The White Doe, by Francesco Petrarch

1183 Words3 Pages

Title: When looking at this poem's title, one can get many ideas of what the poem will be about. One of the ideas that I got when I read the title was that it was going to be about a white female deer that was being hunted by a hunter. Another one that I thought up was that a white deer is an angel from heaven that will save someone. The last idea that I came up with was that it was about a white deer that was camouflaged in some snow to escape a predator.

Paraphrase: In the first stanza, the speaker mainly describes the doe and its surroundings. The speaker says that the doe is all white with golden antlers. The speaker says that the doe is standing in the shade between two streams in a green opening in a forest. In the second stanza, the speaker tells how he left his work to follow the doe because she was so beautiful. The doe must have run off into the woods because he compares his looking for the doe to a miser searching for his treasure. He also seems to be happy while he is looking for the doe. In the third stanza, he finds the doe once more. The way I interpreted this stanza was that the doe was wearing a collar with a diamond on it. I came to this conclusion because the stanza's first two lines say, "Around her lovely neck 'Do not touch me'/Was written with topaz and diamond stone[.]" It seems as though the doe was once owned by someone because the stanza continues the inscription on what I believe to be the collar: "'My Caesar's will has been to make me free.'" I think it is some kind of ghost deer that was once owned by Julius Caesar. The last stanza basically says that he was chasing the deer until noon. He says that he was so tired he could barely see, and he fell into the stream. When he got out the doe was gone...

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Title: The title is the subject of the poem. It is not a very specific title so the reader can make many inferences about what the poem will be about. The title just simply says "The White Doe." It does not say "The White Doe that was Spotted by a man Working in the Woods and Decides to Follow but falls into a Stream." So until the reader actually reads the poem, he or she will not really know what the poem will be about. The title contributes to the overall effect of the poem because the white doe is the subject of poetry in the poem.

Theme: What the poet is trying to tell the world is that just because someone throws something a way does not mean one can take it from the garbage and keep it as his or her own. If the person that threw the object away wanted someone else to have it, he or she would put it up for sale or give it away.

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