The years a er Elizabeth:
In 1603 Elizabeth died childless and the English throne went to the son of Mary Stuart, James I of England.
He was Protestant but ini ally he seemed to be on the side of the Catholics. He was the rst king Stuart and
the rst to unite the Bri sh Isles into one kingdom. He believed in the divine right of the kings so he was an
absolute king and he believed that his power descended from gods. He summoned parliament only to ask
for money, this alienated Protestant who became opposed to the monarchy. However he made peace with
Spain and the expansion con nued establishing new colonies.
In 1605 an a empt was made on the kings life and on parliament by some radical catholics, who included
Guy Fawkes, tried to blow up parliament using gunpowder, the plot was discovered and then stopped.
As both catholics and puritans were forbidden to prac se their religion, many puritans le England for
Holland, where Puritanism was accepted. They had high sense of morality and duty. On 16th September
1620 a group of puritans known as the “pilgrim Fathers”, le from Plymouth aboard the May ower and
they reached Cape Cod across Atlan c, they named their landfall Plymouth Rock, the pilgrim fathers
established a colony with its own government.
The sonnet:
Invented in Italy, the sonnet gave a new set of poe c conven ons. The two most famous Italian sonnet
writers were Dante and Petrarch. The greatest English sonnet writers were Thomas Wya , Philip Sidney,
Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare, for the technical mastery with they manipulated the form. A er
1600, enthusiasm for the sonnet form suddenly declined.
The main themes of the sonnet were love, friendship, beauty, the destruc ve e ect of me and the desire
for women who were una ainable for the poet for the following reasons: they were already married, or
came from another social class, or they simply didn’t return their love for the poet.
The lady is an idealized gure and this raises several ques ons which seem to derive from Platonic ideas.
The original Italian sonnet form consists of a total of fourteen hendecasyllabic lines in two parts, the rst
part being an octave and the second being a sestet. The rhyme scheme was ABBA ABBA CDE CDE.
This form was later modi ed by English poets into the Elizabethan sonnet, again composed of fourteen
lines, but divided into three quatrains and one rhyming couplet. The rhyme scheme is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.
“I FIND NO PEACE” (Thomas Wya ) and “Pace non trovo” (Petrarca)
I Find No Peace is based on Petrarch’s sonnet Pace non trovo. The poem is a notable example of the
ambiguity involved in courtly love.
All of his feelings are expressed through contradic ons (eg eace/war, fear/hope, burn/freeze) which re ect
the doubts of the changing world around him. These expressions are called oxymoron. The poet is agitated
and at the same me feels weak to change his situa on. His love for the woman leads him to hate himself:
“I love another, and thus I hate myself”.
The di erences between the two texts are: the rhythmic schemes, in fact the English version follows that of
the English sonnet ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, while the Italian one follows the classic ABBA ABBA CDE CDE.
In both poems the topic is love but in Petrarch's this is caused directly by a single woman, who is Laura, and
not like the English version where the topic is described in a more general way. Then in Wya 's poem he
himself is pleased with the su ering of love but doesn’t directly say the force that imprisons him in his
sadness, from this we understand that the author su ers and can’t go on, overcoming this di culty of his
life, because ini ally he does not love himself.
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William Shakespeare:
The sonnets to the young man speak about the themes of platonic love, we see all the di erent sen ment
that the young man inspires in Shakespeare. Shakespeare frequently returns to the con ict between beauty
of what his eyes see and the truth of what his heart knows, he also wishes to preserve the eternal part of
the young man’s beauty against the e ects of me. Love is judged to be stronger than me, but poetry is
considered immortal. In fact, many sonnets to the young man repeat this idea of poetry’s capacity to
immortalize.
Sonnets to the young man:
The sonnets to the young man speak about the themes of platonic love, we see all the di erent sen ment
that the young man inspires in Shakespeare. Shakespeare frequently returns to the con ict between beauty
of what his eyes see and the truth of what his heart knows, he also wishes to preserve the eternal part of
the young man’s beauty against the e ects of me. Love is judged to be stronger than me, but poetry is
considered immortal. In fact, many sonnets to the young man repeat this idea of poetry’s capacity to
immortalize.
SONNET 18:
This sonnet is known with the rst line of the sonnets or with its number so “sonnet 18”, it is na Elizabethan
sonnet. At the begins the poet compare the young man, to which the sonnet is dedicated, to a summer’s
day, but summer is o en short and the weather is changeable and doesn’t give the sense of balance and
harmony the poet sees in the young man’s beauty, it is also true that the young man’s youth will not last
long. In fact it is only in art that the poet will be able to preserve the idea of youth. This marks the tuning
point of the sonnet at the line 9; in the world of the poem, the young man’s beauty will last as long readers
can read this poem.
Sonnets to the dark lady:
The second, smaller group of sonnets wri en by Shakespeare is addressed to a "dark lady". These sonnets
represent a more real descrip on of a love story even rejec ng many of the tradi onal conven ons of
Elizabethan love poetry, in fact here we can nd love in all its colors, such as from irony to despair.
The iden ty of the dark lady remains a mystery. Describing her, Shakespeare highlights how she doesn’t
correspond to conven onal ideas about the beauty of her me.
Her "naturalness" makes her extremely "rare" in a world where the desire of other women is to correspond
to an ideal of beauty that makes them all similar and banal. This is also evident in today's beauty world,
when girls try to look like the best in uencers.
What fascinates the poet in his lady are the things that make her unique. O en, in fact, it is her apparent
"imperfec ons" that dis nguish her from other women.
SONNET 130:
In this sonnet, one of the most famous dedicated to the dark woman, Shakespeare cri cizes the tendency of
Elizabethan poetry to compare the beloved with the glories of nature, taking inspira on from Platonic
no ons. All the comparisons of the woman that the poet makes are nega ve, at rst it seems that this
vision is realis c: leading us to think that she isn’t beau ful according to the criteria of ideal beauty.
However, this also has the e ect of surrounding the woman in mystery, in fact we only know that she has
dark hair and therefore we can’t imagine her.
In fact, at the end of the sonnet the poet declares that he loves his woman because of her uniqueness.
Poetry therefore denies the objec vity of beauty, sugges ng instead that beauty is in the eye of the
beholder.
Metaphysical poetry:
This phrase is derived from the scornful remarks of 18th-century. Metaphysical means concerned with the
fundamental problems of the nature of he universe, and man’s func on or place in life. The metaphysical
poets wrote during the rst three-quarters of the 17th century. They re ected the intellectual and spiritual
crisis of their age. The poet was expected to be a man of “wit” displaying not only his sensi vity but also his
knowledge and cleverness. The ability was to make up unusual metaphors and images and arrange them in
an excepted way so as to surprise the reader. The poem begin in medias res, introducing the reader in the
middle of the poet’s argument.
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John Done:
He is an unconven onal poet, he reject the Elizabethan idea, he represented something new. He Crete’s a
way of wri ng which turned around these features:
• An intensive drama c quality
• The use of wit and unusual, intellectual metaphors called conceits, he use them to shock and
surprise the rider, to show his knowledge. he use puns, using words that make the same sound but
di erent meaning and he use also a lot of paradox, statesman which it says to contradict himself
but in reality says something true.
• A rhetorical stance with a variety of tone and register.
The most powerful image in Donne is that of death, connected with darkness and sickness, another image is
that of the world, the lovers are the world, other images draw upon current beliefs in metaphysics,
cosmology, natural science, medicine, alchemy and geography (conceits).
BATTER MY HEART:
In the poem John Donne makes a request to God, seen in his threefold person. The poet's heart beats a lot,
because he turns directly to God, who is powerful. Only God, considering his greatness and magni cence, is
able to educate men by trying to make them follow the right path, correc ng their errors. Turning to him,
Donne asks him to destroy him and make him reborn as a new person. Only God is capable, according to
the poet, of making him overcome the anguish and worries of every day thanks to his greatness.
Star ng from the second quatrain it is noted how the poet is also nega vely obsessed with sin and always
tries in every way to use ra onality as a way to avoid falling into tempta on. A metaphor rela ng to this
aspect is contained in these verses: "I, like an usurp'd town, labor to admit you, but Oh, to no end" in which
he imagines himself as a usurper of a city who, despite working a lot arduously and hard, he doesn't get any
kind of result. He also claims that his ac ons are false and evil, which is why he considers himself almost a
real prisoner of the devil. He considers God as good and maintains that every man must be guided by him
and love him, as it leads to salva on.
We therefore glimpse a double condi on of Women: on the one hand he is a sinner, but on the other he
would like to be able to love God uncondi onally.
For the author of the poem we can be considered free only if we are "slaves of God". Women therefore has
the only desire to want to change their lifestyle, freeing themselves from passions and sin in order to nally
become a new man.
THE SUN RISING:
"The sun rising" is the most famous of Donne's love poems. It is a 30-line poem where the poets expresses
his disappointment for the rising of the sun which ends the mee ng of the two lovers.
In the rst stanza, Donne addresses the sun with a strong a tude asking it to leave the two lovers alone
and do other things such us rush late school boys to start their day because he does not want to leave his
lover, therefore he images a world where two lovers can be always together without the sun annoying
them.
In the second stanza, the poet con nuous to make fun of the sun saying that it has no real power over him
and his lover. The poet could eclipse the sun with a wink but yet he does not want to because he would
leave the sight of his lover and for him she is all that ma ers.
In the last stanza, the poet realizes that a er all the sun does not need to leave the room because the duty
of the sun is to warm the world and for the poet, him and his lover are the world in par cular the bed is the
Earth and the walls are the Spheres. It is a reference to the Ptolemaic system.
"The sun rising" is divided in three stanzas, each of which rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. The meter is
irregular and the longest line is at the end of each stanzas. The poet to talk about his lover uses a lot of
hyperbole: "She is all states, all princes", " If her eyes have not blinded thine"; to talk about the sun he uses
a lot of personi ca ons: "busy", " old", “fool".
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The rise of Puritanism:
James I died and his son Charles I became king of England, he took for guarantee his divine right so he
followed his father footsteps and he also wanted to rule as an absolute monarch. This views had became
unsustainable, England was in the process of great change: the wealth of the na on had shi ed from the
nobility to the landed gentry and the professional people, comprised the new middle class, there were also
the con nuing religious con ict between Catholics and Protestants. The king was determined that he could
raise money on his own. In 1628 a law, the pe on of right, was forced on Charles, which limited his power
and prevented him from raising taxes without parliamentary authoriza on. When parliament resumed to
give him money, the king responded by dissolving parliament and ruled as an absolute monarch for 11
years. A civil war broke out between the Parliamentarians, led by Oliver Cromwell, and the Royalists,
supported the king. The parliamentarians were puritan and were supported by the new gentry. They were
divided between a more conserva ve and more radical group, the levelers argued for substan al
democra c reforms which they included in a manifesto called “the agreement of the people”. Oliver
Cromwell tried to mediate between these two groups and to do this he needed the military support of the
levelers who formed his new model army so the power of Oliver was relate on the army.
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A er a series of ba le, Oliver Cromwell took control of London and arrested over 100 member of
parliament loyal to the king. The members that remained formed Rump Parliament, who voted for Charles
I’execu on, the levelers were suppressed. King Charles I was executed, the monarchy was abolished and
Cromwell established a republic known as the Commonwealth. He resume the naviga on Acts, imposed a
limit on the introduc on of goods into ports and this led to a war with Holland, Dutch were defeated.
Sco sh and Irish dissent was suppressed. Cromwell made himself Lord Protector, a sort of dictatorship, a
posi on he held un l his death.