Lyrical Love Poems of the Renaissance

Sonnets are poems comprised of fourteen lines. An essential part of a sonnet is the rhyme scheme, which can flow like song lyrics. Many poets from the Renaissance era created a lyrical flow from their sonnets to express their thoughts about love, or to idolize their love of a woman with the use of blazons.

Thomas Campion's poem, "There is a garden in her face" compares a woman's face to a garden. The narrator of the poem describes the aspects of the woman's face to coincide with different parts of a garden. For example, the line "Those cherries fairly do enclose/ Of orient pearl a double row," refers to the woman's mouth (Greenblatt et al, 2006, p. 1230). Her mouth serves as the cherries that house her pearly teeth. To make sure that the reader understands that the woman is of fair repute, the narrator says of her mouth, "There cherries grow, which none may buy/ Till 'Cherry ripe!' themselves do cry," (Greenblatt et al, 2006, p. 1230). Although the woman has a delectable cherry mouth, she is not willing to let just anyone taste them. Other parts of her face guard her honor, like "Her eyes like angels watch them still;/ Her brows like bended bows do stand," (Greenblatt et al, 2006, p. 1230).

Other poets like Sidney, Shakespeare, and Spenser during the Renaissance era appeared to be preoccupied with the idea of love, or the idea of being in love with someone. Women were often compared with facets of nature, such as flowers. Women in the Elizabethan era must have been thought of as beautiful, dainty, and fragile if they were always being compared to flowers. In contemporary society, comparable lyrics from love songs are also preoccupied with love. However, instead of honoring love, modern lyrics lament love. The sad love song is more common and interesting than an uplifting love song.

Greenblatt, et al. [Eds]. (2006). The norton anthology english literature (8th ed.). New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Analysis of Four Different Poems

In the poem, My Last Duchess, Robert Browning constructs a sinister tone by implying murder was committed in such casual tones: "I gave commands/Then all smiles stopped altogether." At first, the narrator in the poem seems to describe a portrait of a woman he loved, but by the poem's end, the reader is well aware that "[the duke] refers to his last duchess as an object, as a possession that has been appropriately added to his prized collection," (DiYanni, 2008, p. 514).

The connotation of the word daffodils differs from its denotation in William Wordsworth's I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. While a dictionary describes daffodils simply as yellow flowers, in his poem, Wordsworth personifies the daffodils to make the narrator's loneliness apparent to the reader. He does this by describing the daffodils as "a crowd", "a host", and seeing the daffodils "dance".

The effect of Elizabeth Bishop's recurrent use of white imagery in the First Death in Nova Scotia is one that illustrates the finality felt by the narrator over the death of Arthur. She describes his casket as "frosted cake", his countenance as "white, like a doll, and his final resting place: "roads deep in snow".

Shakespeare plays with metaphor and meaning in his two poems, Shall I compare thee to a summer's day and My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun. During the poem Shall I compare thee to a summer's day, the reader knows that the narrator is in love because he uses a summer day to describe the object of his affection. He also vows that their love will last forever, an "eternal summer" that "shall not fade". Simile is further employed in My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun with the line, "If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head."

References:

DiYanni, R. (2008). Literature approaches to fiction, poetry, and drama [2nd Ed.]. New York: McGraw Hill