I Sat Belonely

5 Pages 1149 Words

In the poem “I sat belonely” the general rhyme pattern is that of standard crossed rhyme. John Lennon, the author wrote this entire sonnet in crossed rhyme with six quatrains which resembles an English sonnet except for the fact that it is twenty-four lines in length and does not end in a couplet. All six stanzas are iambic tetrameter, the first stanza has end stop on the first, second, and fourth lines with enjambment on the third line. The second stanza is crossed rhyme showing end-stop in all four lines with a caesura in line three. The third stanza also has end-stop punctuation throughout all four lines. The fourth stanza has a bit of a change in tempo due to the enjambment found in the second and third lines, the first and fourth still have end-stop punctuation. Stanza five has enjambment in the first line, and the rest of the quatrain has end-stop punctuation. The sixth and final stanza is a quatrain with end-stop punctuation on all four lines. The flow of the stanza is changed from the other five by the use of caesuras in the second and fourth lines. This is different from a Standard English sonnet due to the lack of a couplet which is the standard ending of most all English poems. The overall theme of this poem is kind of hard to ascertain due to the suessian use of made up words and the strong use of Liverpudlian slang. Lennon wrote most all of his poems and sonnets in a manner consistent with that of children’s poems purely for the entertainment value of listening to the rhyme scheme and silliness of the poem itself.

The general idea of the first stanza is simple enough to ascertain the speaker who could or could not be John Lennon himself states that he sat beneath the boughs of a tree in the shade. There in the shade he heard a lady’s voice singing. The second stanza directly relates to the first showing that the speaker has not moved from beneath the tree, but merely looks up in to the branches and all around the...