By Will Linhares-Huang

In the Unknown Water

The dark liquid flowed in each direction.

Nothing could be seen past the cold abyss

but I could see my perfect reflection.

However, I could never feel true bliss.

What is it like to be fully submerged?

What creatures can possibly live beneath?

Some of my questions were surely absurd.

But my imagination was unleashed.

I felt a wisp of something graze my toe.

My body jolted, chills went down my spine.

Wanting to latch on, the creature below

Put me at the end of a fishing line.

At that moment I needed to adjust.

A strip of algae made me filled with disgust.

Rationale:

Sonnets can appear in a variety of forms, but they often have an iambic pentameter, fourteen lines, a rhyming scheme, and a turn or volta. Each line of the sonnet should be ten syllables or consist of five ‘iambs’ because an ‘iamb’ is two syllables. A sonnet should also be fourteen lines in length which requires three quatrains (a group of four lines) and one couplet (a group of two lines). Moreover, a sonnet must follow a rhyme scheme which is often ‘abab cdcd efef gg’. Lastly, the final quatrain of a sonnet, referred to as the the turn or “volta”, experiences a change in either message, theme, or sound. This sonnet contains all of the necessary components. My sonnet about disgust is fourteen lines in length each consisting of ten syllables. I also have implemented the volta in the fourth quatrain where I talk about my personal experience with disgust. When writing my sonnet, I made an effort to be mysterious with my writing and not be explicit of what I thought was disgusting to make it more interesting for the reader. This is why the first two quatrains are quite vague and the volta keeps the readers guessing. It is only the final line of the couplet where I reveal that I find the feeling of touching algae in water disgusting. I decided to use a variety of words linked to the unknown or creatures to capture the sense of disgust that I felt. I used words like ‘abyss’, ‘wisp’, ‘latch’, and ‘chills’.