The imagery in the poem in generally symbolic of the idea of the overpowering nature of love. The writer is comparing the likelihood of his love running out to the likelihood of things like the sea going dry or the sun melting the rocks, “Till a’ the seas gang dry and the rocks melt wi’ the sun” The writer uses the two most fundamental elements of nature to suggest how impossible it is for his love to change. The first imagery in the poem is also related to nature. This is the classic rose image, “O my luve’s like a red, red rose.” The repetition of red emphasises the deep colour of the rose and the depth of his love. Although the rose is beautiful and fresh (‘newly sprung’) it is short lived and insubstantial and dies away quickly. This could be a truer representative of what his love is like.
‘The Flea’ by John Donne is a entertaining poem written as part of the metaphysical movement. The writer tells his beloved to look at the flea on the bed and to note "how little" it is that she’s denying him. He says, the flea has sucked his blood, then her blood, so now inside the flea they are mingled; and that mingling cannot be called "sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead." The flea has joined them together.
As his beloved goes to kill the flea he stops her, telling her to spare the three lives in the flea. This is his life, her life, and the flea's life. In the flea where their blood is mingled they are married and the flea is like their marriage bed and marriage temple mixed into one. Although their parents grudge their romance and she will not make love to him, they are still made one and mixed in the flea. He asks her to not kill herself by killing the flea that contains her blood; he says that to kill the flea would be sacrilege, "three sins in killing three."
The writer calls his lover "Cruel and sudden," as she has now killed the flea, "purpling" her fingernail with the "blood of innocence." He asks his lover what the flea's sin was, other than having sucked from each of them a drop of blood. His lover replies that neither of them is weaker for having killed the flea. It’s true, he says, and it proves that her fears are stupid: If she were to sleep with him, she’d lose no more honour than she lost when she killed the flea.
The rhyme scheme in each stanza is similarly regular, in couplets, with the final line rhyming with the final couplet: AABBCCDDD.
This poem shows Donne's metaphysical love-poem style, he makes the least likely image into imagery of love and romance whereas Burns uses traditional imagery like a rose and music. Donne uses the image of a flea that has just bitten the writer and his beloved to show a humorous argument over whether they’ll have sex. The writer wants to but the beloved doesn’t. The writer is very clever and uses the flea, in whose body his blood mingles with his beloved's, to show how harmless this mingling is, he says that if mingling in the flea is so harmless, sexual mingling would be equally harmless, for they are really the same thing. By the second stanza, the writer is trying to save the flea's life, holding it up as "our marriage bed and marriage temple." But when his beloved kills the flea he turns his argument around completely and says that despite his previous arguments, killing the flea did not really affect his beloved's honour and despite the fair morals she has shown in refusing to sleep with him, doing so would not affect her honour either.
‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ is a sonnet (sonnet 18) by William Shakespeare and a prominent one too. At first glance, the poem is simply a speech of praise about the beauty of his beloved. Summer is often related to unpleasant extremes of windiness and heat, but the beloved is always mild and temperate. Summer is personified as the "eye of heaven" with its "gold complexion"; the imagery throughout is simple and natural, with the "darling buds of May,” conceding to the "eternal summer", which the speaker promises. The language, too, is quite simple for the sonnets; it isn’t packed with alliteration etc.
The writer opens the poem with a question addressed to the beloved: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" The next eleven lines are based on similar comparisons. In line 2, the writer emphasises what mainly differentiates the man from the summer's day, he is "more lovely and more temperate." Summer's days tend toward extremes, they are shaken by "rough winds"; in them, the sun ("the eye of heaven") often shines "too hot," or too dim. And summer is passing: its date is too short, and it leads to autumn, as "every fair from fair sometime declines." The final lines of the sonnet tell of how the beloved is different from the summer in that respect: his beauty will last forever ("Thy eternal summer shall not fade...") and never die. In the couplet, the speaker explains how the beloved's beauty will achieve this, and not perish because it is preserved in the poem, which will last forever; it will live "as long as men can breathe or eyes can see." Evidently it has done just that as we explore the poem to this day.
