Unit 4 Journal C.S. Lewis, “Sonnet 1” (from Five Sonnets), pages 476-477 Shadow and Light This sonnet brings to mind the feelings one has when faced with fear or loss. Lewis puts it beautifully that we all grieve in different manners, but that our pain is the same. I feel that he makes a call for people to be more understanding of others. That just because someone does not show the same emotion as you, does not mean they do not feel. It means they feel in a different manner. Lewis also says, “we do not shout and shake our fists at God”(p 476), to me this shows a deeper understanding of life. We all can find someone or something to blame for problems or injustices in life, but until we learn to put the blame where it lies we are doomed to feelings of pain and loss. Samuel Johnson, excerpt from Prayers and Meditations, pages 25–27 Shadow and Light This selection is a bittersweet plea from Johnson to God. His wife, 20 years his senior, has passed and he is obviously stricken with grief. Johnson states, “Oh Lord, release me from my sorrow, fill me with just jopes, true faith, and holy consolations, and enable me to do my duty in that state of life to which Thou hast been pleased to call me, without disturbance from fruitless grief, or tumultuous imaginations;”. This speaks to his sorrow over the loss of his wife and his determination to continue on as is God’s plan for him. Johnson clearly was very much in love with his wife and even later states that he wishes to
In "Sonnet 73", the speaker uses a series of metaphors to characterize what he perceives to be the nature of his old age. This poem is not simply a procession of interchangeable metaphors; it is the story of the speaker slowly coming to grips with the finality of his age and his impermanence in time.
Throughout his writings Lewis makes examples of the everyday world in order to translate his feelings and experiences of his grief. He compares losing someone to losing a limb; at first there is continuous pain then eventually it will heal, however there will be recurrent pains in the stump for the rest of your life. He continues saying that everything that you do
Sonnet 73 by William Shakespeare is widely read and studied. But what is Shakespeare trying to say? Though it seems there will not be a simple answer, for a better understanding of Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, this essay offers an explication of the sonnet from The Norton Anthology of English Literature:
The author’s diction in the sonnet creates a strong and firm point that is being shown, as well as understood. Words such as “nobly”, “precious”, “constrained”, etc. all give a
the first of the two lines he uses the word ‘mark’ which means buoy to
In this particular sonnet there is a man who is weeping and praying, wishing he was with friends and they say that thinking of your love brings such happiness, but would not change his position in life with kings. In this poem he states “I all alone be weep my outcast state”, “look upon myself and curse my fate” and also “trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries.” In conclusion this sonnet shows that the man knows that there is things stopping him from making him show or commit to his love, all in all his heart wants the love but his mind is fighting with his heart.
The lesson to be learned in this specific sonnet is the idea of the immortality of literature. The entire poem is masked by the idea of praise for the addressee. The language of the poem, the destructiveness, suggests the survivability of the poem itself. Shakespeare is using
has the gentle heart of a woman but is not inconsistent as is the way
In "Holy Sonnet XIV," John Donne directly addresses God using a desperate and forceful tone. The formal structure of Donne 's holy sonnet follows the basic Petrarchan sonnet form. The sonnet has fourteen lines divided into an octave and a sestet. The rhyme scheme of the octave is abba abba. The sestet has the rhyme scheme cdcdee. Donne expresses his spiritual turmoil and longing by using this structure to present different metaphors that illustrate his condition, and he uses Petrarchan conventions to further highlight his spiritual desires.
Is the poet saying that the young man now understands that he will lose his own youth and passion, after listening to the lamentations in the three preceding quatrains? Or is the poet saying that the young man now is aware of the poet's imminent demise, and this knowledge makes the young man's love for the poet stronger because he might soon loose him? What must the young man give up before long -- his youth or his friend? The answer could lie in the interpretation of both the young man's and the poet's character in other sonnets.
Donne even goes so far as to command God to destroy the person he has
Socrates once said: “[...]For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?” (“Socrates”) Sonnet X by John Donne discusses the idea that people fear death without just cause, simply because humans are terrified of that which they cannot comprehend. In his poem, Donne communicates this messages by means of conceit, personification, and witty wordplay.
The sonnet, being one of the most traditional and recognized forms of poetry, has been used and altered in many time periods by writers to convey different messages to the audience. The strict constraints of the form have often been used to parallel the subject in the poem. Many times, the first three quatrains introduce the subject and build on one another, showing progression in the poem. The final couplet brings closure to the poem by bringing the main ideas together. On other occasions, the couplet makes a statement of irony or refutes the main idea with a counter statement. It leaves the reader with a last impression of what the author is trying to say.
Sonnet 6 is notable for the ingenious multiplying of conceits and especially for the concluding pun on a legal will in the final couplet: "Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair / To be death's conquest and make worms thine heir." Here, as earlier in the sonnet, the poet juxtaposes the themes of narcissism and death, as well as procreation. "Self-willed" echoes line 4's "self-killed," and the worms that destroy the young man's dead body will be his only heirs should he die without begetting a child which shows the theme of death. The whole sonnet is about trying to persuade the man to have a baby hence the theme if procreation. And lastly, the man is being selfish in wanting to die without passing on his beauty.
During the Renaissance period, most poets were writing love poems about their lovers/mistresses. The poets of this time often compared love to high, unrealistic, and unattainable beauty. Shakespeare, in his sonnet 18, continues the tradition of his time by comparing the speakers' love/mistress to the summer time of the year. It is during this time of the year that the flowers and the nature that surround them are at there peak for beauty. The theme of the poem is to show the speakers true interpretation of beauty. Beauties worst enemy is time and although beauty might fade it can still live on through a person's memory or words of a poem. The speaker realizes that beauty, like the subject of the poem, will remain perfect not in the