Poetry and Poetics–Lit 204

John Donne’s poem “A Valediction of Weeping” portrays a relationship where sadness seems to operate as a means of currency. The speaker compares their tears to coins produced in the image of their partner, explaining that “thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear, / And by this mintage they are something worth” (3-4). Their partner sees the speaker’s sadness, and molds it into something to trade away. Yet, the tears only gain meaning through this partner’s affirmation of their worth. The partner’s face marks the front of this metaphorical coin, irremovably and importantly emblazoned like George Washington on the quarter. 

For me, the coin imagery altered the significance of the first two lines: “Let me pour forth / My tears before thy face whilst I stay here.” (1-2) When I reread these lines thinking about tears as something monetary, I pictured the speaker pouring forth a sleeve of change the way a customer might at a bank teller’s window, or at a cashier’s register. The speaker sees this exchange as holding some transactional quality, as if they had only a moment to compensate for the time, attention, and product they’d used up. The following lines further establish this currency’s specificity: “When a tear falls, that Thou falls which it bore, / So thou and I are nothing then, when on a diverse shore.” (8-9). These tears maintain no significance on some distant land, or ‘diverse shore.’ However, inside the nation of this relationship, they govern the economy. 

Donne introduces other metaphors throughout the poem (i.e also comparing tears to globes) but the final line underscores the monetary nature of the speaker’s relationship. The speaker expresses real resentment, saying that “Since thou and I sigh one another’s breath, / Who’er sighs most is cruelest, and hastes the other’s death.” (26-27). Because these two partners remain so closely interconnected, the greater pain of one inflicts fatal damage to the other. The one who sighs more in a way steals something from the other; feeling sadness morphs into an action deeply cruel and somehow murderous. Rather than supporting each other through pain, each partner hoards emotion, and selfishly places blame. Their relationship circulates around the trading of currency, and thus remains antithetical to truly intimate connection.

George Herbert wrote 160 poems to emphasize many notions of the Christian Church, “Easter Wings” being on of them, which specifically expresses the idea that after suffering in sin, we can ascend into Heaven. The title alludes to the Christian holiday of Easter which is a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus and the hope of salvation. The structure of Herbert’s poem also alludes to Easter as it was designed intelligently to represent birds with wings that symbolize people will also resurrect like Jesus. While reading, I also thought the stanzas looked like a funnel and an inverted funnel merged together. In both stanza’s, the top funnels each had a negative tone created by Herbert’s choice in diction. He talks about the fall of man which has led humans to sin using words like “foolishly,” “decaying,” and “poor” (lines1-5). In the second stanza, we see words like “sickness,” “shame,” “punish,” and “thin” (lines 11-15). This negative tone matches the structure because as the lines get smaller and smaller, it gives the effect of feeling small and hopeless. If the funnel were to continue, readers can assume it would eventually lead into a nonexistent line with no more words—a depressing ending. As humans suffer the consequences of sin, there is a hopeless feeling that nothing will get better and the human condition will continue to weaken becoming frail and sick. The tone of the poem changes when you hit the inverted funnel of each stanza in lines 6-10 and lines 16-20. Herbert uses these lines to focus on the ascension to Heaven and salvation. He uses words like “harmoniously,” “victories,” and “advance” which all create a positive tone. This also matches the structure of the poem as the funnel shape opens back up and the lines become bigger again, giving a new sense of hope as if there is something bigger to look forward to. The complete funnel structure shows that death is not the end. He refers to the ascension as a victory. The last line of each stanza is repetitive to emphasize that suffering is necessary to get to Heaven. In other words, you cannot ascend without it paying the consequences of sin first. 

Hi Everyone! Today, I’m going to be writing about Sonnet 2 from the Shakespeare sonnets. I found the theme of this sonnet–immortalizing oneself through one’s children– to be very fascinating. The main aspect of this poem that I struggled to grapple with was its central conceit. After deliberating, I identified the central conceit to be the parallel the poem draws between an adult’s lost beauty and their child’s new beauty. It took me a while to identify this as the conceit because I couldn’t decide if these two things were dissimilar enough for their comparison. The main line that convinced me that this could function as the main conceit was the following: “proving his beauty by succession thine” (line 12), which I translated to “Showing that his beauty used to be yours.” Shakespeare’s idea that the adult loses their “beauty” to give directly it to the child implies that the beauty of a parent and the beauty of their child is the same entity. While the appearance of a child is inherently connected to that of their parent, I find that the directness of this parallel is what makes this comparison the central conceit, as it frames beauty as something that can be physically given or taken away, intertwining the parent and the child as if they are the same (even though they’re obviously completely different people). With that said, I would love to hear your opinions on whether or not you could buy that this is the central conceit of the poem. My favorite part of this sonnet is that, by drawing this parallel between the parent and child, Shakespeare is able to depict a parent as an immortal being, as they continue to live through their children and the following generations. The last two lines summarize the idea that children give youth back to their aging parents, saying: “This [their beauty] were to be new made when thou art old, / And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold” (lines 13-14). Even though they follow typical sonnet structure, the rhyme and the form of these last two lines cleverly mirror their meaning–just like the adult’s dying beauty becomes “new made” through the child, the poem becomes new again through a new rhyme and the new form of the couplet standing alone. 

William Shakespeare is touted as the playwright who defined modern cliches and created nuanced plays that spat at the traditions of nobility. Behind closed doors, he wrote 154 sonnets for a mysterious W.H. figure. One of these sonnets is Sonnet 138: “When my love swears that she is made of truth[.]”

The poem seems to be written in iambic pentameter and follows the classic Shakespearean sonnet rhyme scheme (ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, GG). It features three 4-lined stanzas and one couplet with a volta in the middle. Typically, each line is written in 10 syllables except for line 4— though it could be assumed that the first word should be spoken as “Un-Learn-Èd” to keep the 10-syllable structure. These exceptions are sprinkled all around the poem. For example, lines 7 and 13 invert the rules of the Shakespearean sonnet by switching which syllables are stressed and unstressed at their beginnings.

I believe the poem is about the speaker’s relationship with his sweetheart and their relationship on a stack of falsehoods towards each other. It highlights that the speaker is aware of the fallacies their relationship is built upon, but he continues the lies as there is no point in stopping. As the speaker stated: “Oh, love’s best habit is in seeming trust,/And age in love loves not to have years told.” (Shakespeare, Line 11–12) Love is about superficial trust, and age is not something that should be told with such strong feelings. These lines along with the previous rhetorical questions in lines 9–10 demonstrate a shift in the speaker’s mentality about his relationship with his mistress. Though he knows he is filled with lies by lying about how youthful he is, so is she with her menagerie of fraudulent truths. Yet, they can still love each other beyond the dishonesty because they flatter each other’s lies for the other’s sake.

The first Shakespearean sonnet undoubtedly seems to have been written knowing its place in the collection, aptly serving as a tone-setter and thoughtful, poignant hook to readers via its direct diction and through my interpretation, the call to action it creates. I found that the way this poem is written especially implores the reader to examine Shakespeare’s ideas in relation to their own life. Although poems often have this sort of effect inherently, I thought the contrasting usage of the words ‘we’ in the first line and ones like ‘thou’, ‘thy’, and ‘thine’ in the second quatrain very deliberately and effectively created a sense that the subject is acting in a way which opposes some norm or the way in which ‘we’ are supposed to behave. The first quatrain is straightforward and unassuming, merely Shakespeare’s perspective on the flow of life and the way things are, but the second makes direct and pointed claims about an individual. 

The aforementioned sense of opposition is bolstered by the juxtaposing lines in the second quatrain, which are simultaneously critical and complimentary. Shakespeare insinuates that the person to which he is referring has merit and purity, saying that they have ‘bright eyes’ (5) and that they are too cruel to their ‘sweet self’ (8). However, he also seems to claim that they are self-absorbed and misguided, saying that they are ‘contracted to thine own bright eyes’ (5), and that they are ‘making a famine where abundance lies’ (7). These layered, contrasting lines to me seem to be intended to spark curiosity and introspection in the person to which ‘thou’ refers or the reader. Despite reading as very deliberate and direct, these lines contain plenty of ambiguity, ambiguity which in my analysis is addressed in the final quatrain.

Shakespeare meanders through the first two quatrains of this sonnet, poking and prodding as a means to provoke curiosity, but in the final quatrain he attains some specificity and provides more concrete ideas to the reader. The first two lines assign significance and purity to ‘thou’, saying that “thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament and only herald to the gaudy spring” (9-10). These lines are especially striking as they begin the third quatrain and proceed those in the second which as previously mentioned had a much different tone, but the third line in this quatrain stood out to me especially: “within thine own bud buriest thy content” (11). I took this to mean that we have inherent value and the ability to live meaningfully simply by being and recognizing our place in the world and the flow of life. In tandem with the second quatrain, Shakespeare–from my perspective–implies the danger of self-absorption and encourages one to recognize their purity and significance. This idea is corroborated by the concluding couplet, which opens with the line: “pity the world, or else this glutton be” (13), which to me outlined a very real inferiority we all have to the ways of the world, and encouraged us to live as Shakespeare suggests for fear of a consequence.