BA #3

B.
Drayton, Michael. "Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part." 1619.

"Now at the last gasp of Love's latest breath,
When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies,
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And Innocence is closing up his eyes,
Now if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou mightst him yet recover." (lines 9-14)

These six lines of the poem bring the message that the persona portrays from its previous statement of the closure of a relationship to a desperate plea for a change of heart. This poem (and specifically these lines) adhere to the form of an English Sonnet, with the exception of the final couplet. Each line in the couplet has one extra syllable, as if the final lines of the sonnet are struggling to outlive the "end" of the lines (where the iambic pentameter of the poem would have them end); this is representational of the emotional situation in which this last quatrain and the couplet are presented. The author uses the personification of intangibles such as love, passion, faith, and innocence to express the fragile vitality of these emotions which the persona is striving to save. I find it interesting that sonnets are usually about love, because it seems contradictory for something as chaotic and random as love to be organized (in poetry, no less) in such a structured fashion as a sonnet. It seems that in traditional sonnets, this contradiction either serves the purpose of contrasting the disarray of love with this strict form of poetry, or the structure and order that come with a sonnet act as a counterpoint to the disorder of love. I believe the latter is the situation in this sonnet; the stress, sadness, and hope in the voice of the poem seem to be soothed by the secure structure of a sonnet. Though in the first two quatrains of the poem, the persona tries to be strong and secure, the expression of fragility and the reliance on the security of structure show that the true point of the poem, though it contradicts the title and earlier lines, is an imploration for a sign of hope when there seems to be none.