Leave Me O Love The Best Love Sonnets example essay topic

Love is a difficult thing to express in words in any given language. It is near impossible to convey the paradoxical pain and pleasure of love that sounds dreadfully horrid but simultaneously magical. Most people are often confused and have a hard time figuring and sorting out exactly how they feel and felt about their love and relationship. However, to love someone or be loved by someone is a special gift, and to be able to convey your gratitude for whatever you received out of the relationship is an extremely intense and concentrated task. Poetry is one of the best ways to express oneself sincerely. With the time and connections that go into writing poetry, it allows the reader to think of exactly what he or she desires to say, and then allows them to craft and sculpt it in a manner the writer sees fit.

The form into which a poet puts his or her words is always something of which the reader ought to take conscious note. Many love poems are written in the form of a sonnet. A sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines in iambic pentameter with a complex rhyme scheme. In the English sonnet, the rhyme scheme is abba abba cd dc ee, leaving to the poet's discretion the choice of whether to form the lines into an octave, turn, and then sestet, three quatrains and an ending couplet, or any other pattern of lines imaginable. When poets have chosen to work within such a strict form, that form and its structures make up part of what they want to say. In other words, the poet is using the structure of the poem as part of the language act: we will find the 'meaning' not only in the words, but partly in their pattern as well.

Both Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder and Sir Philip Sidney were English poets of the renaissance. They were both courtier poets who wrote many sonnets about love and the unsettled course of relationships. In Wyatt's "Farewell, Love" and Sidney's "Leave Me, O Love", one can see many similarities and some differences in their writing. Language, theme, tone, and other important aspects of the poem reflect such similarities and differences among the two poets' works. Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder uses the structure of the sonnet to his advantage.

He uses the octave, turn, and then sestet in "Farewell, Love". Although he did not make the breaks in between the lines to actually show the reader, one can get the feel of them simply by reading the poem. The first eight lines of the sonnet are about how his love has left him, but he doesn't seem too upset because he believes it is for the best and that he can now improve himself. He speaks as though he is already smarter for knowing that it is okay, and claims that, "Thy baited hooks shall tangle me no more". (Ln. 2).

Then, the turn occurs in line 9 that brings the sonnet to a new position: Thy sharp repulse, that pricket h aye so sore, 7 And 'scape forth since liberty is lever. 8 Therefore farewell, go trouble younger hearts, 9 And in me claim no more authority; 10 Instead of him acting so impartial about the situation and that he will be better off now that he can be in "perfect health", he sounds a bit more bitter and realistic towards the experience (ln. 4). The words feel as though through the turn Wyatt released everything that he had stored up inside of him and now wishes to acknowledge, in terms of disappointment and aggression, in the previous lines in the octave. It seems as though he is tired of it all after the turn, that he has lived and loved and does not want to go through it again, claiming that, "Me lusteth no longer rotten boughs to climb", and tells love to "With idle use go use thy property, / And thereon spend thy many brittle darts". (Ln.

14, 11-12). He speaks as though he feels that he is now past love or too old or even wise to fall for its crafty tricks again; he feels deceived and spent. Sir Philip Sidney also uses the form of the sonnet to his advantage. In "Leave Me, O Love", Sidney uses the three quatrains with an ending couplet spacing of the sonnet. This allows each quatrain to feel like one separate thought within the entire idea of the sonnet. The last quatrain is the ending to the narrator's thought, which is then summarized in the ending couplet.

The ending couplet reads: Then farewell world, thy uttermost I see; 13 Eternal Love, maintain thy life in me. 14 The ending couplet acts as a sort of last word for the sonnet. It is usually not specific, but generalized to convey the basic idea of the sonnet and what the author was essentially trying to say and what he has come to after his experiences. This gives the poem a very solid feel to the ending; it feels like a catharsis for the narrator. Although similar in form and topic, the theme and tone of the two sonnets are not entirely similar. Both of the sonnets are based on love and the complex emotions that come from it, but they both do not share the same end feeling toward the general concept of love.

In Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder's "Farewell, Love", the narrator seems to be accepting of the failures that sometimes occur with love, and seems a little saddened and used by love and relationships. The tone that the narrator gives is that he has lived and experienced and doesn't care or feel the desire to experience anymore. This is emphasized with the last two lines of the poem that read: For hitherto though I have lost all my time 13 Me lusteth no longer rotten boughs to climb. 14 He generally sounds like he is too old to deal with the fickle and uncertain ways of love anymore. In Sir Philip Sidney's "Leave Me, O Love", the tone of the narrator is a little different than that of "Farewell, Love".

The narrator in Sidney's sonnet sounds a little more dramatic and distraught by love and his experiences. He seems to be more passionate about the idea of love and especially eternal love. The narrator sounds as though he is trying to speak to his subject: Draw in thy beams, and humble all thy might 5 To that sweet yoke where lasting freedoms be; 6 Which breaks the clouds and opens forth the light, 7 That doth both shine and give us sight to see. 8 O take fast hold; let that light be thy guide... 9 The tone is as though he is trying to communicate with his subject, and is trying to make his subject see things the way that he does. It is like he is trying to convince the subject to listen to what he has to say and believe that he is right in his views.

Although the narrators of both poems have love on their mind, they are not thinking about it in the same light. There is a fair amount of imagery in both sonnets, like in most love poems. There always seems to be some imagery in love poems, whether it be common clich " es dealing with radiance like the sun or lips as red as roses, writers of love poems almost always include some imagery. In Thomas Wyatt the Elder's "Farewell, Love", Wyatt uses imagery to describe the pleasured pain of love. Wyatt calls love "baited hooks... in blind error... that pricket h aye so sore", which draws from it the feeling of being lured in only to be stung (ln. 2, 5, 6).

The last line, however, really brings out the feeling the narrator is trying to express by the end of the sonnet with, "Me lusteth no longer rotten boughs to climb". (Ln. 14). This creates perfectly an image of exactly what the narrator feels; he no longer wants to go for something that is not secure, or climb on branches that he knows are just going to break on him. It is a perfect image with accordance to the feelings of the narrator. In Philip Sidney's "Leave Me, O Love", Sidney uses a lot of images and symbols to convey the narrator's thoughts.

Words such as "dust" and "rust" make the reader think of both death and growing old, because those are the ideas associated with those symbols. The second quatrain draws a nice picture for the reader: Draw in thy beams, and humble all thy might 5 To that sweet yoke where lasting freedoms be; 6 Which breaks the clouds and opens forth the light, 7 That doth both shine and give us sight to see. 8 Here, the reader is given an image of the sun and its light and rays of light, which shines through the clouds and opens up the darkness and allows them both to see the light; this is how the narrator feels about his love and relationship. Both writers use imagery to help illustrate the ideas of the narrator and emphasize their feelings regarding love and relationships. The sounds of the two sonnets are fairly different. In Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder's "Farewell, Love", Wyatt uses a lot of soft sounds like soft Os and Es.

This allows the poem to move from line to line without much haste except for the given punctuation. It also gives a more placid sound to the sonnet, leaving out harsher sounds like those found in "Leave Me, O Love". In "Leave Me, O Love", Sidney uses a lot of harder sounds like hard Ts and Es, which give a lot more emphasis to the endings of each of the lines along with the already given hard punctuations like periods and semi-colons. This gives the sonnet a harder feel and sound than the other, with coincides with the different tones and messages of the two. The softer sound goes with the softer peaceful message of "Farewell, Love", while the harder sounds of "Leave Me, O Love" go with its more dramatic and stronger message. Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder and Sir Philip Sidney were both wonderful craftsmen of the sonnet.

With careful skill and attention to spacing, emphasis, and detail, they both managed to create some of the best love sonnets to date. Though they are similar in some ways, and contrasting in others, each writer managed to construct their own unique sonnet with appropriate form, fitting language, and a unique idea on how to express an emotion or interpretation of love within it.