Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Analysis of the tragedy of Hamlet
Analysis on the play Hamlet
Theme of Shakespearean sonnets
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Analysis of the tragedy of Hamlet
The six poems that I shall be comparing are: Sonnet 116, My last duchess, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, The highwayman, The laboratory and The ballad of Tam Lin. There is a common theme that runs through all of these poems of relationships and the love in them whether it be the love lost between two lovers such as in the Laboratory or a fantasy love such as in The ballad of Tam Lin. In La Belle Dame Sans Merci the speaker of the poem comes across a knight all alone and who is apparently dying in a field. He proceeds to ask the poor knight about the awful fate that has befallen him. The knight’s reply takes up the rest of the poem; he says that one day he met a beautiful faery in the fields. He spent the whole day with her making her flower garlands and letting her ride his horse. She invited him back to her fairy cave where he gently kissed her four times and she lulled him to sleep. He had a horrendous nightmare about all of the other knights and kings the woman had previously seduced who were all now dead. He awakens alone and on the hillside. This ballad is divided into 12 quatrains, each with a rhyming structure (A-B-A-C). The rhythm is an iambic tetrameter meaning each line is made up of four iambs, except for in the fourth line of each quatrain where there are only three iambs. The main imagery in this ballad is placed in stanzas 10 and 11 during the knight’s nightmare. He talks about the pale kings and princes he saw and goes into slightly dark and gory detail “I saw their starved lips in the gloam” and you really feel as though you can see them too. Like most ballads this is quite like a song and starts off in quite an upbeat way when the knight is describing the glorious day that he spent with the young faery, but takes qu... ... middle of paper ... ... imagine this poor man being turned into all manner of beasts. The tone of this ballad is quite dark and somber which is strange for a ballad as they are normally quite lighthearted, but for this one it needs to be dark so you can sense the turmoil Janet felt when trying to win her true love back. It is also filled with passion and the love they feel. My favourite poem is The Highwayman as it has as it has an extremely dramatic storyline behind it that really draws you in and makes you want to read on. It also tells the story of a forbidden love between the highwayman and Bess which ultimately ends in their demise but the ending gives out the message that even death could not keep them apart in the end which is a really powerful statement he is trying to put across. All of these points’ reasons contribute to why this is my favourite po Works Cited shmoop poetry
Writing the poem in ballad form gave a sense of mood to each paragraph. The poem starts out with an eager little girl wanting to march for freedom. The mother explains how treacherous the march could become showing her fear for her daughters life. The mood swings back and forth until finally the mother's fear overcomes the child's desire and the child is sent to church where it will be safe. The tempo seems to pick up in the last couple of paragraphs to emphasize the mothers distraught on hearing the explosion and finding her child's shoe.
In the essay I hope to explain why I picked each poem and to suggest
The story starts out with Perceval, the son of a widow, out in the forest listening to the sweet season and all the warbling of the birds. In the distance he discovers knights riding towards him. At first he thought that they were devils, which his mother had warned him to stay away from. Then he saw all their bright and shiny armor and he thought it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, so according to his mother, angels were more beautiful than everything else in the world. Basically, everything his mother told him he believed, because he was very naive and didn’t know any better.
Pushing tears from her eyes, a frantic mother scrambles through what remains of her beloved church. But she does not locate her choir singer. Only a little white shoe and a glove to match. In his poem “Ballad of Birmingham,” David Randall uses descriptive imagery, dialogue, irony, and a tonal shift to give the poem emotion and draw the reader’s attention towards the dramatic situation.
Before the dreamer fell asleep, he was reading the story of Seys and Alcyone, which is too a story about sorrow caused by the loss of a loved one. When comparing this story to the Knight’s, the knight has much more in common with Alcyone, a woman, than with Seys the King. Alcyone succumbs to the grief she feels over Seys’ death after a period of great distress. The comparison between these two figures feminizes the Knight because he is compared to Alcyone, who is experiencing a “normal” amount of sadness as a woman in this situation. It is expected that she will mourn outwardly, freer to express her emotions because she is a woman. As a man, the Knight should be strong and composed, two traits of a “traditional” man. The Knight also states throughout his description and elegy of Whyte that she was his everything. As a Knight (and maybe even the English prince John of Gaunt (Chaucer 17)), he should have other important and promising prospects that would make him want to continue living. However, the Knight talks about ending his life, to which the dreamer responds, “And ye for sorwe mordred yourselve, / Ye sholde be dampned in this cas” (Chaucer 724-725). The dreamer continues after this line to talk about multiple women and one man who ended their lives because they had in some way lost their lovers (726-739). Again, the dreamer is comparing the Knight to women,
This poem is written in eleven quatrains. All of these quatrains follow an abcb rhyme scheme. An example of this from lines 1-4 are “toune” being a, “wine” being b, “salior” being c, and “mine” being b. This means that the poem was written in closed form. It also follows a meter with four beats in the a and c lines and three beats in the b lines. An example of the four beats from line 5 is “Up and spak an eldern I Knicht”. The example of three beats from line 6 is “Sat at the kings richt kne”.
It consists of four stanzas, each a bit longer than the preceding one. Each stanza has it's own
He basically sets the scene. The The narrator describes the atmosphere as eerie, desolate and bleak. There there was no noise at all, it was very quiet-"and no birds sing. " The second paragraph is when the narrator first speaks to the knight.
Throughout the song the tone changes from a disappointed and unsatisfied feeling until it progresses into a hopeful and maturing tone. This transformation of tone follows the story almost perfectly and allows the reader to feel a connection to the transformation of the protagonist. This transformation from “expecting the world” (line 1) to realising that some things must happen for others to come into motion “the sun must set to rise” (line 24) is especially impactful and emotional when paired with the lines “ This could be para-para-paradise, para-para-paradise” that are repeated to show her newly established happiness and maturity. Ultimately, this progression from disappointed
To begin, the episodic shifts in scenes in this ballad enhance the speaker’s emotional confusion. Almost every stanza has its own time and place in the speaker’s memory, which sparks different emotions with each. For example, the first stanza is her memory of herself at her house and it has a mocking, carefree mood. She says, “I cut my lungs with laughter,” meaning that...
In this quote the knight is troubled because everything is going as it is supposed to, the granary is full and the harvest is done. This is why the knight is also sad and roaming around on his horse. In the next stanza, the knight is described as exhausted in appearance and afflicted. “And on thy cheeks a fading rose fast withereth too.” The colour of his skin is fading away, and he is dying.
This is an enjoyable sonnet that uses nature imagery, found extensively in Petrarca, that Shakespeare uses to get his point across. Not much explication is needed, aside the sustained images of nature, to fully understand its intent, but I would like to point out a peculiar allusion. When reading line 3, "the violet past prime" has made me think of Venus and Adonis. In the end, Adonis melts into the earth and a violet sprouts where his body was, which Venus then places in her heart, signifying the love she has for him. Reading this into the poem makes the few following lines more significant. Having Adonis portrayed as the handsome youth, Shakespeare is alluding to the death of youth (in general and to the young man) through the sonnet. In the next line, it is not certain if "sable" is an adjective or a noun and if "curls" is a noun, referring to hair (which is plausible) or a verb modifying "sable." Invoking the allusion to Adonis here, Shakespeare portends that if Adonis did live longer, he too would have greying hair; thus, Shakespeare sees ["behold"] an Adonis figure, the young man, past his youth.
Keats begins with the poem with a question, “O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, alone and palely loitering?”. He does this to ask the “knight-at-arms” what has made him this weak, this pale, dying in a field somewhere and the knight’s answer takes up the rest of the poem. The imagery in my visual representation depicting a heart broken and weakened by the icy, deceptive lips of ‘femme fatale’ is both powerful and highly symbolic because it expresses the coldness and the deviousness of the deceptive witch that has weakened the knight. The icy cold lips of the witch symbolise her deceptive nature, and the way she tricks the knight into a deathly sleep, which is also visualised in my representation. His deathly sleep is also represented in a ‘before/after’ representation in which an image of the beautiful woman in the meadows is shown, and after his nightmare, the icy cold, desolate and dark hill side upon which the knight awakes is shown in the neighbouring image. The speaker says that the "sedge" have all died out from around the lake, and "no birds sing”. We can deduce that it 's autumn since all the birds have migrated, and the plants have “withered." The speaker continues to address this sick, depressed "knight at arms." He asks about the "lily" on the knight 's "brow," suggesting that the knight 's face is pale like a lily.
The poem is written in iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Giving the poem a smooth rhyming transition from stanza to stanza.
This poem consists of only one stanza. There is no rhyming, but the poet instead conveys his meaning through the rhythm, the tone, and his use of words. E.