bass. Moot Booxlé on keys. Still looking for a drummer though. You said you used to sing metal so come on man, sing!
Get Fricker from Spectre sound to mix it haha
LowReedExpert1 Nice!!
66Samus on drums, obviously :D
And have Rick Beato write for them
Damn, basically every single music-related person on youtube I'm suscribed to has been mentioned in this thread haha. Maybe Leo Moracchioli producing?
This is great info, however, and I appreciate this was uploaded years ago, it was so frustratingly fast! :(
As usual, an excellent video. Though now my mind is flooded with potential first musical lines to set Sonnet 18 to music. I'm sure it's been done already, but I'm always on the lookout for favourite "lyrics" as I'd love to write something - almost anything! - to make it sound even more lyrical. Thank you!
That'd be really cool! I'm sure someone's done it, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try it too!
:Silence creeping in the dark
Close your heart and try depart
thou I cry and fell apart
Would I never give a f**k
:English is my second tongue
I'm 16 and I write my first
I play the sports, would love the thanks
thou I live my world in mind
I don't really know how to write poems :\
Great content - PLEASE SLOW DOWN! The fast pace is really cute, but doesn’t allow for good absorption of the material. Slow down please so you can serve your viewers better. Thanks
Great video! Great to hear about things like music (poetry in this case) to help strengthen or inspire music in the musician.
Thanks!
A lovely and informative video as always! Really clear about the sonnet structure. However, I feel like it generalises a bit much about meter and rhyme, given that most poetry in the last 100 years hasn't used those much. Rhythm and sound are still vital, but in most modern poetry the rhythm is more like a free jazz solo or Stravinsky than a marching band of iambs and trochees. Given the way that 12 tone goes well beyond traditional functional theory, I'd like to think that this is just the start of a series that looks at how poetry brings out the musicality of language in the broadest sense :-)
Good catch! I probably should've included a disclaimer about modern poetry like I did with non-Western poetry. I still think that a deep understanding of meter makes you better at more freeform poetry too, because it's still all about the sound and feel of words even if you don't have a consistent pulse anymore. Kind of like how most of the great free jazz players, like Coltrane, had a strong background in more "traditional" music as well, so even if it's not used in the same way, I think it's still important!
Oh, absolutely! When I used to read/write more poetry, some of the most moving poems I read were sonnets in the form of 7 unrhymed, unmetered couplets. But knowing about the tradition that's being subverted is a vital part of appreciating that act of subversion, and that's where videos like yours are really helpful. I've seen some postmodern/poststructuralist critics refer to certain forms of experimental poetry as "foregrounding the materiality of language", and while that sounds like godawful jargon, it's actually a powerful way of thinking about traditional poetry as well.
Great video! You managed to make poetry actually interesting.
But we better see more music videos ;)
Oh, don't worry, there's still plenty of those coming!
So next week is an original composition with vocals and video accompaniment. You know--a music video!
Great video! I'd like to note that ordinary language is metrical as well. Poetry uses the metricality already in language to build pretty objects/rhythms… sort of like building cathedrals out of Lego! :D (bad metaphor?)
Modern phonologists (since the late 80s / early 90s) actually use feet and other metrical/prosodic categories (such as moras, which are important to haiku) in their analysis of languages' sound systems. Metrical structure is quite core to the phonologies of the world's languages (in fact, even sign languages have metrical structure (and poetry) that is very similar to that of spoken languages).
True! I guess a better way to put it would've been that poetry amplifies the metricality of ordinary speech. There are always patterns there, but poetry organizes those patterns to really make them stand out in a way that prose doesn't tend to.
I didn't really get the whole feet thing until i accedetly read the shacspere thing in an english accent than it made sense
My Inner Writer: awesome, time to learn things
My Inner Artist: *shoves writer out of the way to watch lines being drawn*
I've discovered that this particular video format is not comprehensible to me due to my own short attention span.
How would you go about turning the words of a sonnet into the lyrics of a functional song? Is there a 1:1 meter exchange between poetry and music or is it less defined and leaves more room for interpretation?
Good question! Linguists have done some studies on that, and apparently we tend to naturally speak iambs as swung 8ths and trochees as basically straight, but really if you set it to music then whatever rhythms you have there should work fine. Just make sure to line up the poetic accents with the musical ones and it'll probably sound great!
So, in theory, a sonnet might line up with common jazz tropes like the swung eight? I think I'll have to see what I can come up with.
Dude, great video. Do you also write songs with lyrics?
I would love some more videos about poetry, song lyrics and how they relate. Maybe you should consider starting a new series or second channel about that?
Thanks! I do, although I'm a perfectionist on lyrics (Much more so than on harmony and melody, honestly.) so it always takes me a really long time. I'd definitely like to do more on poetry, but it may be a while...
What a great channel! Man, you're rock. Thank you.
Make a poem with 13 syllables per line with the 1st, 4th, 6th, and 12th syllables accented (3+2+6+2)
Interesting! I'd be a little worried that you couldn't really go 6 syllables without implying some form of accent, but it'd be cool to see!
I feel this video has greater entertainment value than it does educational. As a complete newbie most of this goes in one ear and out the other. The drawings are fun but distracting. Would appreciate more examples, but thanks for the vid anyway!
0:39 ok it's not in imperial that's good :D :p
^_^
He does use feet though...
cxiliapersono neh I just said it since "the meter" is the underlying pulse.
1.08. Poetic prose? Prose poetry? Every piece of lovely cadenced prose written by Faulkner, D.H. Lawrence, Nabokov, etc?
2:48 when suddenly Agnes strikes...
Everyone talks about sonnet 18,but my personal favorite is sonnet 17 😢 show some love to sonnet 17 😂
in spanish we've a form of poetry called Decima wich is basically: ABBAACCDDC
Cool! I like the sort of palindromic shape it's got going, I'll have to try it out!
Data and Picard by Pogo.
3:32 wait that’s a septave
Strongly recomend playing this at 75% speed..😢😅 switch to decaf!
Can the turn/volta be compared to the bridge section in a song?
Sort of, but after a bridge you normally go back to previous sections, like the chorus, whereas the volta usually lasts for the rest of the poem.
Would you make a video about Radiohead :D?
This video pretends like the last hundred years of modern poetry doesn't exist.
Never heard any of that Shakespeare poem. Thought roses are red was the most well known poem.
Can you slow down? After you make a point, pause. Do you even know what terminal punctuation is?
You’re talking about how to communicate through words using rhythm and you don’t even provide an example of that in your video. Your speech is so unnatural it is almost impossible to follow.
Learn to speak.
pov: your hire from school
shush
Pretty sure "twelve-tone" is a spondee, not a trochee.
Could be. I tend to bounce off the first syllable when I say it, but I could see it either way.
Speed 0.75
well I didnt understand a ounce of that 👍
U must study rapper RAKIM the God of rhyming.
Love you 12tone but, the subject and his beauty, not her. This poem was written for a young man.
It's vi Hart... But for music. How have I not heard of you before
I don't understand a single thing in this video
Bro youre making me wanting to study literature...
first