Sonnet for Iona

written for Iona, on the occasion of receiving an assignment in her Senior year to write a Shakespearean sonnet.

I found her sitting in her sunlit room,
With pleasant springtime breezes wafting round.
But on her face there sat a certain gloom
For to a trying task her time was bound.
What was this task so burdensome and dire
Which had last week so cruelly been assigned?
To write from her imagination’s fire
A sonnet new - Shakespearean in kind.
Of fourteen lines, each five iambic feet,
Three quatrains of an A-B-A-B rhyme;
A couplet at the end makes it complete,
But oh it strains the brain, and takes such time!
And there she sits, as time is growing late,
Still searching for a word which rhymes with ‘great’.