Compare But You Didnt by Merrill Glass and My Mistress by William Shakespeare

Titles and Poets “But You Didn’t” by Merrill Glass

“ My Mistress” by William Shakespeare

Both poets are writing about their lovers but wrote them for different reasons. Shakespeare wrote the poem for other poets of his time, to make fun of the comparisons they used in their poems, which he thought was “false compare” which “belied” the ladies being described.

Merrill Glass wrote her poem to help her to get over the death of her lover. She writes as if she is talking to him but at the end she says

“And there are so many things

I wanted to tell you when you

Returned from Vietnam…

But you didn’t,”

The words in each poem show that they were written in different centuries. Shakespeare uses “hath” which is how have would have been written in the seventeenth century while Glass refers to “Vietnam,” meaning the Vietnam war, which means that the poem must have been written in the last thirty years.

Both poets use conversational words. For example Glass uses the word “You” as if she was talking to her boyfriend directly. “Remember the time you lent me your car and I dented it?”

In the final couplet Shakespeare says “ And yet, by heaven,” as if he was talking to the other poets.

The poets use different structures because they were written for different reasons. Merrill Glass is writing as she is thinking because she uses enjambment where one line runs into another, as if she is trying to work things out by writing the poem. The verses are quite unstructured. The first verse has four lines; the second has five, the third six and the fourth seven lines. She used this structure because as I said before she is writing as she is thinking, trying to cope with the grief she feels inside. Shakespeare’s poem is very structured as if he has everything worked out. He follows the rules for a sonnet exactly except for one line:

“And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare”.

He did this deliberately because he wanted to stress the word “rare” meaning special, highly valued. He wanted to make clear that he loved his woman very much, which he had to do because the images created of her in the quatrains are not very flattering.

In “My Mistress’ Eyes” Shakespeare compares his mistress to images found in other love sonnets of the time. For example,” Coral is far more red than her lips red”.

At first it sounds as if he is saying her lips are pale, unattractive ...