"How Many Paltry, Foolish Painted Things" (Idea 6)

1. How does the subject matter of this sonnet connect with that in Shakespeare's Sonnet 55 ("Not marble, nor the gilded monuments")?

2. How does this sonnet have both an Italian form (octave and sestet), as well as English form (three quatrains and couplet), including in the content of the various parts?

3. (A) What particular scene is implied in the first two lines of the sonnet? What meanings does "painted" (line 1) have? (B) How does the locomotion of lines 1-2 contrast with that in lines 13-14, conveying what ideas? (C) How is the figure of speech hyperbole used thematically or significantly or meaningfully in the poem? (D) How might the word "still" (line 14) have multiple meanings?

4. Why the listing of both "virgins and matrons" in line 9?
 

"Since There's No Help, Come Let Us Kiss and Part" (Idea 61)

1. The wit in English Renaissance poetry frequently shows in how strategy and stratagems appear in the wooing or courtship love poem (cf. Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," Donne's "The Flea" and "The Apparition," Jonson's "Song: To Celia," Suckling's "Out upon It!", and Waller's "Song: 'Go, Lovely Rose'"). How does this poem appear at first to be one poetic genre (cf. Wyatt's "Farewell, Love," Ralegh's "Farewell, False Love," and Herrick's "Upon the Loss of His Mistresses"), but to cleverly (and persuasively) modulate into the wooing love lyric?

2. (a1) How do Drayton and the speaker manipulate and modulate tones* in the poem? (a2) Where, and how, in diction* and grammar (sentence structure) is the speaker colloquial and forceful? What kind of verbs (what mood, to use the technical grammatical term) are come(1), shake(5), and Be(7)? Why do sentence structure and verbs change to the conditional in the poem's concluding couplet? (a3) What expressive effect, what effect as strategy or stratagem, does the grammar of periodic sentence (a term that can be looked up in both collegiate dictionary and composition handbook) have in lines 9-14? (Note that the opposite of the periodic sentence is the loose or cumulative sentence, also an expressive rhetorical figure or stylistic device.) (a4) How does a metonymic gesture recommended by the speaker in the first line have simultaneously an apparent and an ulterior motive? (b) How might the Italian form of the sonnet be seen to be overlaid on the English form of the sonnet in this poem? How do rhyme scheme and grammar (sentence structure) help articulate the two sonnet forms in the poem?

3. (a) How might the metonymy* in line 7 be expressive? (b) How might the very use of personification* in the multiple personifications that create the little drama of the sestet be related to the speaker's persuasive purposes? (b) Why or how is the creation of the little dramatic scene through personification* in the sestet expressive and persuasive? Who are the four dramatis personae (three abstract personifications, plus "thou") created in the sestet? What qualities is the speaker suggesting about his love (the emotion)? How does he draw in the female addressee (listener, auditor) of the poem? (c) What witty latent paradox* is there in the word speechless(10)? (d) How is drama created in the verb forms in lines 11-12? (e) How is repetition used expressively and persuasively in line 3 and in lines 9 and 13 ("now")?

4. What lexical (word meaning) problem is there in latest(9), which does not have its usual modern sense but instead what today is an archaic sense? (Compare the use of the word in line 9 of Ralegh's "[On the Life of Man].")