The poet thinks that his descriptions will be completely disregarded in the future: “So should my papers, yellowed with their age,
Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue”
Proverbially, old men babbled nonsense, and the concern of the poet is that his papers will be regarded as just the same sort of nonsense as came from the old men. He then finishes by suggesting that if the youth sires a child, he shall be able to live again, within this child, and also be able to live on within the poet’s writings.
This poem is a mixture of morbid and new-life imagery. The poet is asking the youth to create a new life, and yet seems to be suggesting that death is imminent with the use of words like “heaven” and “tomb”. Shakespeare seems to have put a lot of passion and feeling into this poem, wanting so much for this youth’s beauty to live on, it is almost a plea for him to have a child, so another generation can benefit.
Sonnet VII by Mary Wroth, however, is vastly different to the above of Shakespeare. It shows Wroth dealing with the emotion of the death of her husband, and the effect and emotional toll it has on her life. The feeling seems to be completely overpowering the poet, as if taking over her entire life relentlessly.
The poet says that no amount of time or space can stop her heart longing for the love that she can no longer have, the pain that she is feeling is unrelentless, it has taken over her entire life, and is unable to do anything whilst it has a hold over her. She describes the thing that is affecting her as a “smart”- something that has wounded her, and yet she doesn’t know quite how deeply, as if she is still in a state of transition between the before and after of the event. She can see that nothing she says or does will make the pain go away, and so she seems to give in to the almighty power that is Love, and lets it “rule, wound and please” her, in the same way that it did at the start of the relationship. Wroth appears to think that the duty of Love is to test man’s ability to deal with this kind of emotional trauma. When she is alone, she contemplates how she can escape from the trappings of Love, and continuously learns why this is happening to her, how it was destined to happen, and nothing she could ever have done would have stopped it from hurting her.
Toward the end of the poem, Wroth is seeming to accept that this heartbreak happened to her for a reason, and that there was no way she could have avoided it. She views Love as an everlasting emotion, one that can never be disposed of in any way, and will live with you forever. The poet sees Love as an ever-growing emotion, one that increases, right up until the end of time, which is the only point that it shall ever be relinquished. I think that Wroth is wishing that time to come, wanting to edge herself closer, and closer to the end of her time, to her death, so that the immense wound that has been cut insider her by her loss can be healed, and can hurt her no more.
The Wroth poem is a lot darker than the Shakespeare one, it deals very directly with death, mortality, and loss. It is obvious that the speaker is experiencing great pain and sorrow, and this is made clearer with the extended use of negatives through the poem. It always seems to be heading towards an inevitable conclusion of when “the world come to a final end”- the death of the speaker, the only time when she will experience any sort of relief from all the pain she is going through. It seems to me that the loss of the speaker’s Love signals the end of anything she has left to live for, and that everything is now pointing toward her own life ending, as she feels that she now has nothing to live for.
I believe that any poem about love is timeless, as the experiences and emotions that are felt by us in the modern day, were felt by those in Elizabethan times, in Roman times, and will be felt by generations to come. The feelings never change, and therefore, neither do the expressions of it. Overall, love itself has never differed, and so, anything that once related to it, will still do so now.
Wroth’s view of time was a very negative one, feeling that time could not heal her wounds, but Shakespeare felt that time was necessary for life and love to carry on as before. I think a view of time is a very personal one, and is up to an individual. Some people recover from tragedy a lot quicker than others, and every person is different in that respect.
