But You Didn't by Merrill Glass and My Mistress by William Shakespeare

But You Didn't by Merrill Glass and My Mistress by William Shakespeare

Both poets are writing about their lovers but wrote them for different

reasons. Shakespeare wrote the poem for other poets of his time, to

make fun of the comparisons they used in their poems, which he thought

was "false compare" which "belied" the ladies being described.

Merrill Glass wrote her poem to help her to get over the death of her

lover. She writes as if she is talking to him but at the end she says

"And there are so many things

I wanted to tell you when you

Returned from Vietnam…

But you didn't,"

The words in each poem show that they were written in different

centuries. Shakespeare uses "hath" which is how have would have been

written in the seventeenth century while Glass refers to "Vietnam,"

meaning the Vietnam war, which means that the poem must have been

written in the last thirty years.

Both poets use conversational words. For example Glass uses the word

"You" as if she was talking to her boyfriend directly. "Remember the

time you lent me your car and I dented it?"

In the final couplet Shakespeare says " And yet, by heaven," as if he

was talking to the other poets.

The poets use different structures because they were written for

different reasons. Merrill Glass is writing as she is thinking because

she uses enjambment where one line runs into another, as if she is

trying to work things out by writing the poem. The verses are quite

unstructured. The first verse has four lines; the second has five, the

third six and the fourth seven lines. She used this structure because

as I said before she is writing as she is thinkin...

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... the poem "But You Didn't", I felt the girl was

always doing things to the boy, and that he never retaliated. I guess

it was because he loved her and I suspected that the girl did not

realise this until it was too late. Although I feel the boy should

have shown his true feelings towards the girl and told her that he did

indeed love her. I never expected the poem to end in the way it did;

it shocked me because it was abrupt and final. This ending saddened me

and it took me a minute to two to realise that he had died.

If I had to pick a favourite poem, I would choose " But You Didn't",

by Merrill Glass as she made one have feeling for her work by talking

through her emotions in this way. She certainly got a reaction from

me, because she expressed emotion and feeling and it takes a lot of

guts and confidence to do this.