Analysis Of Renaissance Love And Desire By George Gascoigne

Renaissance poets were especially fond of articulating their love through writing, primarily poetry. After reading through all of the poems from the section “Renaissance Love and Desire,” George Gascoigne’s “And if I did, what then?” stuck out to me the most for several reasons. As I read this poem multiple times, I first seemed to notice that it consisted of a rhyme scheme of ABABCDCDEFEFGHGHIJIJKHKH. Although this was one of the first aspects I seemed to recognize in the poem, it is not the main reasoning that this poem stood out to me, but it was the distinctiveness in the poem’s message and meaning that made this poem extremely noticeable for me. Gascoigne makes readers realize that not all love has a happy ending and that not all love is pure and faithful, which also brings out this poems distinctiveness. Gascoigne’s clever use of

I seemed to be able to connect to the narrator on a personal level in a way that makes me know exactly how he feels and why the emotions that he feels exist.
Being one of the most important poets during the early Elizabethan era, George Gascoigne began writing plays, literary criticism, prose fiction, poems, etc., after failing as a lawyer and a soldier. In this particular poem of his, a speaker begins in mid conversation, and at first it is hard to tell whether the speaker is a male or a female. The opening of this poem also seems to be in the form of an argument or a disagreement, creating a mysterious background for reader’s right from the start of the poem. It is then obvious that the opening stanza is a female speaking about being accused of infidelity. She does not seem to care what she is doing because there are plenty of women out there for every man and doesn’t want people trying to monopolize her sexuality: “‘And if I did, what then?’ / The sea hath fish for every man” (Gascoigne 1007). Gascoigne uses idiomatic