"Care-charmer Sleep, Son of the Sable Night" (Delia 45)

1. How does the dominant figure of speech in the poem, apostrophe*, help convey anything about the speaker's emotional or psychological state? How does his, in effect, talking to himself, or forming this two-"person" (how might the personification* suggest something about the speaker's psychological or emotional state?) group suggest something about his situation? How is the psychological portrait accurate, in your own experience?

2. How does this poem compare or contrast (or both) with Sidney's Astrophil and Stella 31 and 39?

3. (a) How is the Italian form of the sonnet overlaid on the English form in this poem? How are octave and sestet definite units? How are three quatrains and couplet definite units? How does grammar (that is, sentence structure) help articulate the poem's structure? (b) How do rhythm, meter, rhyme, and sound effects work expressively in the poem? For example, how does the sigmatism* (a special form of alliteration*) help express the speaker's situation or state in line 1? How is the sigmatism continued in lines 2-3 and elsewhere in the poem? With what effect or effects? Alliteration (or consonance) of the r's in lines 3-4? Assonance* in line 7?

4. How are denotation(s) and connotation(s) multiple and expressive in -charmer(1), sable(1), languish(3), untruth(8) [why, other than for rhyme*--and how is the rhyme significant between lines 6 and 8?--not falsity or some other synonym]?

5. (a) How is inverted word order emphatic in line 4? Helping to emphasize what, exactly? (b) How do sentence structure and pun* help create multiple meanings in still(13)? How is the position of still(13) in its line expressive? (c) What kind of verbs (what mood of verbs, to use the technical term) are relieve(3), restore(3), return(4), and cease(9)? How does this kind or mood of verb help express the speaker's tone and emotional state or condition?

6. (a) How do light and dark become symbols* or metonymies* in the poem? (b) What paradox* or paradoxes may there be in lines 1-3?
 

Delia 46: "Let others sing of knights and paladins"

1. How might this sonnet be seen to have both an Italian (octave and sestet) as well as English (three quatrains and couplet) form, including the content of the various parts?

2. How does the subject matter of this poem connect with that in Sidney's Astrophil and Stella Nos. 6 & 15, as well as Shakespeare's Sonnet 55 ("Not marble, nor the gilded monuments")?

3. (A) How does Daniel's speaker pun on "lines" (line 3)? (B) How does Daniel's speaker draw on both Greco-Roman epics (including epic conventions, as well as the religious background of those epics -- e.g., Homer's Odyssey or Vergil's Aeneid) as well as the Judeo-Christian tradition to praise the beloved? (C) What ideas about the relation between the writer's biography and the writer's work are suggested by the sonnet, particularly the ending?