Sonnet 75 from Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti
sequence and sonnet 116 from Shakespeare’s collection of sonnets both use a
number of similar literary devices. Among those devices are the
following:
- Line one of sonnet 75 uses assonance,
the repetition of similar vowel sounds; so does line 5 of Shakespeare’s
sonnet:
One day I wrote her
name upon the strand . . .
.
……………………………………………
O,
no, it is an ever-fixed
mark
- Line 4 of
Spenser’s sonnet uses alliteration, the repetition of consonant sounds
(“made my
paynes his prey”). So, too,
does line 1 of Shakespeare’s poem “Let me not to the
marriage of true minds . . .
.”). - Line 4 of Spenser’s sonnet uses personification
(“But came the tyde, and made my paynes his prey”). So,
too, does line 9 of Shakespeare’s poem (“Love’s not
Time’s fool”). - Lines 9-10 of
Spenser’s sonnet use enjambment, in which the poet uses no punctuation at the end of a
line and thus runs the sense of the phrasing smoothly into the next
line:
“Not so,” quod I, “let baser things
devize
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame . . .
.”
Shakespeare uses this
device frequently throughout his sonnet, as in lines
1-2:
Let me
not to the marriage of true mindsAdmit impediments . . .
.
- Both poems use
imagery of nature to emphasize their points (as in lines 1-2 of Spenser’s sonnet and in
lines 6 and 10 of Shakespeare’s poem).
Both
poems celebrate true love (as opposed to selfish desire). Spenser’s is literally more
dramatic, since both the male and the female speak; Shakespeare’s poem, on the other
hand, presents simply the voice of the speaker himself.
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