The Speakers Role in Three Poems by Howard, Wyatt, and Raleigh Essay

The Speakers Role in Three Poems by Howard, Wyatt, and capital of North Carolina The speakers in Farewell, False Love, by Sir Walter Raleigh and My Lute, Awake by Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder convey similar motivations, although the poems have differing constructs. Each speaker seeks to unleash his venomous emotions at a woman who has scorned him, by humiliating her through complicated revenge fantasies and cruel metaphors. Through this invective, he hopes to convince us of this womans inward ugliness. Raleigh catalogues a long list of conceits for his false love she is every horrid topic from a siren song to an idle boy that sleeps in pleasures dress circle. The overtone of Henry Howard, Earl of Surreys Alas So All Things Now Do Hold Their Peace bears more similarity to that of a soliloquy of lament than a libellous study. The speaker seems more preoccupied with his own woefulness than with shaming his absent love before us, his audience, of whom he seems only peripherally awa re. He does non berate the object of his affections for not requiting his love, only regrets that she cannot be with him, drawing a contrast amongst his heavy inward stimulated swings and the peaceful night which outwardly surrounds him. Several centuries after these poets lived, John Stuart move would write an essay called What is Poetry? that codified a distinction between what he called poetry and eloquence. He writes . . . when he the poet turns round, and addresses himself to another somebody when the act of utterance is not itself the suppress, but a means to an end -- viz., by the feelings he himself expresses, to work upon the feelings, or upon the belief or the allow for of another when the expression of his emotions, or of his thoughts tinged ... ...women whom supposedly seduced them in their youthful naivete. The bank clerk of My Lute, Awake takes a distinct pleasure in conjuring up a future where his lover, not he, lies Plaining in vain unto the moon. Raleighs vehement all the same affected language are entirely out of keeping with the innocent-schoolboy insure of himself he would have us believe. Surreys speaker does not need to declare that he was beguiled, nor make any excuse for his misplaced emotion, because he is not aware of our listening, and therefore can feel no embarrassment at our knowing he was rejected. These three poems, then, are written in the interpretive program of the spurned lover. In two of them, this lover is cognizant of our presence and seeks to expunge us with his impassivity but in the third, he pours out his regret and minds not whether we think the less of him for his poor choice of women.