Sonnet Analysis the Quality of Beauty, Love, Essay

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Sonnet Analysis

The Quality of Beauty, Love, and Sonnets

Sir Thomas Wyatt's sonnet "How the Lover Perisheth in His Delight as the Fly in the Fire" describes how love, passion, and/or beauty can be all-consuming and self-destructive. The poet uses a long-running metaphor of birds as a substitute or symbol for male lovers generally and the speaker of the poem specifically, while the sun is the female lover and possessor of great beauty -- the source of the fire or passion, in some sense. It is the nature of the birds and their relationship to the sun that concern the speaker at first, however; he comments that some are able to shield their eyes from the sun's light, and that others only come out at night because the sun is simply too much for them to handle, but that many try to play in the sun but ultimately find themselves consumed by it's blaze. It is after describing this last type of bird that the speaker turns to a comment on himself and the reason behind the running metaphor -- he is one of the latter type of birds, drawn to his lover's flame (her beauty, perhaps, or perhaps just driven by the passion she kindles in him, though the two are essentially inseparable in such poetry) despite the fact that it will destroy him and with the added tragic element that he is well aware of his fate and is tortured by his lover's absence even while he reflects on the fact that his love and passion for her is destructive.

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This sonnet is a decent example of its genre and period, but there are several features that make it less successful than other sonnets, especially some of Shakespeare's, Donne's, and the more modern lines of Edna St. Vincent Millay. One issue is the title, which gives away the poem's conceit before it is even read; though the traditional form of simply….....

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