- Shut off distractions: turn off music and notifications. Put your phone away: I dare you. Try earplugs.
- You will need: a book (in print); two coloured pens or pencils; and access to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Accept no substitutes.
- Frame your intentions. Inhale, exhale, and open your mind.
- Read the sonnet aloud. Start to finish. Don't try to understand it, just read it.
- Think about the sonnet as a whole. Mark off sections, transitions, shifts of argument or descriptive subjects. Is there a volta, or turn? Is there a question that's asked and then answered? Note what seems to happen, and what's different at the end.
- Mark (circle, underline, or whatever) the words you don't understand, particularly those that seem to be used in ways that don't make sense to you.
- Look up at least three of those words in the OED. In the margin, write down the definition that makes the most sense to you in the poem's context. Pay particular attention to obsolete meanings.
- If you think you understand every word, you're not paying attention; poets always use unexpected word choices (diction) and orders (syntax). Look up a word you think you understand, and learn what meanings you didn't recognize.
- Using a different colour, mark the sonnet's essential words and phrases. What's the main subject or topic? What's the most important verb? What are the conjunctions (and, but, or) doing? What's the story or argument?
- You should then be able to paraphrase it pretty accurately by looking at those essential words and phrases. Try putting (brackets) around less essential words and phrases.
- Mark the repetitions of words and their synonyms, and the oppositions between words and their antonyms: e.g. virtue and goodness, or virtue and vice; thinking and wondering, or thinking and feeling.
- Mark the rhyme scheme with letters at the ends of lines (A, B, C, …).
- Read the sonnet aloud again. What's different, now that you better understand its patterns and meanings?
- Write down a question or uncertainty you still have about the sonnet. Finally, mark its most pivotal, consequential word or phrase: one that, if it were absent or altered, would change the sonnet's whole meaning.
See my guide to close reading more generally, here.
