Milton returned to England about 1641 when the political and religious affairs were very disturbing to many. He started to apply his work in practice for that one great work like Paradise Lost when penning the Sonnets. Not every sonnet is identical but they can be difficult in interpretation, styles, word use, and so forth. The purpose of this paper is to analyze Milton’s Sonnet 8 (ca 1642), “Captain or Colonel.” This will be done by explaining the type of theme and then separating the sonnet into three sections: lines 1-4, 5-8, and 9-14 for a better understanding of how Milton used the development of ongoing events to present problems with a mystical resolution.
John Milton studied and traveled abroad, mainly in Italy, prior to returning home. In his earlier sonnets, with the exception of a few, he used a Petrarchan Theme which is primarily dominate in many Italian sonnets. It is very prevalent in Sonnet 8 where as it may not be in other poetic verses like Sonnet 7. Sonnet 8 seems to be somewhat melodic as if it were a musical type chant. It sticks strictly to the pattern of 14 lines where a problem exists on the first eight lines and the resolution is on the last 6 lines. It is not an iambic pentameter where there are at least five iambs per metrical line but iambs do exist in the poem like “Muses” or “requite.”
He did, though, follow a standard pattern in verses 1 through 8. This was done by rhyming the first and last word of verse 1 and 4; he rhymed the words arms and harms. Verse 5 and 8 rhymed the words charms and warms. Verse 2 and 3 rhymed the words sease and please whereas these and seas rhymed in verses 6 and 7. This follows the pattern abba and abba. In verses 9 through 14 a different pattern was used a as resoluti...
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Kerrigan, William, etal. The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton. Random House. New York: 2007. pp 144-145.
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Stevens, David H. "The Order of Milton's Sonnets." Modern Philology, May 1919: 25-33.
Stonemen, Houlston and. "Studies In English Literature: The Sonnets of Milton." British Controversialist: A Literary Magazine , 1 1, 1867: 227-229.
coheres to the subject of nonconformity in the rhyme scheme. Although it appears to be
Wilson, John Dover. An Introduction to the Sonnets of Shakespeare: For the Use of Historians
Canfield Reisman, Rosemary M. “Sonnet 43.” Masterplots II. Philip K. Jason. Vol. 7. Pasadena: Salem Press, 2002. 3526-3528. Print.
All Shakespearean sonnets have the same poetic structure. They consist of fourteen lines divided into three quatrains and a couplet. They also all contain the same rhyme scheme, which is: abab cdcd efef gg. Punctuation is also an
The sonnet itself is written in iambic pentameter. The first line is a reference to the speaker, "a traveler from an antique land." Imagery and figurative language used at the beginning of the sonnet,(words such as vast, trunkless, and desert) add to the desolate and barren image and tone of the sonnet. Shelley, through the form of the traveler, describes the statue?s face or ?visage? to have a wrinkled lip, and a ?sneer of cold command.? This describes a negative aspect towards the tyrannical figure. Shelley himself was against tyranny, as that is obvious in his poem here (...
Roche, Thomas P. Jr. Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences. New York: AMS Press, 1989. Print.
---. "Sonnet 130." The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1. M. H. Abrams, ed. W. W. Norton (New York): 1993.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) lived in a time of religious turbulence. During the Renaissance people began to move away from the Church. Authors began to focus on the morals of the individual and on less lofty ideals than those of the Middle Ages. Shakespeare wrote one-hundred fifty-four sonnets during his lifetime. Within these sonnets he largely explored romantic love, not the love of God. In Sonnet 29 Shakespeare uses specific word choice and rhyme to show the reader that it is easy to be hopeful when life is going well, but love is always there, for rich and poor alike, even when religion fails.
William Shakespeare was an excellent writer, who throughout his life created well written pieces of literatures which are valued and learned about in modern times. One of his many works are 154 Sonnets, within these Sonnets there are several people Shakespeare “writes to”, such as fair youth, dark lady and rival poet. Sonnet 20 is written to fair youth, or in other words a young man. The idea of homosexuality appears in Sonnet 20 after the speaker admits his love towards the young man.
Sonnet 73 by William Shakespeare is widely read and studied. But what is Shakespeare trying to say? Though it seems there will not be a simple answer, for a better understanding of Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, this essay offers an explication of the sonnet from The Norton Anthology of English Literature:
Milton, John. ‘Paradise Lost.’ 1674. Norton Anthology of English Literature. 7th ed. 2 vols. New York: Norton, 2000, 1: 1817-2044.
Milton: Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. Arthur E. Barker, b. 1875. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. 205-217.
When examining the presence of time and certainty in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the best place to begin is with Sonnet 18. This is by far one of Shakespeare’s most famous Sonnets, and probably his most misunderstood by the common reader. Though this Sonnet seems to be a simple love poem on the...
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
The regularity with which Milton frequently conforms to principles of epic structure make his occasional (but nevertheless fundamental) variations on the epic tradition all the more striking by contrast. The most important departures from epic decorum--the rejection of a martial theme, and the choice of an argument that emphasizes the hero's transgression and defeat instead of celebrating his virtues and triumphs--are paradoxically conditioned by concern for the ethical and religious decorum of the epic genre. On the whole, Milton has retained the formal motifs and devices of the heroic poem but has invested them with Christian matter and meaning. In this sense his epic is . . . something of a "pseudomorph"--retaining the form of classical epic but replacing its values and contents with Judeo-Christian correlatives. (Epic and Tragic Structure . . . 20)