Comparison of two Shakespearean Sonnets and one Modern Sonnet.

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Rowan Lovegrove-Fielden

Comparison of two Shakespearean Sonnets and one Modern Sonnet

The three poems I am going to analyse and then compare are, for the two Shakespearean sonnets, Sonnet XVIII- ‘Shall I compare thee…?’ and Sonnet CXVI-‘Let me not…’; with the modern sonnet by Rupert Brookes entitled ‘The Soldier’ from ‘Songs of Other Lands’.

 ‘The Soldier’ was written by Rupert Brooke at the start of the First World War. Brooke was going to fight in a war which was supposed to be won by Christmas, War was seen as an honourable and heroic thing by many and Brooke had no idea of what the war would actually be like. At the time, the whole of England was feeling very patriotic; England was thought to be the greatest country in the world. In his poem Brooke expresses his belief that to die for England was the most noble and worthy cause, that to be buried in a foreign land would make that plot of land English and bring a sense of honour and immortality upon him.

The poem is in the form of a sonnet and uses iambic pentameter. The mood of the poem is calm, serene and heroic. It is like Brooke is writing a poem to his lover, a romantic poem describing how wonderful, beautiful, happy and peaceful she is and how he is the better for knowing her and belonging to her. He proclaims his love for her and how if he dies, he does not wish her to mourn for him but to rejoice that part of another land belongs to her through him. It is almost as if that plot of land has been cleansed of sin and purified by him lying there.

To proclaim his love and give the sonnet its rich, gay heavenly sense, he uses very rich, peaceful words with gentle, soft sounds. There is very little imagery; in fact the only imagery employed is in the personification of England. To give the rich effect the poem has, Brooke applies words such as ‘rich’, flowers to love’, ‘roam’, ‘washed’ and ‘blest’. These words are used in the first verse where he is explaining and describing the things which England gave to him and how wonderful these things are. The words ‘breathing’ and ‘sun’ give the picture of a happy and carefree life.

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In the second verse he allows the poem to become livelier in parts by using words such as ‘pulse’, ‘happy’, ‘laughter’ and  ‘friends’ but calms it again with ‘eternal’ and ‘heaven’. The poem begins heroically and patriotically, plunging in with the powerful topic of death but not allowing it to cast a shadow of darkness  and depression over the poem and ends peacefully with the word ‘heaven’. This sums up the nature of the poem. There are not a lot of literary devices used, there is some alliteration such as ‘sights and sounds’ and ‘laughter, learnt’ in line thirteen; there ...

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