Page:The Craftsmanship of Writing.djvu/149

Rh sounds and a discord, it is rather futile to try to help him. But, granted that he possesses these elemental and indispensable qualities, the first thing to do, of course, is to put him in the way of knowing what a sonnet is. Now, the shortest and simplest—I was on the point of saying, the laziest—way to do this would be to pick out some one or two of the great English sonnets, Milton's sonnet on his blindness, or Wordsworth's sonnet to Milton, and say to him: "Here is your model; study the verse scheme and try to do something like it." And of course the student in question would be no more fitted for writing a sonnet than a child is prepared to read when it has mastered only the letter a. What he ought to do is to learn the history of the sonnet, to study the development of its form with all permissible variations of rhyme, in Italian as well as in English; to know in what respect the