Teaching Shakespeare Sonnets: Structure, Support, and Some Really Bad Love Poetry

Personally, I love anything Shakespeare. But I’ve also been teaching long enough to know that just hearing me say “No, I promise, it’s going to be so good!” is not enough to get the average teen to wade into the depth of a Shakespeare sonnet.

Sonnets are great for teaching for so many reasons—they’re master classes on why humans use figurative language; they’re dense enough to reward close reading without forcing students through chapters and chapters of text; and the joy of watching teens figure out the twist in the last two lines of the sonnets just can’t be beat.

But while the payoff is great, students still need lesson plans that include careful scaffolding—not simplified readings, but support that helps them do the hard work of figuring out the sonnets by themselves.

Shakespeare lasts because the questions he raises—about love, deceit, aging, desire, inspiration—are the same questions students wrestle with on their own time. And when students are given the right support to wrestle with the language for themselves, they’re often surprised by how right I was when I told them the poems would actually be good.

I’ve been working to up my Shakespeare game beyond just enthusiasm. Read on below for my favorite sonnets and how I teach them in high school—or click here if you want to check out my sonnet units for yourself.

Sonnets 18 & 130: How should we talk about love?

As dark, cynical, and questioning as they might be at times, Shakespeare’s sonnets are, at the core, love poems. And so starting off by asking the question how should we talk about love is a great way for students to start paying attention to the ways our language shapes our reality.

I like to start off really low-key with a clip of “Elephant Love Medley” from the film Moulin Rouge.  As students watch Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor’s characters debate about “silly love songs,” they start to think about different ways of viewing love, and why the language we use to talk about it matters.

After that, they start to go deeper as we watch a TED Talk about the metaphors we use to talk about love.  While people often take phrases like “falling in love” for granted, when students step back and examine the language, they start to think even more about how the words we use frame our realities.  

Finally, a focused analysis of pop songs and the unintended messages they give listeners about  love—especially about gender and power—and a fun contest to see who can write the “best” bad love poem gets students really primed for Shakespeare’s sonnets.  

Sonnets 18 and 130 are both about the speaker’s struggles to find the words, or the best metaphor, to talk about his love.  When the speaker rejects the metaphor of a summer’s day or says that his mistress’ breath is nothing like perfume, he is wrestling with finding the best way to talk about something that is, ultimately, beyond words. 

And since Shakespeare is criticizing those silly love poems with his own writing, I love to take the opportunity to get students writing by conducting a bad love poem contest!  We all write our own bad love poetry—whether it’s cheesy metaphors or trite ideas or cliched images—and then we vote on the best worst one.  It’s a ton of fun and one of those lessons that really teaches itself.

Now that students are thinking about why words matter, why writers turn to figurative language to describe the indescribable, why we have so much love poetry in our culture—and they are more confident reading Shakespeare’s language—it’s a great time to transition into a longer Shakespeare play unit.  These poems work especially well as an intro to Romeo and Juliet.  

Sonnet 138: Are we all liars?

Sonnet 138 is possibly one of the most cynical Shakespeare sonnets—and yet despite, or perhaps because of this?—it’s so much fun! My favorite intro to this mini unit is to watch some classic clips of Lucy and Charlie Brown with the football.  (If you’re not old enough to remember this running joke, ahem, I’ll explain.  Basically, Lucy would promise every single time to hold the football for Charlie Brown, and every single time he’d believe her only to be betrayed when she pulled it away at the last minute.  So cynical, right?  Explains a lot about Gen X. I guess.)

I pair Shakespeare’s sonnet 138, which ends describing how he and his love both lie to one another and that works out just fine for them, with Dorothy Parker’s equally cynical poem “A Certain Lady.”  

Students love when they figure out the twists at the end of both poems, and our discussions work great as an intro to just about any longer text in which a character is a liar. If you’ve read any Shakespeare plays you know that there are quite a few of those dishonest types hanging around—basically, these poems can intro just about any Shakespeare play.

Sonnet 73: What’s the best way to approach death?

Looking at death and old age might not seem like an obvious win for teens, and yet I have found that my students really appreciate the chance to talk about such an important topic.  While Shakespeare’s speaker looks to the end of his life as a warm fading fire, Dylan Thomas’s speaker more famously encourages us to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”  Pairing Sonnet 73 with “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” sparks some great conversation in the classroom.

Honestly, I think that for most contemporary Americans, the idea that one might view old age and death as something not to be fought against tooth and nail is practically revolutionary.  

Sonnet 73 is also a favorite choice of mine as an early introduction to Shakespeare because the speaker works through three clear metaphors in an attempt to—again—find the right words to describe a hard-to-put-into-words life experience.  By having students draw and unpack the three metaphors, I really get them to understand why metaphors matter when talking about abstract concepts. These poems segue nicely into a unit on Hamlet.

Sonnet 38: Why even bother with writing when it’s so hard?

Everyone knows that old chestnut usually attributed to Hemingway: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” So why do we humans continue to feel the need to write when it is so very challenging?

For this unit, I like to pair Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet “Astrophil and Stella 1: Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show” with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 38.  Both poems deal with themes of inspiration, love, and how we get over writer’s block.

While these poems are more challenging than the others—and certainly Sidney is a stretch for many high school students—there is still something so relatable in the stories they tell.  If your students have ever experienced pain of putting words to the page, they’ll appreciate these two classic poems.

A Final Note on Scaffolding and Independence

Another way that I make these challenging texts accessible for the average teen is that every one of my lessons on the sonnets follows the same rhythm: a bellringer that taps into a universal question; a slow analysis of the poem with guided questions; a paired source that offers a different perspective; and a moment at the end where students do something creative with their ideas.

The goal is never to explain the sonnet to them. The goal is to give them enough footholds that they can move through the poem independently, making discoveries that feel entirely their own.

If you’d like to use the exact sequences I’ve built—with the paired texts, guided questions, creative writing, and all the scaffolding that helps students actually work through the poems independently—you can find the full bundle of mini-units here.

But even without the full resource, I hope these approaches help convince your classes that these poems really are worth the effort.

If nothing else, please at least try the bad love poem contest!