Dipesh Patel LVP English
Poetry Comparison
“First Love” and “Shall I compare thee to a Summers day” are two poems written before the 1900’s by John Clare and William Shakespeare. The poems share similar language and imagery mainly about love but vary in structure. The poems allow the reader to see Clare’s experience as he has lost his heart and Shakespeare’s emphasis that his love’s beauty is immortal.
The two poems both comprise of love and physical relationships and are both written in the first person to portray a personal view intended for the reader to see the effects of being in love and how you see a person differently when you are in love. The poem by Clare is a love lyric written in the first person about a woman in contrast to Shakespeare’s which is written also in the first person but addresses his love where she is apostrophised. This creates a more powerful and effective approach to the reader as Shakespeare intelligently conveys his love as exasperating and uncontrollable.
Clare uses the symptoms of love and relates to recognizable or understandable feelings to cleverly interact with the reader’s reactions by describing “blood” and “sight” as blushing and rendered. Combined with the lost sense of time in lines 11 and 12 Clare produces the idea of great sadness and ache to the reader and gains sympathy by doing this.