Sir Thomas Wyatt

'I Find No Peace'

The narrator expresses his despair with diametrically opposed concepts. He is unable to rest, and yet he has no fight left in him. He is optimistic yet afraid, he is ablaze yet frozen. He is soaring, yet cannot take off; he has nothing, yet he holds the whole world. Though there are no locks strong enough to imprison him, he cannot escape. The narrator feels he has no control over whether he lives or dies. He can see without his eyes, and complains without a tongue. He says he wishes to expire, and yet demands strength. By line 11 he reveals a less paradoxical contrast: that he loves another therefore must not love himself. He revels in the joy of the sadness and discomfort of this love, and although the situation is almost like a living death, the cause of his pain is his greatest pleasure.

'They Flee From Me'

Lines 1-5

The poet directly asserts that the acquaintance to whom the poem is about once actively sought his company, yet now avoids him. The acquaintance had formerly been exposed in his chamber, and presented as a mild, disciplined and docile character; but is now unpredictable and has forgotten their former intimacy. The relationship has been unsafe for the acquaintance on occasion.

Lines 6-9

The danger has been in being close to the poet, eating together. The change now sees the acquaintance looking further abroad in search of new interests. The poet is grateful that this was not the situation in the past; the relationship has been at least twenty times better.

Lines 10-14

Wearing thin clothing, after a pleasant show, ‘her’ loose dress fell from her shoulders. She took the poet in her arms and kissed him tenderly. She then asked him directly if he was happy.

Lines 15-17

He recalls that this was not a dream as he was fully awake. He next notes that everything has now changed because of his mild nature, to a cruel situation of his abandonment.

Lines 18-21

He is now released from her for decency’s sake, and she is released to allow a new encounter. However, he questions, has he has been treated badly, what is the reader’s view? What is ‘she’ now worthy of?

'Whoso List to Hunt?

The poem opens with a question to the reader, asking who enjoys the hunt, and pointing out that the poet knows a worthy hind (female deer). He then continues with a contrast to the excitement of line 1 to say that he is regrettably no longer up to the chase.

In line 3 he notes that his efforts have been in vain and he is greatly tired, and that he is now at the back of the hunting party. However, he tells us in line 4 and 5, he cannot draw his tired thoughts away from the deer; as she runs before him he follows exhausted. He gives up due to the futility of trying to hold the wind in a net.

By line 9 he confidently tells those who follow the hunt that, just as for him, the pursuit is fruitless. Picked out plainly in diamond lettering there is a collar around the neck of the hind. The collar says ‘do not touch me, as I belong to Caesar, and I am wild, though I seem tame.’

Henry Howard

Love That Doth Reign

Deals with themes -of love, death, confusion of love. It examines how love chooses you, you can’t choose it. He talks about being in love with a woman who does not return his feelings. Shows that LOVE and PAIN go together, it is 'sweet' to die for love.

Howard uses the imagery associated with the tradition of courtly love by mixing the semantic fields of love (love, breast, desire, grace, heart, sweet) and war (reign, captive, fought, banner, ire, death). The extended metaphor employed throughout the poem is the personification of love as a knight or warrior who, faced with the disdain of the beloved, turns coward and flees. The effect is humorous but also induces pathos; the speaker's attempt to distance himself from the events by using the conceit of love personified is easy to see through and the final two lines suggest that the speaker, rather than denying that he is guilty of love, which he did in the previous line, accepts responsibility for the fate of Love and even sees dying for love as desirable or 'sweet'.

Sir Philip Sidney

Sonnet 1

The author opens this first sonnet by explaining his motivation for composing the sonnet sequence. He believes that if his love were to read the sonnets, she would eventually return his affection. He argues that her pleasure in his pain would cause her to read his sonnets, and her reading of the sonnets would allow her to know the extent of his affection, which might make her pity the author's situation-and this pity may transform into grace and love.

The author also describes his difficulties in composing the sonnet sequence. He has struggled to express the pain and misery of his emotions and has tried to look at other poets' works in order to gain inspiration. Still, he has been unsuccessful. Finally, the author has realized that the only way to fully express his love for Stella in his poetry is to write from his heart.

Sonnet 75

This sonnet seems to be about the author’s attempts to immortalize his wife or the love of his life. Spenser starts the poem with a quatrain recalling an incident that could have happened any summer day at the seaside. He writes his love’s name in the sand at the beach, but the ocean’s waves wipe it away, just as time will destroy all manmade things. The next quatrain describes the woman’s reaction to the man’s charming attempt to immortalize her. She claims that the man’s attempts were in vain and that no mortal being can be immortalized due to the cruelness of time. The next quatrain represents a turning point in the poem and the author reveals that his wife will be eternally remembered in his poems and his verse. The final couplet at the end, “Where whenas Death shall all the world subdue, Out love shall live, and later life renew,” summarizes the theme of the poem by comparing the eternalness of love and death to the brevity of life and humanity.

Christopher Marlowe 

The passionate shepherd to his love

The speaker in "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" is a shepherd, who pledges to do the impossible if only the female object of his desires will accept his pleas. The poem is static in time, with no history or clearly defined future. Only the present matters. There is never any suggestion that the poet is asking the woman for a long-term commitment; there is no offer of marriage nor does he offer a long-term future together. Instead, he asks her to come and live with him and seek pleasure in the moment. The use of "passionate" in the title suggests strong emotions, but may also refer to an ardent desire to possess the woman sexually, since there is never any declaration of love. The shepherd makes a number of elaborate promises that are generally improbable and occasionally impossible. The woman's response is never heard, and she is not present in any way except as the object of the shepherd's desire.

Walter Raleigh

The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd

"The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" is Sir Walter Raleigh's response to a poem written by Christopher Marlowe, "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love." In the Marlowe poem, the shepherd proposes to his beloved by portraying their ideal future together: a life filled with earthly pleasures in a world of eternal spring. Raleigh's reply, however, debunks the shepherd's fanciful vision. While Marlowe's speaker promises nature's beauty and a litany of gifts, Raleigh's nymph responds that such promises could only remain valid "if all the world and love were young." Thus, she introduces the concepts of time and change. In her world, the seasons cause the shepherd's "shallow rivers" to "rage," rocks to "grow cold" and roses to "fade." The shepherd's gifts might be desirable, but they too are transient: they "soon break, soon wither" and are "soon forgotten." In the end, the nymph acknowledges that she would accept the shepherd's offer "could youth last" and "had joys no date." Like the shepherd, she longs for such things to be true, but like Raleigh, she is a skeptic, retaining faith only in reason's power to discount the "folly" of "fancy's spring."

William Shakespeare

Shall I Compare Thee (Sonnet XVIII)

he is comparing a woman to the way he feels towards summer and how this feeling gives him life to breathe. Summer must be his favorite season, so this is why he describes his love to summer. This poem describes how love isn't a possession, but as long as men can breathe, they can live with love.

Sonnet CXVI

This sonnet attempts to define love, by telling both what it is and is not. In the first quatrain, the speaker says that love—”the marriage of true minds”—is perfect and unchanging; it does not “admit impediments,” and it does not change when it find changes in the loved one. In the second quatrain, the speaker tells what love is through a metaphor: a guiding star to lost ships (“wand’ring barks”) that is not susceptible to storms (it “looks on tempests and is never shaken”). In the third quatrain, the speaker again describes what love is not: it is not susceptible to time. Though beauty fades in time as rosy lips and cheeks come within “his bending sickle’s compass,” love does not change with hours and weeks: instead, it “bears it out ev’n to the edge of doom.” In the couplet, the speaker attests to his certainty that love is as he says: if his statements can be proved to be error, he declares, he must never have written a word, and no man can ever have been in love.

John Donne

 'The Good-Morrow'.

The first stanza opens by posing a series of rhetorical questions geared toward examining the narrator's life prior to knowing his true love. This time is compared to childhood and sleep, with Donne even employing an allegorical reference to the Catholic legend of the Seven Sleepers, which tells of seven early Christian children who slept in a cave for nearly 200 years to escape persecution. The poetic narrator then acknowledges that any pleasure he's experienced in his life up until this point was 'but a dream of (his love)' that he encountered in that earlier 'nap' of his.

'And now good-morrow to our waking souls,' begins the second stanza and ties into the poem's title and goal. The lovers' souls are noted as being joined not out of jealous fear, but of pure love. From here, the narrator dismisses the exploration of 'other worlds,' claiming all he needs is the one world he and his love share as their own since love 'makes one little room an everywhere.'

The final stanza highlights the perfection of the lovers' harmonious union, which is apparently so seamless that it basically makes them into one inseparable being. While using geographical metaphors for death, the narrator then closes the poem with a claim to their immortality through the power and purity of their undying devotion to virtue and to one another.

A Valediction: forbidding Mourning

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.”

Sonnet 6

Holy Sonnet 6, written by John Donne, deals with death and how it is not so bad and should bewelcomed rather than feared. One of the first things Donne does to establish this is he personifies Deathas to be able to have a conversation as you would with a fellow man. The idea of conversing withDeath brings it down to eye level with you and is easier to accept. Treating death as a person shows themetaphysical poet style of comparing two dissimilar things by bringing the idea that death, one thatkills men, is a man himself. Donne then tells Death, “from rest, and sleep which but thy pictures be,/much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow”(lines 6-7). Since sleep is a pleasurableexperience, and death is nothing but an extended rest, we should enjoy it for it will be much better thana short rest. Seeing Death as an enjoyable experience won't let us give him the satisfactory of fear thathe prides himself on. Line two marks the caesura after “...dreadful// for thought art not so” Thischanges the rapid pace of the first line to a little slower. He uses longer vowels, “O” and “U” sounds. “for those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow” (line 3). This slower speed adds to the mood of  being comfortable with Death as he is just a peer to Donne now. At the volta, Donne starts to tell Deaththat he isn't so big and scary, but is rather a slave to circumstance. It also changes from long vowels toshorter “i” and “a” sounds, “though art slave to war, chance, kings, and desperate men” (line 9). Thisstarts to belittle Death by using a short tone, further showing he isn't afraid by being able to, essentially,make fun of him. On the last lines, Donne says “one short sleep past, we wake eternally/and death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die” (lines 13-14). He says that when Death kills us, we actually wakeeternally in the afterlife and through this Death himself dies. The paradox of death dying is another metaphysical poem attribute. The poem flows from beginning to end with anger, softness, harshness,and then a happy end, telling Death that he is the one that dies in the end of it all.

Sonnet 10 (Death be not proud)

“Death Be Not Proud” presents an argument against the power of death. Addressing Death as a person, the speaker warns Death against pride in his power. Such power is merely an illusion, and the end Death thinks it brings to men and women is in fact a rest from world-weariness for its alleged “victims.” The poet criticizes Death as a slave to other forces: fate, chance, kings, and desperate men. Death is not in control, for a variety of other powers exercise their volition in taking lives. Even in the rest it brings, Death is inferior to drugs. Finally, the speaker predicts the end of Death itself, stating “Death, thou shalt die.”

George Herbert

The Pulley

It means that man is always restless and striving for more, and that this is necessary to force mankind to seek God and be good. The first stanza talks about how God wanted to bless mankind as much as possible. The second is one of the keys of the poem, and it states that God blessed man with everything except rest.

The Collar

it reflects the speaker's impatience at feeling constrained, railing against humanity's innate need to serve its master, God. The last two lines of the poem ironically reveal that the poem is not simply a diatribe advocating freedom, but rather the temporary frustration of a generally willing and eager servant.

Ben Jonson

On my first son

Ben Jonson wrote this elegy after the death in 1603 of his eldest son, Benjamin, aged seven. The poet addresses the boy, bidding him farewell, and then seeks some meaning for his loss. Jonson blames himself, rhetorically at least, arguing that he hoped too much for his son, who was only on loan to him. Now that the seven years are up, the boy has had to be returned.

Jonson tries to argue that this is only fair and his presumptuous plans for the boy's future were the cause of his present sense of loss. He then questions his own grief: why lament the enviable state of death when the child has escaped suffering and the misery of aging? He cannot answer this question, simply saying "Rest in soft peace" and asking that the child, or perhaps the grave, record that his son was Jonson's "best piece of poetry," the creation of which he was most proud. He concludes by vowing that from now on he will be more careful with those he loves; he will be wary of liking and so needing them too much.

The poem is a moving exploration of a father's feelings on the loss of his son, made all the more poignant by the difference between its affectionate, resigned tone and Jonson's usually satirical and biting comic voice.

Robert Herrick

To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time urges young ladies should pursue opportunities for marriage before time turns you into old maids. However, due to the time frame and the values of the society, Herrick is not urging the ‘virgins’ to delve in to the pleasures of life, and to lead adulterous lives, but he urging them to marry, to join in holy matrimony. That is what he means when he says, “this same flower that smiles today, tomorrow will be dying”. He is telling them that their death is coming. Life is short, do all that you can before you embark on to holy matrimony, before losing your virginity.

Sir John Suckling 

(Song) Why so pale and wan fond lover?

A young man who is failing in his schemes to win the heart of a young lady receives advice from a friend. In the first stanza, the friend asks the young man why he looks so pale and sickly. If the young lady did not like him when he was well, the friend says, why would she like him when he appears ill? In the second stanza, the friend asks the young man why he is so sullen and withdrawn. If his conversations with the young lady failed to impress her, not speaking to her at all certainly will not arouse her interest. In the third stanza, the friend advises the young man to cease wooing the young lady. If she refuses to return his love, nothing he can do or say will change her mind.

Andrew Marvell

To His Coy Mistress

The poem is spoken by a male lover to his female beloved as an attempt to convince her to sleep with him. The speaker argues that the Lady’s shyness and hesitancy would be acceptable if the two had “world enough, and time.” But because they are finite human beings, he thinks they should take advantage of their sensual embodiment while it lasts.

He tells the lady that her beauty, as well as her “long-preserved virginity,” will only become food for worms unless she gives herself to him while she lives. Rather than preserve any lofty ideals of chastity and virtue, the speaker affirms, the lovers ought to “roll all our strength, and all / Our sweetness, up into one ball.” He is alluding to their physical bodies coming together in the act of lovemaking.

John Milton

On His Blindness

In this sonnet, the speaker meditates on the fact that he has become blind (Milton himself was blind when he wrote this). He expresses his frustration at being prevented by his disability from serving God as well as he desires to. He is answered by "Patience," who tells him that God has many who hurry to do his bidding, and does not really need man’s work. Rather, what is valued is the ability to bear God’s "mild yoke," to tolerate whatever God asks faithfully and without complaint. As the famous last line sums it up, "They also serve who only stand and wait."

This poem presents a carefully reasoned argument, on the basis of Christian faith, for the acceptance of physical impairment. The speaker learns that, rather than being an obstacle to his fulfillment of God’s work for him, his blindness is a part of that work, and that his achievement lies in living patiently with it. (Milton himself went on to write his twelve-book epic poem, "Paradise Lost," after becoming blind.)

Paradise Lost: The Prologue and Invocation

Milton opens Paradise Lost by formally declaring his poem’s subject: humankind’s first act of disobedience toward God, and the consequences that followed from it. The act is Adam and Eve’s eating of the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, as told in Genesis, the first book of the Bible. In the first line, Milton refers to the outcome of Adam and Eve’s sin as the “fruit” of the forbidden tree, punning on the actual apple and the figurative fruits of their actions. Milton asserts that this original sin brought death to human beings for the first time, causing us to lose our home in paradise until Jesus comes to restore humankind to its former position of purity.

Milton’s speaker invokes the muse, a mystical source of poetic inspiration, to sing about these subjects through him, but he makes it clear that he refers to a different muse from the muses who traditionally inspired classical poets by specifying that his muse inspired Moses to receive the Ten Commandments and write Genesis. Milton’s muse is the Holy Spirit, which inspired the Christian Bible, not one of the nine classical muses who reside on Mount Helicon—the “Aonian mount” of I.15. He says that his poem, like his muse, will fly above those of the Classical poets and accomplish things never attempted before, because his source of inspiration is greater than theirs. Then he invokes the Holy Spirit, asking it to fill him with knowledge of the beginning of the world, because the Holy Spirit was the active force in creating the universe.

Milton’s speaker announces that he wants to be inspired with this sacred knowledge because he wants to show his fellow man that the fall of humankind into sin and death was part of God’s greater plan, and that God’s plan is justified.