Compare and Contrast Four Sonnets Essay - 'Let Me Not'; 'Death Be Not Proud'; 'Shall I Compare Thee'; 'Anthem for Doomed Youth'

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Compare and contrast four sonnets

A. Cahill 

‘No mockeries now for them, no prayers nor bells;’ Owen shows himself to be cynical of the Christian religion, as he can not see how a loving God could have anything to do with so many deaths. In fact, Owen served three years as a parish assistant. Wilfred Owen died aged 25 on 4th November 1918, a week before the end of the Great War. He was completely unheard of at the time of his death, and only five of his poems had been published. Now he is revered as one of the greatest war poets of all time, and has been nominated the national poet of war. In this essay, I will be comparing one of his most celebrated works, the sonnet ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ with two of Shakespeare’s sonnets (the renowned ‘Shall I compare thee …?’ and ‘Let me not) with John Donne’s ‘Death Be Not Proud’. These poems are all sonnets, and for the most part follow a strict rhyme scheme and specific structure. Sonnets are often employed when writing about a solemn subject, which is common to all poems I will be looking at, as the formal structure can often echo the mood.

In both of the Shakespearian sonnets we are looking at, he wrote in the form, which is so much associated with him, known as ‘the Shakespearian sonnet form’. This celebrated form has fourteen lines and is written in three quatrains, these with a regular ‘a,b,a,b, c,d,c,d, e,fe,f,’ rhyming scheme, and the penultimate and the last line being in the form of a rhyming couplet. The other two poems take on some all together different forms: John Donne’s Death be Not Proud is written in the ‘Italian’ or ‘Patrician’ form. It has two quatrains that follow an ‘a, b, b, a’ rhyming scheme and then a single quatrain with an ‘c, d, d, e’ rhyming scheme followed by a rhyming couplet. The rhyming couplet is in fact a feature common to all the poems, as Wilfred Owen’s anthem for doomed youth, follows a ‘semi-Shakespearian’ form. It again has three quatrains the first two with an ‘a, b, a, b’ and ‘c, d, c, d’ rhyming scheme, whilst the last quatrain differs slightly as it has and ‘e, f, f, e’ rhyming scheme. The sonnet ends with a rhyming couplet. All of the poems I am studying share a common metre, iambic pentameter, although, it is not consistent throughout all of them.    

Shakespeare was writing in the 16th centaury and Donne about a century after. As a result archaic spellings are present in both the works of William Shakespeare and John Donne. In Shakespeare’s sonnet ‘Shall I compare thee …?’ some examples of his use of archaic ‘old-English’ spellings are, ‘Maie’ and ‘Sommer’. It is interesting to note that in ‘Let me not’ Shakespeare effectively uses negative vocabulary (‘not’, ‘no’, ‘never’, ‘although’) with the effect of assuring that the positive seems true. He uses the negatives to prove that the points he is making are well-founded.

John Donne (1572 – 1631) wrote ‘Death Be Not Proud’ in about 1610, in the Elizabethan period. It is however difficult to date the writing of his poems, as none of them were published in his lifetime. It is thought that all his songs and sonnets were written between 1590 and 1617. Donne wrote a group of sonnets which are referred to as the ‘Holy Sonnets’, of which ‘Death Be Not Proud’ is one. He was a religious man, ordained in 1615, and became a royal chaplain in the same year.

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In the poem there are lots of examples of archaic spellings, and multiple uses of words like ‘thou’ and ‘thee’. There are also some unusual spellings like ‘poore’ and ‘stroake’. Donne was very experimental with genre, form and imagery. His work lacks conventional metric smooth sounding poetry, or the descriptive clichés of other poets of the time.

As Wilfred Owen was writing much later, during the First World War, there are no instances of archaic spelling. His vocabulary, however, is quite traditional, and there are many usages of phrases that are no longer used in society today, ...

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