Dr. Prinsky

Engl. 3002/6315: Engl. Literature Renaissance to Restoration

Notes and Questions on the Assigned Poetry of Edmund Waller (in NAEL)

S1. N & Q on Waller’s “Song: ‘Go, Lovely Rose’”

S1.1 (a) Waller’s poem is one of the most famous examples of the use of apostrophe in English poetry. However, this figure of speech is usually treated superficially in introduction to literature textbooks, which fail to indicate clearly enough how it is used to convey theme or meaning. Its primary function is usually (e.g., Keats’s “Bright Star” and Wordsworth’s “London, 1802”) to reveal things about the speaker’s emotional, psychological, or societal state or condition. In this poem, though, how is the figure used as part of the strategy or maneuvering that might go on (in theory – probably not in reality, today, in this class anyway) in the romantic relationship. That is, how does the speaker use his address to the particular object in order to convey things to a particular human listener? Why does he go to the trouble of making his approach so oblique – why doesn’t he just tell the human listener what he wants to say, rather than apostrophizing the object that he does? (b) What several parallels does the speaker find or assert between the object apostrophized and the overhearing listener? (c) How is the poem arranged mainly chronologically, and how or why is this organization thematic in the poem ? (c) What repeated punctuation mark suggests something about the speaker’s tone, along with the verb form (actually the “mood” of the verb) in “Go” (line 1) and “die” (line 16)? (d) How does the speaker use a combination of pun and zeugma on “wastes” (line 2)? Helping to convey what ideas?