Poetry is a beautiful manner to express emotions, successfully accomplished by some of the finest writers in history. Best said by Robert Frost, “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” Infinite pieces of art have been created on love; life and death yet only some leave behind a mark. The never-ending pursuit to express the intense emotion of love is practiced best by Shakespeare in Sonnet 116 and Sonnet 130. The ageless essence of love is explored in Sonnet 116 while Sonnet 130 is an enchanting poem about the unrealistic expectations of beauty in love. However, with love comes tragedy. Projected beautifully in the poems “Death Be Not Proud” and “When I have Fears that I may Cease to be.” John Donne uses personification to bravely address the unsettling powers of Death, while, Keats in When I have Fears that I may Cease to be recognizes Death as an untimely nuisance taking captive his future accomplishments. Life is explored in What Lips My Lips Have Kissed by Edna Millay along with The World is too much with us by William Wordsworth composed this poem as an admirer of nature living in a materialistic world whereas, What Lips My Lips Have Kissed travels with a withered woman ruminating her past; two unrelated experiences yet a part of life. Poems abundant in passion, as such, helps convey difficult sentiments through words.
Ordinary beauty and compassion is of great importance to Shakespeare in Sonnet 130. He discards the customary metaphors and embellishment of conventional beauty and describes his mistress as a perfectly imperfect being. He disregards the accepted forms of splendor for she is nothing like it; her “eyes nothing like the sun,” coral is far redder tha...
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...sts” that “tap and sigh…and listen for reply.” Flashes of her youth’s escapades evoke a painful reality as mean turned to the speaker at “midnight with a cry.” Reminiscing, she addresses that “summer sang” in her once but now all that remains of her is a “lonely tree” in the wintertime. She cant seem to gather a sense of who she is, unable to name the “birds that vanished one by one.”
Exploring insightful poems by such great poets exposes emotions that are complex to describe, skillfully done in the above-mentioned poems. Shakespeare is the undefeated king of love poems, ranging from imperfect beauty to timeless love; John Keats and John Donne examine death in completely contrasting ways; Edna Millay and William Wordsworth analyze life and the self-created woe in their reflective poems. Thus, poetry effectively saunters on themes such as love, death and life.
In today’s modern view, poetry has become more than just paragraphs that rhyme at the end of each sentence. If the reader has an open mind and the ability to read in between the lines, they discover more than they have bargained for. Some poems might have stories of suffering or abuse, while others contain happy times and great joy. Regardless of what the poems contains, all poems display an expression. That very moment when the writer begins his mental journey with that pen and paper is where all feelings are let out. As poetry is continues to be written, the reader begins to see patterns within each poem. On the other hand, poems have nothing at all in common with one another. A good example of this is in two poems by a famous writer by the name of Langston Hughes. A well-known writer that still gets credit today for pomes like “ Theme for English B” and “Let American be American Again.”
In Chapter 19, “Thinking Critical about Poems”, I chose the three poems, “ I heard a fly buzz –When I died”,“ Those – dying, then”, and “The Starry Night”. These poems particularly have the same theme of dying or coming to an end and I enjoyed reading them and hearing the backgrounds to the author’s lives. It put things in perspective once I knew these poems had meaning to not only the story told, but the meaning to the author in the life.
I will discuss the similarities by which these poems explore themes of death and violence through the language, structure and imagery used. In some of the poems I will explore the characters’ motivation for targeting their anger and need to kill towards individuals they know personally whereas others take out their frustration on innocent strangers. On the other hand, the remaining poems I will consider view death in a completely different way by exploring the raw emotions that come with losing a loved one.
The concept of love has long been the preferred topic of conversation among prominent male poets. Towards the closing of the sixteenth century, however, the emerging of the female poet took place. With the introduction of Queen Elizabeth, an initial path was now cleared for future women poets to share their views on the acclaimed topic of love. Due to this clashing of ideas, the conflicting views of two exceedingly different sexes could manifest itself. Who better to discuss the topic of love then Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who expresses her ideas with intelligence comparable to the best male poets, and Emerson, world renowned for his poignant opinions? In accordance with the long history of conflict between males and females, both Emerson’s "Give All to Love" and Browning’s "Sonnet 43" convey the pleasure love brings, but while Emerson’s poem urges the retention of individualism in a relationship, Browning pleads for a complete surrender to love.
Poetry can serve as cautionary tales, a declaration of love and many other types of expression. Poems can discuss several themes from love and life to death and religion; however two poems with the same themes can have two different messages. Thomas Grey’s “Elegy Written in a Church Courtyard” and “Beowulf” author unknown, express themes such as death and the value of life; however their use of figurative language and choice of form convey two different messages. Figurative language can deepen the meaning of a message, while form can give the reader a hint about the poem’s theme.
Although death seems to be a theme for many literary poems, it also appears to be the most difficult to express clearly. Webster’s Dictionary defines the word “death” as, “A permanent cessation of all vital function: end of life.” While this definition sounds simple enough, a writer’s definition goes way beyond the literal meaning. Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost are just two examples of poetic writers who have used death successfully as the main theme of their works. Robinson, in the poem “Richard Cory,” and Frost in his poem, “Home Burial,” present death in different ways in order to invoke different feelings and emotions from their readers.
This poem speaks of a love that is truer than denoting a woman's physical perfection or her "angelic voice." As those traits are all ones that will fade with time, Shakespeare exclaims his true love by revealing her personality traits that caused his love. Shakespeare suggests that the eyes of the woman he loves are not twinkling like the sun: "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun" (1). Her hair is compared to a wire: "If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head" (3). These negative comparisons may sound almost unloving, however, Shakespeare proves that the mistress outdistances any goddess. This shows that the poet appreciates her human beauties unlike a Petrarchan sonnet that stresses a woman's cheek as red a rose or her face white as snow. Straying away from the dazzling rhetoric, this Shakespearean poem projects a humane and friendly impression and elicits laughter while expressing a truer love. A Petrarchan sonnet states that love must never change; this poem offers a more genuine expression of love by describing a natural woman.
In literature, themes shape and characterize an author’s writing making each work unique as different points of view are expressed within a writing’s words and sentences. This is the case, for example, of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee” and Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I could not stop for Death.” Both poems focus on the same theme of death, but while Poe’s poem reflects that death is an atrocious event because of the suffering and struggle that it provokes, Dickinson’s poem reflects that death is humane and that it should not be feared as it is inevitable. The two poems have both similarities and differences, and the themes and characteristics of each poem can be explained by the author’s influences and lives.
William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130”, was published in the mid-1590, and published with the rest of Shakespeare’s sonnets in 1609. The sonnet has fourteen lines, and divided into three quatrains and one couplet at the end. The rhyme scheme is cross rhyme, with the last two lines being couplets that rhyme. The sonnet compares between nature and the poets’ lover or mistress. He shows a more realistic view of his lover. Needless to say his significant other wasn’t physically attractive, yet he loved her inside beauty. Today we may use the term, “It’s not all about looks, but what’s inside”.
Sonnet 130 is Shakespeare’s harsh yet realistic tribute to his quite ordinary mistress. Conventional love poetry of his time would employ Petrarchan imagery and entertain notions of courtly love. Francis Petrarch, often noted for his perfection of the sonnet form, developed a number of techniques for describing love’s pleasures and torments as well as the beauty of the beloved. While Shakespeare adheres to this form, he undermines it as well. Through the use of deliberately subversive wordplay and exaggerated similes, ambiguous concepts, and adherence to the sonnet form, Shakespeare creates a parody of the traditional love sonnet. Although, in the end, Shakespeare embraces the overall Petrarchan theme of total and consuming love.
Shakespeare's sonnets are a romantic and charming series of poems. His use of rhyme and passionate, eloquent language serve to illuminate his strong feelings. These techniques were probably the most fluent way for such a writer as him to express the immeasurable love that he obviously felt for his mysterious lady. Examining the numerous ways Shakespeare found to describe it, the reader believes that this love was undoubtedly lasting and authentic. He often made heart-felt comments about his emotions that could also suit lovers in the present day. Because of this, and the fact that people read them yet, Shakespeare's sonnets are timeless and universal, just like the concept of love itself.
This sonnet is an anti-love poem that ironically shows how the fairness of a lady is contingent upon nature's blessings and her external manifestations. The Spenserian style brings unity to this sonnet, in that it's theme and rhyme is interwoven throughout, but the focus of her "fairness" is divided into an octave and a sestet. The first eight lines praise her physical features (hair, cheeks, smile), while the last six lines praise her internal features (words, spirit, heart). This sonnet intentionally hides the speaker's ridicule behind counterfeit love-language, using phrases like: "fair golden hairs" (line 1), and "rose in her red cheeks" (line 3), and "her eyes the fire of love does spark" (line 4). This traditional love language fills pages of literature and song, and has conventionally been used to praise the attributes of a lover; but this sonnet betrays such language by exhibiting a critique rather than commendation. This sonnet appears to praise the beauty of a lady but ironically ridicules her by declaring that her "fairness" is contingent upon nature, physical features, and displaying a gentle spirit, which hides her pride.
That means, the approaches of poet’s love remain the same. In one place, he portrays beauty as conveying a great responsibility in the sonnets addressed to the young man. The poet has experienced what he thinks of as "the marriage of true minds," also known as true love, that his love remains strong, and that he believes that it’s eternal. Nothing will stop their love, as in the symbols like all the ships, stars and stormy seas that fill the landscape of the poem and so on what can affect to their love. The poet is too much attracted with the young man’s beauty, though this indicates to something really bad behavior. But in another place, Shakespeare makes fun of the dark lady in sonnet 130. He explains that his lover, the dark lady, has wires for hair, bad breath, dull cleavage, a heavy step, pale lips and so on, but to him, real love is, the sonnet implies, begins when we accept our lovers for what they are as well as what they are not. But other critics may not agree with this and to them, beauty may define to something
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 Shakespeare’s sonnet 130, the speaker ponders the beauty, or the lack thereof, of his lover. Throughout the sonnet, the speaker presents his lover as an unattractive mistress with displeasing features, but in fact, the speaker is ridiculing, through the use of vivid imagery, the conventions of love poems and the way woman are portrayed through the use of false comparisons. In the end, the speaker argues that his mistress may not be perfect, but in his eyes, her beauty is equal to any woman who is abundantly admired and put through the untrue comparison.