Friday, January 8, 2016

What similar poetic devices appear both in Edmund Spenser's Amoretti 75 and in Shakespeare's sonnet 116?

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:

readability="11">

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:

readability="10">

“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 minds


Admit 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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