Although his poetry was largely ignored and dismissed in his time, John Donne is known today as one of the finest poets of the late 16th and early 17th centuries century. He gained this reputation by creating different poetry, which sets him apart from his peers. Perhaps the best way to examine these unique characteristics is to analyze one of Donne's poems and that of another famous poet of his time, Edmund Spenser. Comparing and contrasting Edmund Spenser's Sonnet 75 and John Donne's "The Blossom," the qualities of Donne's poetry, new and unique for the time, clearly emerge. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get an original essay There are a few characteristics that Donne's "The Blossom" and Spenser's Sonnet 75 have in common. To begin with, both poems involve the action of speech, with Spenser speaking to his lover and Donne speaking to a flower and then to his heart. They both use symbols from the beginning: Spenser uses the ocean as a metaphor for death and Donne uses a flower to represent newly blossoming love. Apart from this, however, Spenser's and Donne's poems are different in both form and subject. Sonnet 75 is found in Spenser's “Amoretti and Epithalamion,” published in London in 1595 (Spenser 585). However, it is difficult to date Donne’s “Songs and Sonnets”. Despite searching our text John Donne: Selected Poetry, our class notes, and the Internet, I was unable to find a specific date for “The Blossom.” But since the subject matter of most of the poems in "Songs and Sonnets" appears to be secular, I believe it is reasonable to infer that Donne wrote "The Blossom" during his "rude and rogue, man-about-town" years, some time before secretly married Anne More in December 1601 (Donne xxiv). Because both poems were written during the Petrarchan sonnet craze that was taking place in England beginning in the 1590s, one might expect them to share a common form and style, but this does not is not the case. Spenser's poetry follows a slight variation of the English Petrarchan sonnet. sonnet (three quatrains followed by a couplet), Donne departs from the Petrarchian tendency by ensuring that his poem consists of five stanzas, each stanza containing a quatrain and two couplets. The rhythm of the two poems also varies. Spenser writes Sonnet 75 with lines of approximately the same length, varying between 9 and 11 syllables. Donne's poem, however, consists of lines of varying length in each stanza: approximately 7, 9, 10, 10, 10, 4, 10, 10 syllables. He continues this same pattern with each stanza of the poem. The subject matter differs greatly between the two poems. Sonnet 75 first begins with a metaphorical visit to a beach in which the author demonstrates the futility of man's attempts to immortalize "a mortal thing" (line 6). The poem, however, is not about a visit to the beach, and after four lines the speaker is off the beach and speaking to a lover who criticizes him for trying to resist the tide of time and to the inevitable fate of being forgotten. The speaker then argues that his lover and their love are greater than other "lower things" (line 9), that his verse will make them both eternal, and that their love is so great that it will renew life after death. death will have conquered the world. (lines 13-14). These features are very typical of the poetry of this era. The brief description of the speaker's lover as possessing "rare virtues" (line 11) is a common characteristic of any young girl in Petrarch's sonnets. Likewise, the idea of ​​a poem perpetuating the speakersbeloved appears everywhere in the poetry of the late 16th and early 17th centuries (cf. Shakespeare's Sonnets 18 and 19). Spenser also advances the idea that their love is a kind of life-renewing love, and that it will be observed by all inhabitants of the earth as the ideal model of love. This thought refers to the ancient concept of the "Golden World", or the Mimetic. The power of the ideal model, which is another common characteristic of the writings of the time. While Spenser sticks to common contemporary themes, Donne's poem is much more unique. “The Blossom,” instead of beginning with a scene, begins with the speaker speaking to a flower. He laments the flower's fate because he knows that, despite the flower's vivacity and triumph today, he will find it "fallen, or not at all" tomorrow (line 8). Donne then transforms the flower of the first stanza into his heart in the second stanza. Here the speech act really plays an important role, because the reader gets the feeling that the heart and the speaker are two separate beings, and the speaker truly pities the poor heart. Then the unthinkable happens: the heart actually responds to the speaker. The heart invokes logic to the speaker, arguing that he should "go to your friends, whose love and means are present / Various contents / To your eyes, your ears, your tongue and all." / So if your body goes away, why do you need a heart? (lines 21-24). In the next stanza, the speaker concedes to the stubborn heart, but warns her that "A naked thinking heart, which does not show itself, / Is to a woman, a kind of ghost" (lines 27-24). 28). It warns the heart that, despite all its efforts, a woman will never know a heart. In the fourth stanza, the speaker tells his heart to meet him in London, where he will be in a much happier state after being in the company of his friends. He also predicts that he will find "another friend, whom we will find / As happy to have my body as my spirit" to whom he can give his heart (lines 39-40). Having the speaker address an inanimate object is the first unique feature of Donne's poem. In Sonnet 75, the speaker speaks only to his lover, but in "The Blossom" the speaker never actually speaks to another human being, although he speaks all the time. The symbol of the flower is also an example of the metaphysical aspect of Donne's poetry which distinguishes him from his contemporaries. Whereas the beach scene in Sonnet 75 was a very simple metaphor for mortality, the flower in "The Blossom" moves from being a metaphor for new love to its own complex entity; it is something that is both interior and exterior to man. The way the poems treat their respective mistresses is also different. Spenser speaks of woman as the ideal virtuous woman that everyone should remember forever, while Donne speaks of woman as a fleeting attraction that can be easily replaced. This brings us to the next interesting difference between the two poems. It is also important to note the difference in tone. Sonnet 75 maintains a very serious tone throughout the poem. Spenser doesn't joke when it comes to mortality and the importance of his verses eternalizing his lover. And although Donne's poem begins by seeming serious and sad, with terms like "poor flower" and "poor heart", it ends up seeming light. The speaker travels to London to be among friends, becoming "fresher and fatter" (line 35), which results in a carefree attitude because he is sure he can find another anonymous friend to give his heart to , as if it really doesn't mean much to him. It is very easy to see that Donne was doing new and unique things with his poetry, but it is difficult to explain these 1601..