In today’s culture, the word “sonnet” is often associated with Shakespeare and boredom, but generally, sonnets span beyond Shakespeare’s realm, delving into different techniques and themes. William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116,” John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet X,” and Christina Rossetti’s “Remember” are all sonnets that fall into the same general form, yet they each maintain a distinct uniqueness through structure utilization, word choices, and themes; these three sonnets show the powerful elasticity and careful craft that this category of poetry calls for.
There are two different types of sonnets: the Italian and the Shakespearean. The Italian sonnet, which is the most common type, has a rhyme scheme of abba, abba, cdecde or cdcdcd. The Shakespearean
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“Though art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, / and dost with poison, war, and sickness and dwell” (9-10). The final two lines reveal what happens when one dies and ascends to heaven. “One short sleep past, we wake eternally / And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die” (13-14). These final clever and paradoxical play-on word shows what God intends to do with the existence of evil. Death, for Christians, will be like a short slumber because followers of Christ will wake up to a heavenly eternity; death will die because death has no place in paradise and will become …show more content…
At first, the poem’s speaker asks to be remembered. “Remember me when I am gone away” (1). The sonnet takes a surprise twist just before the poem’s turn. “Only remember me; you understand / It will be late to counsel then or pray” (7-8). The speaker emphasizes what she means by the word “remembrance.” These two lines suggest that remembrance does not equate mourning or sadness. The poem’s speaker makes it clear that she wants to be remembered by her assumed loved ones, but her wish comes with one condition.
The speaker’s condition is for her loved ones to happily remember her, and if they can only remember her in tears, she wants them to forget her. The speaker reveals this condition in the sonnet’s turn “Yet if you should forget me for a while / And afterwards remember, do not grieve” (9-10). The speaker does not want his or her loved ones to grieve. The final lines tell what the speaker wishes for instead of grief. “Better by far you should forget and smile / Than that you should remember and be sad” (13-14). The sonnet’s speaker views life as celebratory and finds no sorrow in death if life is full of
William Penn, an English philosopher and founder of the Province of Pennsylvania, once said that, “For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity.” He is saying that death is not the end of our lives, but just another stage. In the poem “Holy Sonnet 10” by John Donne, the poet talks to death itself and gives his opinion on his view of death and others’ views: it is something that cannot control anything, can be replaced by other things, and is not the end of a person’s life. Through the use of his figurative language, Petrachan form, and tone and language, Mr. Donne expresses the message that death is not to be feared because one lives in heaven. John uses many examples of figurative language in his sonnet.
In the sonnet, “For That He Looked Not upon Her,” written by English poet, George Gascoigne, he expresses his heartache and sorrow that he is experiencing from the woman he loves. Throughout the poem, Gascoigne uses literary devices such as diction and imagery to convey the feeling of grief and melancholy to his readers.
Wordsworth shows the possibility of finding freedom within his poem by choosing to write within the Italian sonnet’s rules. What makes an Italian sonnet unique is the division and pattern of its rhyme scheme. It is usually structured in an ABBA, ABBA, CDE, CDE pattern, and broken into two main parts, the octave (the first eight lines) and the sestet (the final six). The meter of “Nuns” can be labeled as iambic pentameter, yet along with the meter, the poem differs from the norm in two more ways. The first difference is in the rhyme scheme. In a typical Italian sonnet, the sestet follows a CDE, CDE pattern, in “Nuns” however, it follows the pattern CDD, CCD. It’s minute, but adds emphases to the 13th line, which contains the poem’s second anomaly. All the poem’s lines have an ...
This sonnet, “I Shall Forget You Presently, My Dear” portrays the relationship between Daisy and Tom. In these lines, “So make the most of this, your little day, / Your little month, your little half a year / Ere I forget, or die, or move away,” the speaker interprets that her and her significant other must cherish each moment before either of them loses feelings for one another or are forced to separate by other circumstances. She wants to make the most of the time together with her partner while it lasts. This passage can take us back to ‘The Great Gatsby’, how Daisy and Tom both fall out of love and have affairs with Gatsby and Myrtle. This may be how Daisy and Tom both felt before they went on with their own affairs. In these lines, “And we are done forever; by and by / I shall forget you, as I said, but now, / If you entreat me with your loveliest lie / I will protest you with my favorite vow.” This shows that how her lover can fake his love for her and if he does she will
The poem becomes personal on line 10 when she uses the first person and says “I lost my mother’s watch”. She is letting the reader know what she has lost in reality. Then she gets sidetracked to mention other things she has lost; she then mentions other things she has lost of much more importance such as houses, continents, realms, and cities, but then again mentions it was not so hard to lose those things. But in the end, mention the loss that really matters. She remembers the qualities of the lover she lost.
This idea of memories being forgotten is when there is a mention of graves being lost in “Elegy for the Native Guard”. This is further reinforced in the line “All the grave markers, all the crude headstones – water-lost.” (44) While the poem does allude to the fact that these graves were destroyed due to natural causes, that of a hurricane, it is still significant. This poem demonstrates that society’s memory is not permanent, it can and will be lost
William Shakespeare’s sonnets are renowned as some of the greatest poetry ever written. He wrote a total of 154 sonnets that were published in 1609. Shakespearean sonnets consider similar themes including love, beauty, and the passing of time. In particular, William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 75 and Sonnet 116 portray the theme of love through aspects of their form and their display of metaphors and similes. While both of these sonnets depict the theme of love, they have significantly contrasting ideas about the same theme.
In 1949, Gwendolyn Brooks wrote “the sonnet-ballad”. This poem is written in Shakespearean form and is about a woman, the narrator, losing her lover because he is going off to war. Instead of believing in a chance of her husband coming back home, she tries to accept that he is gone and will not return. Even though she admits she is losing her husband, it may not mean she believes he will die. The narrator gives up all hope that she will ever get her husband back from the war, even if he does return home.
The poem begins the same way in which all elegies tend to do; with a lament. The opening sonnet presents ‘A cobble thrown a hundred years ago’ which was aimed towards his mother’s grandmother,
“Do Not Stand at my Grave and Weep” fulfils the qualification to be an elegy by being written in response to the grief of a young girl whose mother has died (the inspiration), and by ending with a sense of acceptance and peace. The mother of a young girl dies in Germany during the Holocaust, so her daughter is unable to return to the grave and grieve for her. The poem speaks from the perspective of the dead mother, and it communicates what the girl should do to arrive at acceptance of
A sonnet is a fixed patterned poem that expresses a single, complete thought or idea. Sonnet comes from the Italian word “sonetto”, which means “little song”. Poem, on the other hand, is English writing that has figurative language, and written in separate lines that usually have a repeated rhyme, but don’t all the time. The main and interesting thing is that these two poems or sonnets admire and compare the beauty of a specific woman, with tone, repetition, imagery, and sense of sound.
The first quatrain of the poem begins undermining the idea of death by personifying it. Death is personified by Donne throughout the poem as he challenges death by stating that it is not the “mighty and dreadful” aspect of life that people are afraid of, but as an escape from life where people can find peace after death because “nor yet canst thou kill me” (Donne 1100). He argues that death does not really kill those whom it thinks it kills to further beat death into humility. In the opening line of the poem he uses an apostrophe, “Death, be not proud..” to begin with a dramatic tone to argue with death as people’s adversary (Donne 1100). Death is given negative human traits, such as pride, but also inferiority and pretense.
Lackluster love is the subject postulated in both sonnets, Petrarch 90 and Shakespeare 130. This is a love that endures even after beauteous love has worn off, or in Petrarch, a love that never was. The Petrarchan sonnet utilizes fantasy to describe love. It depicts love that is exaggerated and unrealistic. Shakespeare’s sonnet, on the other hand, is very sarcastic but it is more realistic as compared to the Petrarch 90. Petrarchan sonnets, also called Italian sonnets were the first sonnets to be written, and they have remained the most common sonnets (Hollander 28). They were named after the Italian poet Petrarch. Its structure takes the form of two stanzas, the first one an octave, in that, it has eight lines, and the next stanza is a sestet, meaning that it has six lines. The rhyme scheme suits the Italian language, which has the feature of being rhyme rich, and it, can take the forms of abbaabba, cdcdcd, or cdecde. These sonnets present an answerable charge in the first stanza, and a turn in the sestet. The sestet is the counter argument of the octave.
The fourteen line sonnet is constructed by three quatrains and one couplet. With the organization of the poem, Shakespeare accomplishes to work out a different idea in each of the three quatrains as he writes the sonnet to lend itself naturally. Each of the quatrain contains a pair of images that create one universal idea in the quatrain. The poem is written in a iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Giving the poem a smooth rhyming transition from stanza to