They flee from me Sir Thomas Wyatt
This poem reverses the conventional male-female roles in sexual liaisons. There is a genuine dichotomy in the description of the women. While the women are initially described as being 'gentle' and meek' they also 'put themselves in danger' - and are therefore in fact more daring than pusillanimous. The 'they' of the title of the poem also refers to these women, who the narrator fails to offer a definitive identity. They do not carry female characteristics yet the close reading of 'naked foot' seems to suggest that the 'they' are human. It is only as the poem progresses that the dynamics in the relationship between the collective 'they' and the persona is broken down. The second stanza charts a palpable change in the narrator's perspective of his visitors. They 'they become a 'her' and for the first time in the poem it is intimated or confirmed that these 'tame' beings are women. The first use of her alongside her 'loose gown' carries sexual overtones, and appears to imply that the persona has lost power to the attraction of female beauty. However the female figure is still not named - not because she doesn't warrant a name but perhaps because she is of a supernatural and ephemeral 'guise'. The duality in the significance of this word portends that the man will never be capable of finding love with 'her and that she is not all that she seems
First Septain: “They flee from me that sometime did me seek”
The speaker observes that the women who used to be eager for the speaker's attention now ignore him; they seem to be eager now to avoid him as they “flee from [him.]” The speaker implies that these women would slip into his bedroom, likely hoping to engage him sexually. The speaker describes the women as “gentle, tame, and meek” in their behavior back when they also seemed to be “stalking” him. But now those same woman dart from him and are “now wild and do not remember,” that they would go out of their way to be near him. They would defy “danger” for just a crumb of his attention. Now they “range” or run wildly about searching for attention in other places, probably from other men. The speaker is working to cover his resentment by noting the changes in these women's behavior, and he, thus, paints them as somewhat psychologically unbalanced in their vacillation of feeling for the speaker. He never offers any reason—nor does he even speculate about it—that the women who so ardently sought him now fervently disregard him.
Second Septain: “Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise”
The speaker, then in rather humble but telling reference, asserts that luckily he did have the opportunity to experience the result of the earlier behavior of being sought after, and on at least twenty occasions successfully bedded the particular huntress. He especially remembers one time when the scantily clad seductress with “her loose gown” falling “from her shoulders” grabbed him and kissed him and “softly said, `Dear heart, how like you this?'” He remembers this instance with great passion and thanks “fortune” for allowing him at least this much.
Third Septain: “It was no dream: I lay broad waking”
The speaker then oddly professes that the seduction scene he has just dramatized was not a dream; it happened when he was wide awake. But then everything changed, and he blames his own “gentleness” for the “strange fashion of forsaking.” He is forsaken, it seems, because of the woman's “goodness.”
The woman has the audacity to take the initiative in the seduction but then just abandon him; he allows that such behavior is “newfangleness,” which would likely herald the expression, “woman these days.” But the speaker, allowing that he was “so kindly . . . served,” wonders what the woman “hath deserved.” He wonders if she remembers the incident with as much pleasure as he does.
Sonnet I Sir Philip Sydney
It must be remembered that with Loving in Truth the Astrophil and Stella theme-sequence opens. Significantly the opening sonnet presents the dual theme of how to write good poetry and how to win the favour of a beloved. The poet even implies the question whether it is possible to a good poem aiming at winning the beloved. At the very beginning of the sonnet Sidney makes it clear that he writes the sonnet in order to win Stella. Here he employs the simplest means—which any lover does, namely, the pain-pleasure-knowledge-pity-love method:
“… she might take some pleasure of my pain;
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain”.
The word `pain' has, however, a double meaning here; in one sense it refer to the pains of love and in another sense it refers to the hardships of creative writing. This implies that poetry is not just inspirational or impulsive, but a long struggle with words, emotions and feelings. Theoretically Sidney was influenced by both Aristotle and Horace. He believed that good poetry must both teach and delight. That is why he thinks that reading well-written love-poems give his beloved pleasure and knowledge of his sincerity and anguish. This would, in turn, make her pity him and pity would give rise to love.
The poet confesses that once decided upon the means he went on to paint “the blackest face of woe/ Studying inventions fine…” Here we come to an outstanding feature of the imagery of Astrophil an Stella—the device of personification, which was, in fact, a medieval practice and influenced the poets till the 17th century. Here the poet also refers to the contemporary practice of imitating the words of other poets. But he comes to the realization that imitation without inspiration is futile. That is why he waits for “some fresh showers upon my sun-burn'd brain”. The image is an instance of Sidney's innovative imagination. By `sun' he refers to Stella or the source of his love, which has dried up his creative faculty. The poet understands that this forces him to halt. When Sidney says, “Invention, Nature's child”, he follows Aristotle's idea that art is an imitation of nature. In accordance with that equation, literary imitation, the product of `study' has a secondary place in creative writing. Thus, literary imitation, “others' feet” cannot provide the solution to the creation of original poetry. Here Sidney's comparison of creative writing to giving birth to a child is highly significant and it contains metaphor within metaphor.
At last a miracle seems to happen with him:
“Fool' said my Muse, “look in thy heart and write”.
He comes to a sudden realization that only spontaneous inspiration can help the poet compose good poetry and win the beloved. When he will look into his heart, he will see the image of Stella, which will provide him with the inspiration and material he needs to write poetry. Thus, the last line of the sonnet turns out to be a direct statement of Sidney's critical creed that great poetry does not result from imitation of other poets, but from the expression of personal experience and passion. Such views on poetic creation are similar to those of the Romantic poets.
Sonnet 31 Sir Philip Sydney
The questions in the poem show the lover's confusion. He is not expecting answers but he is expecting participation from the audience. The reader -if a rejected lover as the poet's state- could feel that the poet is addressing him.
The whole poem is a personification that reflects the confusion of a rejected lover, he is asking the moon if she is a rejected lover like him.
Sonnet 75 Edmund Spenser
The poem is a typical example of the poetic credo/belief found commonly in the poets of the Elizabethan age, suggests how powerful art, in particular poetry/ literature ( because Spenser is a poet) is. While, the sea erases all foot and other prints on the' sands of time', its only poetry that can confer immortality. His ladylove's extraordinary beauty and his love for her lives on forever defying cruel time-the wrecker of all that is beautiful and lovely. Shakespeare's sonnet 'Shall I Compare Thee..' also, more or less ends on the same note and this(the poem)gives life to thee...'
In Sonnet 75, Spenser writes in metrically regular lines which make great use of alliteration: "waves and washed", "wrote it with", "paynes his pray", "dy in dust", "verse your vertues", "Where whenas", "love shall live" and "later life". The metrical regularity and the music of alliteration provide a smooth background against which the poet carefully works out his argument, opposing the vanity of writing on a beach to the "vertues rare" and "glorious name" which can be written "in the heavens". Thus Sonnet 75 sets up a carefully argued opposition between earthly things and heavenly things.
Sonnet 18 William Shakespeare
The majority of the sonnets (1-126) are addressed to a young man, with whom the poet has an intense romantic relationship. The poet spends the first seventeen sonnets trying to convince the young man to marry and have children; beautiful children that will look just like their father, ensuring his immortality. The remaining sonnets to the young man dissect both the beautiful and ugly moments of their passionate affair, with language of sensual feasting, uncontrollable urges, and sinful consumption. The final sonnets (127-154) are addressed to a promiscuous and scheming woman known to modern readers as the dark lady. Both the poet and his young man have become obsessed with the raven-haired temptress in these sonnets, and the poet's whole being is at odds with his insatiable "sickly appetite"
The first 17 sonnets are written to a young man, urging him to marry and have children. thereby passing down his beauty to the next generation. These are called the procreation sonnets. Most of them, however, 18-126, are addressed to a young man expressing the poet's love for him. Sonnets 127-152 are written to the poet's mistress expressing his strong love for her. The final two sonnets, 153-154, are allegorical. The final thirty or so sonnets are written about a number of issues, such as the young man's infidelity with the poet's mistress, self-resolution to control his own lust, beleaguered criticism of the world
Sonnet 18 is the best known and most well loved of all 154 sonnets. It is also one of the most straightforward in language and intent. The stability of love and its power to immortalize the poetry and the subject of that poetry is the theme. The poet starts the praise of his dear friend without ostentation, but he slowly builds the image of his friend into that of a perfect being. His friend is first compared to summer in the octave, but, at the start of the third quatrain (9), he is summer, and thus, he has metamorphosed into the standard by which true beauty can and should be judged. The poet's only answer to such profound joy and beauty is to ensure that his friend be forever in human memory, saved from the oblivion that accompanies death. He achieves this through his verse, believing that, as history writes itself, his friend will become one with time. The final couplet reaffirms the poet's hope that as long as there is breath in mankind, his poetry too will live on, and ensure the immortality of his muse.
Sonnet 130 William Shakespeare
Sonnet 130 is the poet's pragmatic tribute to his uncomely mistress, commonly referred to as the dark lady because of her dun complexion. The dark lady, who ultimately betrays the poet, appears in sonnets 127 to 154. Sonnet 130 is clearly a parody of the conventional love sonnet, made popular by Petrarch and, in particular, made popular in England by Sidney's use of the Petrarchan form in his epic poem Astrophel and Stella. If you compare the stanzas of Astrophel and Stella to Sonnet 130, you will see exactly what elements of the conventional love sonnet Shakespeare is light-heartedly mocking. In Sonnet 130, there is no use of grandiose metaphor or allusion; he does not compare his love to Venus, there is no evocation to Morpheus, etc. The ordinary beauty and humanity of his lover are important to Shakespeare in this sonnet, and he deliberately uses typical love poetry metaphors against themselves. In Sidney's work, for example, the features of the poet's lover are as beautiful and, at times, more beautiful than the finest pearls, diamonds, rubies, and silk. In Sonnet 130, the references to such objects of perfection are indeed present, but they are there to illustrate that his lover is not as beautiful -- a total rejection of Petrarch form and content. Shakespeare utilizes a new structure, through which the straightforward theme of his lover's simplicity can be developed in the three quatrains and neatly concluded in the final couplet. Thus, Shakespeare is using all the techniques available, including the sonnet structure itself, to enhance his parody of the traditional Petrarchan sonnet typified by Sidney's work. But Shakespeare ends the sonnet by proclaiming his love for his mistress despite her lack of adornment, so he does finally embrace the fundamental theme in Petrarch's sonnets: total and consuming love.
The Flea John Donne
Summary
The speaker tells his beloved to look at the flea before them and to note “how little” is that thing that she denies him. For the flea, he says, has sucked first his blood, then her blood, so that now, inside the flea, they are mingled; and that mingling cannot be called “sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead.” The flea has joined them together in a way that, “alas, is more than we would do.”
As his beloved moves to kill the flea, the speaker stays her hand, asking her to spare the three lives in the flea: his life, her life, and the flea's own life. In the flea, he says, where their blood is mingled, they are almost married—no, more than married—and the flea is their marriage bed and marriage temple mixed into one. Though their parents grudge their romance and though she will not make love to him, they are nevertheless united and cloistered in the living walls of the flea. She is apt to kill him, he says, but he asks that she not kill herself by killing the flea that contains her blood; he says that to kill the flea would be sacrilege, “three sins in killing three.”
“Cruel and sudden,” the speaker calls his lover, who has now killed the flea, “purpling” her fingernail with the “blood of innocence.” The speaker asks his lover what the flea's sin was, other than having sucked from each of them a drop of blood. He says that his lover replies that neither of them is less noble for having killed the flea. It is true, he says, and it is this very fact that proves that her fears are false: If she were to sleep with him (“yield to me”), she would lose no more honor than she lost when she killed the flea.
Form
This poem alternates metrically between lines in iambic tetrameter and lines in iambic pentameter, a 4-5 stress pattern ending with two pentameter lines at the end of each stanza. Thus, the stress pattern in each of the nine-line stanzas is 454545455. The rhyme scheme in each stanza is similarly regular, in couplets, with the final line rhyming with the final couplet: AABBCCDDD.
Commentary
This funny little poem again exhibits Donne's metaphysical love-poem mode, his aptitude for turning even the least likely images into elaborate symbols of love and romance. This poem uses the image of a flea that has just bitten the speaker and his beloved to sketch an amusing conflict over whether the two will engage in premarital sex. The speaker wants to, the beloved does not, and so the speaker, highly clever but grasping at straws, uses the flea, in whose body his blood mingles with his beloved's, to show how innocuous such mingling can be—he reasons that if mingling in the flea is so innocuous, sexual mingling would be equally innocuous, for they are really the same thing. By the second stanza, the speaker is trying to save the flea's life, holding it up as “our marriage bed and marriage temple.”
But when the beloved kills the flea despite the speaker's protestations (and probably as a deliberate move to squash his argument, as well), he turns his argument on its head and claims that despite the high-minded and sacred ideals he has just been invoking, killing the flea did not really impugn his beloved's honor—and despite the high-minded and sacred ideals she has invoked in refusing to sleep with him, doing so would not impugn her honor either.
This poem is the cleverest of a long line of sixteenth-century love poems using the flea as an erotic image, a genre derived from an older poem of Ovid. Donne's poise of hinting at the erotic without ever explicitly referring to sex, while at the same time leaving no doubt as to exactly what he means, is as much a source of the poem's humor as the silly image of the flea is; the idea that being bitten by a flea would represent “sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead” gets the point across with a neat conciseness and clarity that Donne's later religious lyrics never attained.
A Valediction: forbidding Mourning John Donne
Summary
The speaker explains that he is forced to spend time apart from his lover, but before he leaves, he tells her that their farewell should not be the occasion for mourning and sorrow. In the same way that virtuous men die mildly and without complaint, he says, so they should leave without “tear-floods” and “sigh-tempests,” for to publicly announce their feelings in such a way would profane their love. The speaker says that when the earth moves, it brings “harms and fears,” but when the spheres experience “trepidation,” though the impact is greater, it is also innocent. The love of “dull sublunary lovers” cannot survive separation, but it removes that which constitutes the love itself; but the love he shares with his beloved is so refined and “Inter-assured of the mind” that they need not worry about missing “eyes, lips, and hands.”
Though he must go, their souls are still one, and, therefore, they are not enduring a breach, they are experiencing an “expansion”; in the same way that gold can be stretched by beating it “to aery thinness,” the soul they share will simply stretch to take in all the space between them. If their souls are separate, he says, they are like the feet of a compass: His lover's soul is the fixed foot in the center, and his is the foot that moves around it. The firmness of the center foot makes the circle that the outer foot draws perfect: “Thy firmness makes my circle just, / And makes me end, where I begun.”
Form
The nine stanzas of this Valediction are quite simple compared to many of Donne's poems, which utilize strange metrical patterns overlaid jarringly on regular rhyme schemes. Here, each four-line stanza is quite unadorned, with an ABAB rhyme scheme and an iambic tetrameter meter.
Commentary
“A Valediction: forbidding Mourning” is one of Donne's most famous and simplest poems and also probably his most direct statement of his ideal of spiritual love. For all his erotic carnality in poems, such as “The Flea,” Donne professed a devotion to a kind of spiritual love that transcended the merely physical. Here, anticipating a physical separation from his beloved, he invokes the nature of that spiritual love to ward off the “tear-floods” and “sigh-tempests” that might otherwise attend on their farewell. The poem is essentially a sequence of metaphors and comparisons, each describing a way of looking at their separation that will help them to avoid the mourning forbidden by the poem's title.
First, the speaker says that their farewell should be as mild as the uncomplaining deaths of virtuous men, for to weep would be “profanation of our joys.” Next, the speaker compares harmful “Moving of th' earth” to innocent “trepidation of the spheres,” equating the first with “dull sublunary lovers' love” and the second with their love, “Inter-assured of the mind.” Like the rumbling earth, the dull sublunary (sublunary meaning literally beneath the moon and also subject to the moon) lovers are all physical, unable to experience separation without losing the sensation that comprises and sustains their love. But the spiritual lovers “Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss,” because, like the trepidation (vibration) of the spheres (the concentric globes that surrounded the earth in ancient astronomy), their love is not wholly physical. Also, like the trepidation of the spheres, their movement will not have the harmful consequences of an earthquake.
The speaker then declares that, since the lovers' two souls are one, his departure will simply expand the area of their unified soul, rather than cause a rift between them. If, however, their souls are “two” instead of “one”, they are as the feet of a drafter's compass, connected, with the center foot fixing the orbit of the outer foot and helping it to describe a perfect circle. The compass (the instrument used for drawing circles) is one of Donne's most famous metaphors, and it is the perfect image to encapsulate the values of Donne's spiritual love, which is balanced, symmetrical, intellectual, serious, and beautiful in its polished simplicity.
Like many of Donne's love poems (including “The Sun Rising” and “The Canonization”), “A Valediction: forbidding Mourning” creates a dichotomy between the common love of the everyday world and the uncommon love of the speaker. Here, the speaker claims that to tell “the laity,” or the common people, of his love would be to profane its sacred nature, and he is clearly contemptuous of the dull sublunary love of other lovers. The effect of this dichotomy is to create a kind of emotional aristocracy that is similar in form to the political aristocracy with which Donne has had painfully bad luck throughout his life and which he commented upon in poems, such as “The Canonization”: This emotional aristocracy is similar in form to the political one but utterly opposed to it in spirit. Few in number are the emotional aristocrats who have access to the spiritual love of the spheres and the compass; throughout all of Donne's writing, the membership of this elite never includes more than the speaker and his lover—or at the most, the speaker, his lover, and the reader of the poem, who is called upon to sympathize with Donne's romantic plight.
Holly Sonnet X John Donne
Summary
The speaker tells Death that it should not feel proud, for though some have called it “mighty and dreadful,” it is not. Those whom Death thinks it kills do not truly die, nor, the speaker says, “can'st thou kill me.” Rest and sleep are like little copies of Death, and they are pleasurable; thus, the speaker reasons, Death itself must be even more so—indeed, it is the best men who go soonest to Death, to rest their bones and enjoy the delivery of their souls. Death, the speaker claims, is a slave to “fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,” and is forced to dwell with war, poison, and sickness. The speaker says that poppies and magic charms can make men sleep as well as, or better than, Death's stroke, so why should Death swell with pride? Death is merely a short sleep, after which the dead awake into eternal life, where Death shall no longer exist: Death itself will die.
Form
This simple sonnet follows an ABBAABBACDCDEE rhyme scheme and is written in a loose iambic pentameter. In its structural division of its subject, it is a Petrarchan sonnet rather than a Shakespearean one, with an octet establishing the poem's tension, and the subsequent sestet resolving it.
Commentary
This rather uncomplicated poem is probably Donne's most famous and most anthologized; “Death be not proud” seems to be, for some reason, the most famous phrase in Donne. The sonnet takes the oblique reasoning and topsy-turvy symbolism of Donne's metaphysical love poems and applies them to a religious theme, treating the personified figure of Death as someone not worthy of awe or terror but of contempt. Donne charts a line of reasoning that explores a different idea in each quatrain. First, Death is not powerful or mighty because he does not kill those he thinks he kills; second, the experience of being dead must be more pleasurable than rest and sleep, which are pleasurable, pale copies of death, and the best people die most readily to hurry to their “soul's delivery” (“delivery,” a childbearing pun, introduces the idea that the death of the body is a birth for the soul).
In the third quatrain, the speaker mocks Death's position: It is inferior to drugs and potions, a slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men (each of which deals out death), and lives in the gutter with poison and sickness. In the couplet, the speaker rounds out the idea of the poem, by saying that, if the afterlife is eternal, then upon the moment a person dies, it is really Death that dies to that person and not vice-versa, for that person will never again be subject to Death. This final idea represents the classic metaphysical moment, in which an established idea is turned completely on its head by a seemingly innocuous line of reasoning—the idea that Death could die is startling and counterintuitive but completely sensible in light of Donne's reasoning. Of course, even in the seventeenth century the idea would not have seemed as startling as many of Donne's other metaphysical conceits—it is an idea that appears not only in Shakespeare (“And death once dead, there's no more dying then”) but also in the Bible itself (“The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death,” from I Corinthians).
Elegy XX To His Mistress Going to Bed John Donne
The speaker of “Elegy 19. To His Mistress Going to Bed” calls his beloved's body “my America! My new-found land” (27), thereby linking the conquest of exploration to the conquest of seduction. To convince his beloved to make love, he compares the sexual act to a voyage of discovery. The comparison also serves as the speaker's attempt to convince his beloved of both the naturalness and the inevitability of sex. Like the Americas, the speaker explains, she too will eventually be discovered and conquered. he speaker compares his beloved to an angel in “Elegy 19. To His Mistress Going to Bed.” Here, the beloved, as well as his love for her, brings the speaker closer to God because with her, he attains paradise on earth. For instance, in the bawdy “Elegy 19. To His Mistress Going to Bed” (1669), the speaker claims that his love for a naked woman surpasses pictorial representations of biblical scenes.
The Collar George Herbert
Herbert is one of the first poets to use the titles of his poems as an integral part of their meaning. The title "The Collar," of course, is an emblematic image that informs our understanding of the whole poem. If the poem were untitled and one were asked to assign a title to it, I doubt if anyone would come up with "The Collar," since never does the word appear in the poem. Yet, as we know, the title contains a very complex pun.[2] The speaker of the poem, one who is, for most of the poem, in a state of rebellion, is obviously a priest who wears a collar that he wishes to discard. He strikes "the board" (which we later discover is, in fact, the altar, the symbol of the priesthood) and cries "No more"(1). One is reminded also of the slave's collar, which likewise is fitting because the speaker, for most of the poem, thinks of himself as a slave or servant who has served a demanding lord and who wishes to free himself from what he considers degrading and numbing servitude. Perhaps Herbert is also alluding to an animal collar since in his rebellious state the speaker gives up his rational soul and functions on the level of passion or the "animal soul": "But as I rav'd and grew more fierce and wilde/At every word" (33-34). Thirdly, in the seventeenth century "collar" was pronounced very similarly to the word "choler"; and, of course, except for the last four lines of the poem, the speaker is indeed choleric in his rebellion. Thus, the pun in the title not only plays with the various kinds of "collars" that have kept the speaker in bondage, it also announces the tone of most of the poem. But, most important, the word "collar" was pronounced very much like "caller" in seventeenth-century English; and, above all, "The Collar" is a calling poem, one in which the speaker recognizes an interior calling by God: "Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child!/And I reply'd, My Lord" (35-36).
Frustration
The Collar opens with dramatic suddenness, rather poems by John Donne. As in Affliction I, the I-voice is re-enforced by the long i-vowels of `sigh','pine','Lines','life': the poet is full of himself and his frustration. `The board' just means a table, or any flat surface, even a desktop. The frustration is centred on two things: loss of freedom; and lack of any `harvest' or outcome, in spite of all his efforts.
Tears
There was plenty in the poet's life before his `sighs' and `tears' spoiled it. Whether this refers to suffering through illness, or through tears of repentance, of a moral turning away from his previous lifestyle, is not clear. `Thy cold dispute/Of what is fit, and not' does suggest the latter, unlike Affliction I, where it is more his poor physical health that held him back.
Whatever the cause, he feels it is not irremediable. He can surely
Recover all thy sigh-blownage
On double pleasures
He does not need `thy death's-head'. People actually did have skulls in their studies in the seventeenth century to remind them of the imminence of death, and to take life seriously. His `need' now is to serve his own wishes.
The reversal
Then comes the reversal: as he gets more and more frustrated, it seems as if he hears a voice `calling, Child'. The term `child' is one Herbert uses elsewhere for an immature person of whatever age, but suggestingendearment rather than anger. It is God's loving voice and it immediately melts his anger. He turns at once to acknowledge `My Lord', a term which must mean God in the Christian context of Herbert's poetry. Suddenly, there is a new perspective on everything.
The Pulley George Herbert
In the poem, the central idea posited by Herbert is that when God made man, he poured all his blessings on him, including strength, beauty, wisdom, honor and pleasure. However, as in Pandora's box, one element remained. We are told that God "made a stay," that is, He kept "Rest in the bottome." We might, in modern parlance, call this God's ace. God is aware that if He were to bestow this "jewel" (i.e. rest) on Man as well then Man would adore God's gifts instead of God Himself. God has withheld the gift of rest from man knowing fully well that His other treasures would one day result in a spiritual restlessness and fatigue in man who, having tired of His material gifts, would necessarily turn to God in his exhaustion. God, being omniscient and prescient, knows that there is the possibility that even the wicked might not turn to Him, but He knows that eventually mortal man is prone to lethargy; his lassitude, then, would be the leverage He needed to toss man to His breast. In the context of the mechanical operation of a pulley, the kind of leverage and force applied makes the difference for the weight being lifted. Applied to man in this poem, we can say that the withholding of Rest by God is the leverage that will hoist or draw mankind towards God when other means would make that task difficult. However, in the first line of the last stanza, Herbert puns on the word "rest" suggesting that perhaps God will, after all, let man "keep the rest," but such a reading would seem to diminish the force behind the poem's conceit. The importance of rest -and, by association, sleep- is an idea that was certainly uppermost in the minds of Renaissance writers. Many of Shakespeare's plays include references to sleep or the lack of it as a punishment for sins committed. In Macbeth, for example, the central protagonist is said to "lack the season of all natures, sleep" and both Lady Macbeth and Macbeth are tormented by the lack of sleep. Even Othello is most disconcerted by the fact that he is unable to sleep peacefully once Iago has poisoned him with the possibility of his wife's infidelity with Cassio. Herbert's Pulley, then, does not present a new concept. In fact, the ideas in the poem are quite commonplace for seventeenth century religious verse. What is distinctly metaphysical about the poem is that a religious notion is conveyed through a secular, scientific image that requires the reader's acquaintance with, and understanding of, some basic laws of physics.
Pulleys and hoists are mechanical devices aimed at assisting us with moving heavy loads through a system of ropes and wheels (pulleys) to gain advantage. We should not be surprised at the use of a pulley as a central conceit since the domain of physics and imagery from that discipline would have felt quite comfortable to most of the metaphysical poets.
Bermudas Andrew Marvell
To His Coy Mistress Andrew Marvell
Is a witty metaphysical poem, To His Coy Mistress presents a familiar theme in literature carpe diem (Latin, "seize the day") In response to a young man's declarations of love for a young lady. The lady is playfully hesitant and artfully demure. But dallying will not do, he says, for youth passes swiftly. He and the lady must take advantage of the moment, he says, and “sport us while we may.” If they had “world enough, and time” they would spend their days in idle pursuits, leisurely passing time while the young man heaps praises on the young lady. But they do not have the luxury of time, he says, for “time's wingèd chariot” is ever racing along. Before they know it, their youth will be gone; there will be only the grave. And so, the poet pleads his case: Seize the day.
The Garden Andrew Marvell
* "vainly men amaze"- reminiscent of Milton's frequent references to vanity
* "the palm, the oak, or bays"- the listing is similar to what is done in epic form; each item respectively refers to war, public life, and poetry. There is a sense that men can never seem to attain high recognition in all arenas.
* "uncessant labors"- similar to how Adam and Eve toiled in the Garden
* "some single herb or tree . . . / Does prudently their toils upbraid / Society is all but rude, / To this delicious solitude."--compare to PL IV.250-251: "Hesperian fables true, / If true here only, and of delicious taste." Marvell seems to shun society in favor of nature. Marvell especially shuns the company of women, as he clearly prefers the beauty of the trees to the beauty of any woman; he remarks on the cruelty in carving a woman's name in the trunk of a tree since the woman represents such frivolity and the tree is true beauty.
* Like Milton, Marvell alludes to Daphne and Apollo and the significance of the tree in their story ("laurel grow") as well as allusions to Pan ("after Syrinx speed, not as a nymph, but for a reed") also signifying the importance of the reed that may or may not reflect music.
* Marvell's speaker appears to delight in nature as "Ripe apples drop about my head" and nature meets his every whim; he is ecstatic to be surrounded by beauty.
* "Annihilating all that's made / To a green thought in a green shade"-- He places all the efforts of his mind on the garden that god has created for him.
* "My soul . . . There like a / bird it sits, and sings / Then whets, and combs its silver wings"--This evokes the image of an angel or dove (mentioned in Psalms 68:13) as well as Milton's Wisdom who "plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings" in "sweet retired solitude" (Comus 375-80)
* "Such was that happy garden state, / While man there walked without a mate:"—Marvell's speaker seems content without a wife or help mate:
* "Two Paradises `twere in one / To live in Paradise alone."-- In other words, Adam would have been better off without Eve
* "Skilful gardener"--Is it God or Adam who actually tilled the soil?
To the Virgins to Make much of Time Robert Herrick
First published in 1648 in a volume of verse entitled Hesperides, „To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” is perhaps one of the most famous poems to extol the notion of carpe diem. Carpe diem, or `seize the day,' expresses a philosophy that recognizes the brevity of life and therefore the need to live for and in the moment. Seizing the day means eating, drinking and making merry for tomorrow we shall all die. The phrase was used by classicists such as Horace, and its spirit marks the theme of Herrick's lyric poem. Echoing Ben Jonson's poem, `Song: To Celia,' the speaker of the poem underscores the ephemeral quality of life and urges those in their youth to actively celebrate life and its pleasures; however, the speaker does not urge `the virgins' simply to frolic adulterously, but to seek union in matrimony, thereby uniting the natural cycles of life and death with the rites and ceremonies of Christian worship. Although a very common theme in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century verse, and particularly in Cavalier poetry, the association of Christianity and carpe diem is not a traditional one; it is unique to Herrick and perhaps `natural' given Herrick's thirty-two year career as vicar of Dean Prior, an appointment originally bestowed by King Charles I. Written during a period of great political unrest that culminated in Britain's Civil War, the theme and the sage advice proffered by the speaker of the poem appears appropriate in this particularly transient period. The carpe diem spirit, however, has translated to modern times and is the theme of Henry James's The Ambassadors and Robert Frost's `Carpe Diem.'