Love is a difficult thing to express in words in any given language. It is near impossible to convey the paradoxical pain and pleasure of love that sounds dreadfully horrid but simultaneously magical. Most people are often confused and have a hard time figuring and sorting out exactly how they feel and felt about their love and relationship. However, to love someone or be loved by someone is a special gift, and to be able to convey your gratitude for whatever you received out of the relationship is an extremely intense and concentrated task.
Poetry is one of the best ways to express oneself sincerely. With the time and convections that go into writing poetry, it allows the reader to think of exactly what he or she desires to say, and then allows them to craft and sculpt it in a manner the writer sees fit. The form into which a poet puts his or her words is always something of which the reader ought to take conscious note.
Many love poems are written in the form of a sonnet. A sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines in iambic pentameter with a complex rhyme scheme. In the English sonnet, the rhyme scheme is abba abba cddc ee, leaving to the poet’s discretion the choice of whether to form the lines into an octave, turn, and then sestet, three quatrains and an ending couplet, or any other pattern of lines imaginable.
When poets have chosen to work within such a strict form, that form and its structures make up part of what they want to say. In other words, the poet is using the structure of the poem as part of the language act: we will find the "meaning" not only in the words, but partly in their pattern as well.
Both Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder and Sir Philip Sidney were English poets of the renaissance. They were both courtier poets who wrote many sonnets about love and the unsettled course of relationships. In Wyatt’s “Farewell, Love” and Sidney’s “Leave Me, O Love,” one can see many similarities and some differences in their writing. Language, theme, tone, and other important aspects of the poem reflect such similarities and differences among the two poets’ works.
Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder uses the structure of the sonnet to his advantage. He uses the octave, turn, and then sestet in “Farewell, Love.” Although he did not make the breaks in between the lines to actually show the reader, one can get the feel of them simply by reading the poem. T...
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...to move from line to line without much haste except for the given punctuation. It also gives a more placid sound to the sonnet, leaving out harsher sounds like those found in “Leave Me, O Love.” In “Leave Me, O Love,” Sidney uses a lot of harder sounds like hard Ts and Es, which give a lot more emphasis to the endings of each of the lines along with the already given hard punctuations like periods and semi-colons. This gives the sonnet a harder feel and sound than the other, with coincides with the different tones and messages of the two. The softer sound goes with the softer peaceful message of “Farewell, Love,” while the harder sounds of “Leave Me, O Love” go with its more dramatic and stronger message.
Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder and Sir Philip Sidney were both wonderful craftsmen of the sonnet. With careful skill and attention to spacing, emphasis, and detail, they both managed to create some of the best love sonnets to date. Though they are similar in some ways, and contrasting in others, each writer managed to construct their own unique sonnet with appropriate form, fitting language, and a unique idea on how to express an emotion or interpretation of love within it.
Compare William Shakespeare’s Sonnets 12 and 73 William Shakespeare (1564-1616) wrote a group of 154 sonnets between 1592 and 1597, which were compiled and published under the title 'Shakespeare's Sonnets' in 1609. The 154 poems are divided into two groups, a larger set, consisting of sonnets 1-126 which are addressed by the poet to a dear young man, the smaller group of sonnets 127-154 address another persona, a 'dark lady'. The larger set of sonnets display a deliberate sequence, a sonnet cycle akin to that used a decade earlier by the English poet Phillip Sidney (1554-1586) in 'Astrophel and Stella'. The themes of love and infidelity are dominant in both sets of poems, in the larger grouping; these themes are interwoven with symbols of beauty, immortality, and the ravages of time. Lyrical speculations of poetry's power to maintain bonds of love and to revere the beloved can also be found in the larger collection of sonnets.
...onsidered to be a huge romantic gesture; it allowed the writers thoughts and feelings to be spoken through words. It was a way to tell their lovers how they truly felt, in what was at the time one of the most romantic ways to do so. It allowed both poets to create dramatic effects when needed, explore their emotions and declare their love as everlasting. This was all done in 14 lines, usually following the structure of an iambic pentameter. The structure of Sonnet 43 can be differentiated from the more traditional Shakespearean sonnet as it follows the structure of an Italian sonnet (also known as the Petrarchan sonnet) rather than the structure of a Shakespearean sonnet. The first 8 lines which are known as the octave imposes a problem of some sort, the first four lines (quatrain) typically introduce the problem; the next quatrain is where the problem is developed.
The imposition of the British aggressor is even made apparent through the structure of the work, the two sonnet form stanzas not only highlight the inadequacy of the loveless union, but with their Shakespearean rhyme scheme also imply the cultural dominance of English tradition. The use of half rhymes, such as ‘pulse’ and ‘burst’ or ‘pain’ and ‘within’ leaves the stanzas feel...
"Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal [but] which the reader recognizes as his own." (Salvatore Quasimodo). There is something about the human spirit that causes us to rejoice in shared experience. We can connect on a deep level with our fellow man when we believe that somehow someone else understands us as they relate their own joys and hardships; and perhaps nowhere better is this relationship expressed than in that of the poet and his reader. For the current assignment I had the privilege (and challenge) of writing an imitation of William Shakespeare’s "Sonnet 87". This poem touched a place in my heart because I have actually given this sonnet to someone before as it then communicated my thoughts and feelings far better than I could. For this reason, Sonnet 87 was an easy choice for this project, although not quite so easy an undertaking as I endeavored to match Shakespeare’s structure and bring out his themes through similar word choice.
Canfield Reisman, Rosemary M. “Sonnet 43.” Masterplots II. Philip K. Jason. Vol. 7. Pasadena: Salem Press, 2002. 3526-3528. Print.
“Deep down, beneath all our insecurities, beneath all our hopes for and beliefs in equality, each of us believes we're better than anyone else. Because it's our beliefs that are right, our doubts that are allowable ones, our fears which are legitimate (Stein, 2010)”
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.
In truly Renaissance English artistic fashion, poets such as Phillip Sidney and William Shakespeare negotiate poetic boundaries, while implementing Italian conventions. They manipulate the sonnet form and climb Castiglione’s “ladder of love” throughout their poems. Sidney’s Astrophil (Astrophil and Stella) behaves wildly, as Castiglione’s Bembo (The Courtier) expects from a young courtier; he is incapable of being able to see beyond physical form. Shakespeare’s speaker in “Sonnet 130” sees beyond form, almost to a fault. He berates his lover by straying from typical poetic intimacy, but he does so because he sees beyond her physical beauty. Sidney implements predominantly traditional Petrarchan sonnets, but creates a caricature of a “sensual lover;” while Shakespeare experiments with style, and he creates an exceptionally “reasonable lover.” Some scholars sharply contrast the two authors, asserting that Shakespeare’s Sonnets negatively respond to sonnets like Astrophil and Stella. However, the two both develop distinctive stylistic alterations to Italian conventions and Shakespeare borrows from Sidney within his poetic innovation.
In “Sonnet XVII,” the text begins by expressing the ways in which the narrator does not love, superficially. The narrator is captivated by his object of affection, and her inner beauty is of the upmost significance. The poem shows the narrator’s utter helplessness and vulnerability because it is characterized by raw emotions rather than logic. It then sculpts the image that the love created is so personal that the narrator is alone in his enchantment. Therefore, he is ultimately isolated because no one can fathom the love he is encountering. The narrator unveils his private thoughts, leaving him exposed and susceptible to ridicule and speculation. However, as the sonnet advances toward an end, it displays the true heartfelt description of love and finally shows how two people unite as one in an overwhelming intimacy.
Though ballads and Sonnets are poems that can depict a picture of someone’s beloved, they can have many differences. For instance, a Ballad is a story in short stanzas such as a song would have, where as a sonnet typical, has a traditional structure of 14 lines employing several rhyme schemes and adheres to a tight thematic organization. Both Robert Burn’s ballad “The Red, Red, Rose, and William Shakespeare’s “of the Sonnet 130 “they express their significant other differently. However, “The Red, Red, Rose depicts the Falling in new love through that of a young man’s eyes, and Shakespeare’s sonnet 130 depicts a more realistic picture of the mistress he writes about; which leaves the reader to wonder if beauty is really in the eyes of the beholder.
Sir Thomas Wyatt was a wonderful craftsman of love poems such as "Is it possible." Although love is a difficult thing to express, Wyatt makes it look too simple with his brilliant word choice and structure. With careful skill and attention to spacing, emphasis, and detail, he manages to create one of the most intriguing love odes to date. Wyatt also managed to construct his own unique idea on how to express such an emotion such as rejection and the love lost within it.
The form of a poem can be understood simply as the physical structure. However, there are various aspects that make it up that contribute towards the goals of the poet. I find that the sonnets “When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be”, by John Keats, and “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, by Wilfred Owen, make efficient use of their formal elements to display the depth of the situation of their poems. Keats uses a Shakespearean sonnet structure to organize his thoughts being displayed throughout the poem and to construct them around the speaker’s fear that is the central focus of the sonnet. Owen’s sonnet is a Petrarchan sonnet, although it has a rhyme scheme similar to a Shakespearean, which allows him to display a contrast between the images the
From the works of William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser it is clear that some similarities are apparent, however the two poets encompass different writing styles, as well as different topics that relate to each other in their own unique ways. In Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” and Spenser’s “Sonnet 75”, both poets speak of love in terms of feelings and actions by using different expressive views, allowing the similar topics to contain clear distinctions. Although Edmund Spenser’s “Sonnet 75” and William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” relate in the sense that love is genuine and everlasting, Spenser suggests love more optimistically, whereas Shakespeare focuses on expressing the beauty and stability of love.
By looking at a poem which has a specific form, for example the sonnet, consider
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.