Song
1. What is the ocassion of the poem? What literary device does the poet employ? Describe what you know of the speaker, the listener, and the “she” referred to in the poem.
Answer:
The occasion is that the speaker is a man who has fallen in love with a girl that is incredibly shy, and seems to deny his advances because of it, (”suffer herself to be desir’d, And not blush so to be admire’d). The listener appears to be a rose, which the speaker ask’s to tell the girl that he likes, to be less shy, and to accept his advances. The poet personifies the rose, making it a person, the word rose is captialized, giving it a name, and by asking the rose to be a messenger makes it personified as well.
2. Paraphase each of the four stanzas.
Answer:
Beautiful rose go tell her, the woman I love, to accept or reject me. Perhaps by sending you, she will see how just like you, she is sweet and fair. Let this young woman know, the one who shuns those men who go after her, that if you (the rose) had grown in the desert, where no one is, then no one could have seen your beauty. There is little worth in hidden beauty, tell her to come forward, let her be looked upon and desired, and not blush so much upon my advances. Then rose, die, so that she may notice that all things sweet and fair do not last forever..
3. Describe the prosody, including stanza form, rhyme, meter, and notable metrical substitutions (spondees), as well as the structure of the poem. How do these choices help reinforce the poem’s content?
Answer:
There are four stanzas that consist of five lines each. The rhyme is ababbcdcddefeffghghh. Lines that have the a,c,e,g rhymes appear to be shorter then the other lines. The structure fits as each stanza is just one sentance, and each stanza is telling the flower to do a different thing, from telling the girl how beautiful she is, to giving up its life to send a message. This reinforces the cotent as it speaks of carpe diem, seize the day, or rather seize the beauty, before it is gone.
Virtue
1. Consider first Huberts use of metaphor and personification. In each case, what two unlikely things are being compared, and what do they have in common?
Answer:
The first metaphor is comparing daytime to the joining of the earth and sky. It must fall (die) and give way to night. The personification is in stanza two, the rose is so beautiful that is causes the people who look at it to cry. This rose too will die eventually. Spring is compared to a box of sweet smelling things, that too will disappear (die). The last metaphor is comparing a good person to seasoned timber, it (they) never fall, and as everything around them that is not good dies, they rise above.
2. How is the poem structured, and how doe the structure support its meaning? Consider parallelism, order, and the turn in the poem.
Answer:
The poem has four stanzas four lines each, and his the rhyme: ababcdcdefefghgh. Each stanza is one sentance, that describes different things. The day, rose, spring and soul are all sweet. It is ordered in a pattern of life span? The day is shortest, a rose in the ground will last a little longer, spring lasts a few months, finally a “good soul” will live the longest. The turn is that the first three stanzas all end in death, the day will die, the rose will die, spring will die, but a “good soul” will continue to live.
3. How does prosody reinforce the poem’s meaning?
Answer:
The first three stanzas all have the same rhyme (stanza one; b, stanza two: d, and stanza three: e). All end in die, and have a corresponding rhyming word. The last stanza ends in live, and has the rhyming word give, this is unlike the previous rhymes. This difference enforces the point of the poem, to live. Another difference that stands out is that the other three stanzas, except the last one, begins with sweet, the last begins with only.
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