The ‘trepidation of the spheres’ is the past belief of the moving of the planets. This would be a huge event, but innocent, as it did not affect the planet, whereas an earthquake brings fear and harm but is on a much smaller scale. The physical relationship is a consequential event and is on a much smaller scale compared to the relationship between two souls. The relationship between the souls does not really affect day-to-day life, but exists for much longer and I much larger and more important. Christina Rossetti’s poem speaks of pouring out love: ‘love laid bare to you’. It also tells how Rossetti’s love is real and genuine: ‘not that I loved you more than just in play, for fashion’s sake as idle women do’. This means she loves for the love in her heart, rather than loving because it is the ‘done thing’, because it is fashionable. Rossetti’s sonnet gives a sense of a passionate loving. A love which can pass through any barrier. This is conveyed through a use of powerful vocabulary and strong statements. It gives me an idea of a gritty, unyielding love. This is contrary to the love Donne speaks of, a deep love, a love that is not reliant on being physically with a person. The love Donne describes gives me the thought of a deeper love that is a bonding of two souls based upon the emotional and psychological features of a person. A bond that cannot fully be described between two things, which are believed to be there, but cannot be touched, seen or heard. John Donne was a metaphysical poet and used wit and intellect to fully express his thoughts. He uses a wide range of imagery to show the reader what he clearly means. An example of his wit is when he compares his love to ‘gold to ayery thinnesse beate.’ The gold is just like his love, it can be beaten thinner and spread further apart but it always stays as one object.
Next I will look at Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, which is very different to a conventional love poem. For most of the poem Shakespeare talks badly of his lover. In a love poem you expect the author to be hailing their partner with compliments, whereas Shakespeare talks of his partner in a foul way. He insults her through out the poem with comments such as her ‘eyes are nothing like the sun’. You would expect Shakespeare to say her eyes were beautiful like the sun, rather than saying they are nowhere close to comparing to the sun. He insults her further when he says her hair is like ‘black wires.’ In the stereotypical love poem, the writer would compliment her hair, saying something along the lines of it being beautiful and shiny. Shakespeare loses this stereotype and actually goes so far as to say her hair is nasty like ‘black wires grow(ing) on her head’. However, in the final couplet there is a change of direction: ‘And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare’. Before this he insulted his lover with comments such as ‘but no roses see I in her cheeks’, whereas in the final couplet he is applauding her. He lists all of her bad points but he goes on to say ‘I still love her’. He says despite these drawbacks ‘by heaven, (he) thinks (his) love as rare’ as any other girl is. Personally, I think this is real love, Shakespeare loves his partner despite these negative aspects, rather than just loving her because of how she looks. His opinion is based on her personality and character, rather than the aesthetics. I think this is a true love, not a superficial love.
This can be compared to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18. This sonnet seems to portray a more superficial love. In this sonnet Shakespeare expresses his love in a more conventional form. In Sonnet 130 Shakespeare expresses his love by, at first, criticising his partner but then goes on to say that despite all of these imperfections he still loves her. Whereas in Sonnet 18 he expresses more passionate, ‘teenage’ love by complimenting his partner: ‘Thou art more lovely and more temperate.’ He is saying that she is more beautiful and perfect than a summer’s day, which is an aesthetically pleasing event. In the summer the weather is beautiful and there are plenty of animals about, making it a picturesque image. I believe Shakespeare is trying to flatter his girlfriend and had not been seeing her for very long when this sonnet was written. It seems he is at the initial stage of being obsessed with his love and the passion between them rather than have been together for a long time and having a deeper bond. He goes on to say that her beauty will not fade: ‘ they eternal summer shall not fade’. He has already compared her beauty to that of the summer and is now using the summer as a metaphor to say that her beauty will never disappear. In Sonnet 130 Shakespeare seems to place emphasis upon a personal attraction rather than speaking only of beauty and how things appear to the eye. However, in both sonnets the final two lines are separated and form rhyming couplets. This makes for a dramatic and climatic ending. Also in both Shakespeare takes a change of direction in his writing in the final two lines. However, the change in direction is much less drastic in Sonnet 18 than in Sonnet 130. In Sonnet 18 Shakespeare reverts from complimenting his partners beauty to saying she or her beauty will never die. In Sonnet 130 the change is much more dramatic, changing from insults to saying that he still loves her: ‘And yet by heaven, I think my love is rare.’
The next poem I shall compare is ‘Remember’ by Christina Rossetti, another sonnet on the subject of love. Whereas in the previous two sonnets by Shakespeare it describes his different love for his partner, Rossetti talks of what she wants her lover to do when she is no longer around. The first portion of the sonnet repeats phrases associated with leaving: ‘when I am gone away, Gone far away.’ This emphasises the fact that Rossetti is speaking of leaving. We are then informed that she is speaking of when she dies: ‘the silent land.’ I think Rossetti is conveying that he should still love her even when they cannot physically touch: ‘I half turn to go yet turning stay.’ I believe this is similar to the idea in ‘Valediction: A Forbidding Mourning’ that even when the pair are physically apart they should still love each other as is portrayed in Donne’s analogy of the compasses. Rossetti asks her partner not to be upset if she forgets him momentarily: ‘do not grieve.’ To me this seems generous; Rossetti is asking her partner not to feel bad if he momentarily forgets her. The last couplet, which asks her partner not to be sad about her death but still to remember her. This is once again generous as she would rather him be happy without remembering her than to spend his life grieving her death. Rossetti uses an oxymoron to emphasise a point in the final two lines; ‘you should forget and smile, Than that you should remember and be sad.’ The opposites exaggerate one another and emphasise the fact that she wants her partner to be happy when she dies. This sonnet contrasts to the two by Shakespeare that I have previously analysed in the way it is laid out. There is a separation after the eighth line, not only in lay out but also in the idea it is portraying. In the first eight lines Rossetti talks about when she dies and how she wants to be remembered, but after the split she speaks of him not letting his grief stop him from having fun in his life. This poem also has the same rhyme structure as ‘Many in after times will say of you’, also by Chrstina Rossetti.
Although all of the poems I have analysed have been on the subject of love they have conveyed very different interpretations of the love they speak of, utilising a wide variety of differing techniques. It is surprising that a number of poems based on the same subject matter can show such different ideas.
