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- Anthology Part 3: love, loss and power
Anthology Part 3: love, loss and power
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Four poems written before 1929 look at love that lasts, love that traps, love that controls, and love facing death.
Sonnet 116 (Shakespeare)
Love is "an ever-fixed mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken", and "Love's not Time's fool".
The final couplet stakes everything on it: "If this be error and upon me proved, / I never writ, nor no man ever loved."
Remember (Christina Rossetti)
The speaker asks her beloved to remember her after death, but at the volta she changes her mind: "Better by far you should forget and smile / Than that you should remember and be sad."
It is a Petrarchan sonnet.
La Belle Dame sans Merci (Keats) and My Last Duchess (Browning)
My Last Duchess: a dramatic monologue in which the Duke of Ferrara reveals his jealousy and controlling nature: "I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together."
How do Sonnet 116 and Remember both use the sonnet form?
- Both are 14-line sonnets, the traditional form for love poetry.
- Shakespeare uses a final couplet to state his certainty.
- Rossetti uses the volta to change her mind, choosing her lover's happiness over being remembered.
Answer: Shakespeare uses the closing couplet to seal his argument about constant love; Rossetti uses the volta to turn from wanting to be remembered to wanting her lover to be happy.
Sonnet 116: love is constant and unchanging. Remember: love that puts the beloved's happiness first, volta. La Belle Dame: destructive enchantment, ballad. My Last Duchess: love as possession and control.
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