Poetry for Students, Volume 35

Shakespeare’s romantic comedies. The speaker is Jaques, a lord attending the banished Duke of Burgundy, referred to in the play ...

decision.’’ In giving the speech to Jaques, Shake- speare makes a tired cliche ́ ‘‘dramatically effec- tive.’’ His audience pays ...

discusses a certain courtier’s beard, which he claims is the cause for a quarrel seven times removed. The seven instances are th ...

one to deal with erotic subject matter in the first person. The link between medieval first-person gen- res and Dante and Petrar ...

emerges from ‘‘relationships between consecutive sonnets that are bewilderingly unstable.’’ Yet the link between the speaker’s c ...

exciting as it is to imagine a discovery of Shake- speare’s autograph different from Thorpe’s 1609 text, such a discovery would ...

Athanasian Creed, the speaker could also be accusing the young addressee of promiscuity: Fair, kind and true have often lived al ...

effectively implies that the speaker’s need for equality has reached a desperate stage. The speaker’s rudeness repels, his despa ...

conflicted between intellectual and sensual reluc- tance pitched against an inexplicable emotional craving: Nor taste, nor smell ...

The ‘‘masculine’’ voice is also used to describe the addressee in Petrarchan terms that are tradi- tionally associated with fema ...

not easily ‘‘pursued’’—Shakespeare simultane- ously harkens back to the Platonic and Neopla- tonic ideas of wooing of the soul b ...

inspired by the painting, Kaflka Tamura falls in love with Miss Saeki both as woman and as his possible lost mother, embracing o ...

Although he never mentions Jaques or Shake- speare, Shenk validates their insight into this con- dition as ‘‘second childhood an ...

pamphlets, plays, and poetry, all revealing some- thing about the times in which these writers lived. Secara, Maggie,A Compendiu ...

Song John Donne was an English poet and Protestant clergyman who wrote in the late-Elizabethan Age and the Jacobean Age. He is t ...

to find a chaste woman anywhere in the world. The poet’s use of a range of unusual images, his witty and argumentative approach ...

Poem Text Go, and catch a falling star, Get with child a mandrake root, Tell me, where all past years are, Or who cleft the Devi ...

Christian iconography, the devil is portrayed as having a tail and horns as well as a cleft foot. Line 5 presents the poet’s nex ...

poem, but it is highly likely that Donne wrote it when he was a young man with women on his mind. The speaker is likely a young ...

Misogyny The tone of the speaker might be seen as playful as he expounds on the inconstancy of women, but it is possible to take ...