Heartbreak is an experience and emotion that mankind has faced forever. In the poem For He Looked Not Upon Her , George Gascoigne writes his sixteenth century sonnet about a speaker who cannot face his ex lover. The speaker of the poem speaks with an attitude that expresses exhaustion with the games of love all while recognizing the trustless beauty of his ex. George Gascoigne was born in 1539 in Cardington, United Kingdom as the son of Sir John Gascoigne. His father was a landowner and a successful farmer. George is said to have been educated at Trinity College in Cambridge. George’s life ended up being full of mishaps and he ended up going to prison for his debt, He tried to farm like his father and was very unsuccessful. George and his …show more content…
George Gascoigne himself seemed an interesting man by the fact that he experienced a lot of different lifestyles of being a soldier, farmer, a member of british parliament, and finally a writer. Also, I find the poem particular interesting because it’s very relatable. I’ve found that beauty is a very easy thing to fall for, and once you make an attempt to follow with it a lot bullshit occurs that you don’t think about. But what I find quite more interesting is the style of the poem. The poem is a traditional sonnet with 14 lines and an ending couplet. It also has an iambic pentameter. This interest me because it looks just like a Shakespearean sonnet that we discussed about in class. Finally, the rhyming couplet at the end of the poem is interesting. “ So that I wink or else hold down my head, Because your blazing eyes my bale have bred.” lines 13-14. This line especially stands out to me because it shows a lot of emotion that the speaker feels. It shows how the girl has made him suffer through the temptations of her beauty. I like the use of the word bale. I was unfamiliar with this use of bale because it was used differently in the 1500s. This bale means evil suffered; physical torment or mental suffering. I find all these things very interesting about the subject of the
Nearly four centuries after the invention of the sonnet, Oscar Fay Adams was born. He stepped into his career at the brink of the American civil war, a time when typically cold Victorian era romances were set in stark contrast to the passions of Warhawks. It was in this era when Adams wrote his sonnet: “Indifference”, which explores the emotional turmoil and bitterness a man endures as he struggles to move on from a failed relationship . Adams utilizes the speaker's story in order to dramatize the plight of an individual trying and failing to reconcile holding on to the joy that passionate love brings with the intense pain it bestows in conjunction with this joy . Adams employs various poetic devices in order to present a new view of indifference,
Is this not how many people function, in order to protect themselves? Do people not reject love after heartbreak, after being harmed? While Grealy’s story is unique and, on its face, difficult to relate to, the underlying message is widely relatable: People protect themselves from emotional harm by shielding themselves from connections with others. Grealy—mentioning “love” five times in one paragraph—insists that she wants no part in love, while just beneath the surface struggles with the very concept. To communicate the theme of strength and self-protection, Grealy employs a variety of rhetorical techniques and frames it beautifully within the context of perhaps the most relatable human emotion:
Critics of the period were hesitant to praise ‘Choise’. However, contemporary critic, J.B Steane, claimed the poem ‘seems worth reprinting both as a curiosity, and for what one can see as a certain charm and freshness. In its (not unimportant) way, it even does Nashe’s century some credit.’ The idea of ‘freshness’ in regards to the text is evident in the use emotive language to depict Tomalin’s amazement towards Francis, in the description ‘sweeping she coms, as she would brush the ground, / Hir ratling silke 's my sences doe confound.’ (Nashe, 65) The language here is more akin with love poetry than other sections of the text, and it is in part the fluctuation in language which situates ‘Choise’ as something oppositional to the expected. As Brown explains, Nashes ‘was the epitome of verbal facility and quick wit, who came to be identified with a particular kind of literary value.’ (Brown, 59) The originality of Nashe’s poetry, coupled with his lustful subject matter is reflected throughout the poem, such as: ‘first bare hir leggs, then creepe up to hir kneese. / From thence ascend unto hir mannely thigh.’ (Nashe, 65) ‘Choise’ therefore belongs to a segment of literature which presents lust ‘in a salacious,
At a glance, the poem seems simplistic – a detailed observance of nature followed by an invitation to wash a “dear friend’s” hair. Yet this short poem highlights Bishop’s best poetic qualities, including her deliberate choice in diction, and her emotional restraint. Bishop progresses along with the reader to unfold the feelings of both sadness and joy involved in loving a person that will eventually age and pass away. The poem focuses on the intersection of love and death, an intersection that goes beyond gender and sexuality to make a far-reaching statement about the nature of being
This was her first response to the news of his death. She would not had grieved over someone she did not love. Even in the heat of her passion she thinks about her lost love.
The Sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Love is Not All” demonstrates an unpleasant feeling about the knowledge of love with the impression to consider love as an unimportant element that does not worth dying for; the poem is a personal message addressing the intensity, importance, and transitory nature of love. The poet’s impression reflects her general point of view about love as portrays in the title “Love is Not All.” However, the unfolding part of the poem reveals the sarcastic truth that love is important.
The situations are not similar in the scenario, but equal in the tone of the poem. The authors show the break-up of a relationship through the pain of a separation and the loss of a partner. Sometimes one faces challenging situations and learns to survive the bad outcomes with bravery. The ideal and desired love turned into regret and depression. The romanticize concept of eternal love is broken with separation: “[t]he myth of marriage goes like this: somewhere out there is the perfect soul mate, the yin that meshes easily and effortlessly with your yang. And then there is the reality of marriage, which, as any spouse knows, is not unlike what Thomas Edison once said about genius: 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration” (Kantrowitz and Wingert). The sharing of love and joy, when one starts a relationship, does not come with the answers to all questions if in the end the love is gone, and one is looking for closure. The memory of what they had one day cannot replace the bitterness of what was left, after all. In the end, it turns out to not be what one expected. The butterflies fly away, leaving
The sweetness of her touch brought his grief to a climax; he felt his whole being collapse in despair at the thought of having to lose her just when she was confessing more love for him than ever before. (Flaubert 275)
At a glance, the poem seems simplistic – a detailed observance of nature followed by an invitation to wash a “dear friend’s” hair. Yet this short poem highlights Bishop’s best poetic qualities, including her deliberate choice in diction, and her emotional restraint. Bishop progresses along with the reader to unfold the feelings of both sadness and joy involved in loving a person that will eventually age and pass away. The poem focuses on the intersection of love and death, an intersection that goes beyond gender and sexuality to make a far-reaching statement about the nature of being
Phrases such as “divided live”, “separation”, and “absence, what a torment” portray images of longing. The narrator imagines what will become of his life once he and his lover go their separate ways (5-9). The sonnet paints an image of the bittersweet aspects of separation from one’s soulmate. The “sour leisure” refers
Sir Philip Sidney’s “Sonnet 31” paints the portrait of a lover scorned. Sidney examines the subject of unrequited love through the sonnet’s male persona, Astrophel. Rather than using a precise enumeration of the sequence of events that led to Astrophel’s painful rejection, Sidney instead leaves the reader to infer the condition of the speaker based on a scene in which Astrophel projects his sorrows onto the moon. Unable to accept the cruelties the “beauties” of his world perpetrate against those who love them and moreover unable to make his particular “beauty” reciprocate his feelings, Astrophel seeks to delineate his understanding of the injustices of unrequited love to an audience devoid of the capacity to either disagree with his assessment or further injure his already wounded pride.
In Elizabeth Browning’s poem ‘Sonnet 43’, Browning explores the concept of love through her sonnet in a first person narrative, revealing the intense love she feels for her beloved, a love which she does not posses in a materialistic manner, rather she takes it as a eternal feeling, which she values dearly, through listing the different ways she loves her beloved.
She is known for creating radical novels, which stuck discord in many of its early readers, and writing highly respected sonnets. Similar to Behn, Smith also captures the inner thoughts of not just women, but all human beings in the sonnet “Written at the Close of Spring” and juxtaposes the beauty of the annual spring with the frailty of humanity. In the first stanza of this poem, the speaker uses imagery in order to help readers connect with the beauty and delicacy of spring flowers. In the second stanza, she calls to attention the fact that the spring flowers are dying and, to experience the beauty again, one will have to wait until next spring to enjoy them. In the third stanza, the poem’s focus changes from nature to humanity and asserts that as people age and begins to take part in, “tyrant passion, and corrosive care” (Line 11), youth becomes wasted. The speaker comes to the realization that once youth vanishes, it will forever, unlike the yearly revival of spring. The major fault of this sonnet is that it can be difficult to understand and has several different messages, some of which are not as strong or enlightening as
In the poem “A song of Despair” Pablo Neruda chronicles the reminiscence of a love between two characters, with the perspective of the speaker being shown in which the changes in their relationship from once fruitful to a now broken and finished past was shown. From this Neruda attempts to showcase the significance of contrasting imagery to demonstrate the Speaker’s various emotions felt throughout experience. This contrasting imagery specifically develops the reader’s understanding of abandonment, sadness, change, and memory. The significant features Neruda uses to accomplish this include: similes, nautical imagery, floral imagery, and apostrophe.
Love is the ubiquitous force that drives all people in life. If people did not want, give, or receive love, they would never experience life because it is the force that completes a person. People rely on this seemingly absent force although it is ever-present. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is an influential poet who describes the necessity of love in her poems from her book Sonnets from the Portuguese. She writes about love based on her relationship with her husband. Her life is dependent on him, and she expresses this same reliance of love in her poetry. She uses literary devices to strengthen her argument for the necessity of love. The necessity of love is a major theme in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet 14,” “Sonnet 43,” and “Sonnet 29.”