Rhetorical Analysis of “Sonnet XVII” An analysis of Pablo Neruda’s “Sonnet XVII,” from the book 100 Love Sonnets: Cien sonetos de amor, reveals the emotions of the experience of eternal, unconditional love. Neruda portrays this in his words by using imagery and metaphors to describe love in relation to beauty and darkness. The poem also depicts the intimacy between two people. I believe the intent of the poem is to show that true love for another abolishes all logic, leaving one completely exposed, captivated, and ultimately isolated.
Neruda begins his sonnet in a most unusual manner. He states in the first few lines ways in which he does not love his companion. He does not love her as if she were “the salt-rose, topaz, or arrow of
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Perhaps another reason why he loves in secret is a result of unrequited love. In this case, the poem would be describing his unproclaiming secret. A secret so overpowering that his desires are pouring out of his very soul in each line of the poem. Again, the narrator speaks with only strong emotions. There is no logic with his words. He never explains why he loves, only how he feels.
In the second stanza, the poem compares his love to a plant that does not bloom. The flowers are hidden deep within the plant. The text is expressing that while most would not appreciate a flower that does not bloom, the love described here goes far beyond that of anyone else’s. Inner beauty is admired. The narrator is not ashamed of his love. Yet, he feels as though he cannot compare her to anything of this world. He is entirely consumed by the spirit within her.
The poem discusses this concept by going into some detail about the dense fragrance from the earth that lives darkly in his body. I believe the sonnet is expressing that this love is not visible to the world. In actuality, it is a feeling that lives in the depths of his soul. The poem states it is “hidden within itself the light of those flowers.” At this point in the text, the writer lingers and there is potential for an outward expression of love. However, it remains hidden. I believe these few lines are voicing his love leaves him isolated from the world, and no one can possibly comprehend its power.
In like manner, the last verse in Neruda’s sonnet, “My love: I love you for clarity, your dark” could be interpreted to mean that the speaker loves his beloved to continue being a mystery for him in so that he could find more beautiful qualities about her by focusing on her unattractive qualities first. Similarly, Shakespeare’s last couplet, “And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare as any she belied with false compare” display’s the speaker’s love for what is real rather than how his beloved ought to be. In brief, the imagery plays a huge part within both sonnets because it can give readers insight as to how the speakers think.
She continues to list her idealized love in Sonnets 43 and 14, stating that love should be pure as men “turn from praise”, a love which people endure because it is right and correct. She again through imagery demands the purity of genuine love that can grow through time and endure “on, through loves eternity”. This clearly explores the idea of aspirations, hope and idealism within the sonnet sequence.
The poem’s structure as a sonnet allows the speaker’s feelings of distrust and heartache to gradually manifest themselves as the poem’s plot progresses. Each quatrain develops and intensifies the speaker’s misery, giving the reader a deeper insight into his convoluted emotions. In the first quatrain, the speaker advises his former partner to not be surprised when she “see[s] him holding [his] louring head so low” (2). His refusal to look at her not only highlights his unhappiness but also establishes the gloomy tone of the poem. The speaker then uses the second and third quatrains to justify his remoteness; he explains how he feels betrayed by her and reveals how his distrust has led him
To emphasize the significance of love to a human being’s survival, the poem begins with the many aspects that love isn’t capable of. By stating the ways love is useless in providing as a necessity of life, the speaker is able to persuade the reader(s) that it serves no real purpose. Displaying the a b a parts of a Shakespearean sonnet rhyme scheme, love “is not meat or drink nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; nor yet a floating spar to men that sink,” (Millay 1-3) it holds no practical value. It can’t provide you with food and shelter you from nature or even help you to survive. In other words, these stanzas connected the image of love to an idea of uselessness in surviving.
The chosen figurative language created a connection to the depth of her love. Metaphors, hyperboles, and imagery were used to help the reader understand how deep her love is. In the sonnet Elizabeth makes connections to faith and how love goes deeper. The symbolism that is shown is the stages in life. She makes references to childhood, adult hood and death
It is also reminiscent of a sonnet, often a love poem. The love in this poem is of a father who is trying to protect his son but who realises the futility of this. Every other line rhymes in this poem which has the effect of making the poem seem more intense as the rhyme is not overly obvious. It is also written in the first person which makes it seem so much more personal, “my son,” “I saw” and shows Scannal wanting to make the reader sympathies for the child. He reminds us in the last two lines our lives are exposed to physical and negative pain.
He noticed that God created peace in nature just as He feels is necessary all the while disregarding His people in anguish. This sonnet observes love, not the usual type of romance, but one-sided
Describes the characteristics of Love (Sonnet 6) brings a tender effeminacy to the customarily aggressive male gaze (Line 1) and grants the speaker the ability to define and reasonably contemplate the unreasonable and contradictory, particularly in the lines “To chide in fondness, and in folly praise?” (8) and “To dream of bliss, and wake new pangs to prove” (10). The speaker employs “passionate Reason” (Reynolds 38), subverting the practice of criticising feminine passion and sensibility through reason itself (Kelly 7), yet also points towards the conflict that occurs in
Many of the female Romantic poets, especially women like Robinson and Smith, utilised a style of sensibility writing that was honest and natural to combat patriarchal notions that female sensibility was “false” or over-emotional (Knowles 210). Indeed, we see in Sonnet XXV the presence of ‘natural sensibility’ in writing. The sonnet evokes images of nature and death in juxtaposition to highlight Sappho’s heightened passion. Sappho describes how “no spring appears, no summers bloom/No Sun-beams glitter” (XXV:10-11) to represent her sorrow. These natural allusions are also seen in an earlier line, where Sappho mentions “love’s raging fire” (XXV: 6). The language of sensibility is connected to nature, just like the presentation of Phaon in Sonnet XXI, outlining how sensibility is the language of poetics, not just female hysterics, as patriarchal ideas would suggest. Though on the surface, the language of sensibility is a poetic technique, Sappho’s use of this language in her narrative voice has a political message (Gamai 101). Language establishes not just individual identity, but a political identity in the sonnets. Particularly prevalent is the death imagery of this sonnet, emphasised in the line: “The mind’s dark winter of eternal gloom/Shews ‘midst the waste of a solitary urn” (XXV:
The poem entitled “i carry your heart with me” by E.E. Cummings is a truly exceptional poem published in 1952. Through analysis of this poem, it can be deemed that its meaning can be shown through the use of language and poetic devices employed that this poem is substantially romantic. It is a romantic Shakespearean sonnet (a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g) which does not follow any traditional poetry guidelines, making the poem a lot more unique than it already is. The tenderness and attraction tone that consists throughout the poem co-relates to the romantic theme which assists one to better understand this unique complex poem and the poetic devices within it. This poem consists of many poetic devices such as metaphor, repetition, imagery and personification.
How has love been presented by the poets in the poems: My Last Duchess, Porphyria’s Lover, Sonnet 116 and 18, A mother in a Refugee Camp and Mother any Distance? the true capacity of his obsession. The curtain in itself shows the Dukes craving for control as he wishes to restrict who is able to view the painting, instead of leaving it for all to admire. He didn’t want the Duchess, likewise the painting, to receive praise from different men because he didn't want the kind words of others to distract the Duchess from, what he viewed as, her main purpose of belonging to him and him only.
The definition of love is truly unknown. The many emotions and forms associated with love make it a complicated thing to define. Many describe it as fleeting and all consuming, but the darker face of love lies just below the surface of simplicity. This seemingly innocent word brings out feelings of obsession, questioning of one’s self-worth, and jealousy. Can the light exist without the dark? In Pablo Neruda’s “Sonnet XVI”, his expressive language highlights the vital reliance of these two opposing forces in saying that it keeps the physical and emotional space between two people just wide enough to prevent the two forces from ever touching. On the same token, Ernest Hemingway’s, The Sun Also Rises, highlights the destructive consequences of trying to close this gap. The opposing contrasts coupled with the inability to close the widening gap between two individuals call attention to the dilemma spread out over time of the cyclical nature of why two people can never fully know and understand each other.
In lines 2-4 Browning uses a spatial metaphor to describe that her love exists in every part of her soul, using her soul as a spiritual three-dimensional object that contains all of the love she has for him. Browning uses similes to describe her love in line 7 to compares her love to the free moral choice men possess, suggesting that her love for him is a positive choice she chose. She continues in line 8 comparing her love to modesty and refusing to accept admiration, implying that she loves without any recognition. Her passion does not reply on recompense, she will love him regardless of the situation. Lines 9-10 metaphorically describe how she will take all of her childhood nostalgia and anguish and turn it into love.
The Fusion of Content and Form in Sonnet 29 One of the most popular of the fixed poetic forms in English literature is the sonnet. Attributed to the Italian poet Petrarch in the fourteenth century, the sonnet is still used by many contemporary writers. The appeal of the sonnet lies in its two-part structure, which easily lends itself to the dynamics of much human emotional experience and to the intellectual mode of human sensibility for argument based on complication and resolution. In the last decade of the sixteenth century, sonnet writing became highly fashionable following the publication of Sir Philip Sydney’s sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella, published in 1591.
We often fall in love with people and think long and hard about what it is that we really love about them. Is it their smile? Personality? Laugh, maybe? The eyes? We can all agree that we all have the same problem. That we can’t exactly explain “why” we love the person. Well in this case, sonnet XVII, Pablo Neruda loves his beloved from the inside, not the outside features. Pablo Neruda was born in Chile and his sonnets are originally written in Spanish. He published the 100 Love Sonnets in 1959. He had an affair with his second wife with Matilde Urrutia. Later, they got married in 1966, but they have been together since 1946. Apparently, Urrutia is the inspiration for 100 love Sonnets. So let’s assume that the sonnets are about