By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Not marble, nor the gilded monuments’ is one of the more famous poems in Shakespeare’s sequence of 154 sonnets. The poem is a version of the popular conceit that the poet’s words can make his lover immortal through ‘rhyme’. As commentators are quick to point out, the Bard failed in one sense, in that we cannot say for certain what the name of the addressee of the poem was (the Earl of Pembroke? or the Earl of Southampton?).
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘What is your substance, whereof are you made, / That millions of strange shadows on you tend?’ Sonnet 53 is pored over and analysed by Cyril Graham in Oscar Wilde’s brilliant short story ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ (1889), about a man who thinks he’s discovered the identity of the mysterious dedicatee of the 1609 edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Sonnet 52 is another poem about absence, and about Shakespeare having to be apart from the Fair Youth. The rather dense and knotty conceit, which centres on locked-up treasure, requires a bit of untangling and closer analysis, but first, here is Sonnet 52 and a brief paraphrase of its content.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
One of the great ‘goodbye’ poems in the English language, ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’ is, in a sense, not a farewell poem at all, since Donne’s speaker reassures his addressee that their parting is no ‘goodbye’, not really. The occasion of the poem was a real one – at least according to Izaak Walton, author of The Compleat Angler and friend of Donne’s, who recorded that Donne wrote ‘A Valediction’ for his wife when he went to the Continent in 1611. Anyway, before we proceed to an analysis of the poem, here’s a reminder of it.
A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No:
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
‘Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Thus can my love excuse the slow offence / Of my dull bearer when from thee I speed’: Sonnet 51 is very much a continuation or Shakespeare’s 50th sonnet, which focused on the journey Shakespeare made away from his friend and beloved, the Fair Youth. Thus can my love … Read more