The Speakers Role in Three Poems by Howard, Wyatt, and Raleigh Essay

The Speakers Role in iii Poems by Howard, Wyatt, and Raleigh The speakers in Farewell, False Love, by Sir Walter Raleigh and My Lute, ignite by Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder have similar motivations, although the poems have differing constructs. separately speaker seeks to unleash his venomous emotions at a woman who has disdain him, by humiliating her through complicated revenge fantasies and savage metaphors. with this invective, he hopes to convince us of this womans inward ugliness. Raleigh catalogues a yen list of conceits for his false love she is every horrid thing from a siren song to an idle boy that sleeps in pleasures lap. The overtone of Henry Howard, Earl of Surreys Alas So All Things Now Do appreciation Their Peace bears more similarity to that of a soliloquy of lamentation than a libellous study. The speaker seems more preoccupied with his own woe than with shaming his scatty love before us, his audience, of whom he seems only peripherally aware(p). He does not berate the object of his affections for not requiting his love, only regrets that she cannot be with him, design a contrast between his heavy inward emotional swings and the calm night which outwardly surrounds him. Several centuries after these poets lived, John Stuart Mill would pull through an essay called What is Poetry? that codified a distinction between what he called poetry and eloquence. He writes . . . when he the poet turns round, and addresses himself to another(prenominal) person when the profess of utterance is not itself the end, but a means to an end -- viz., by the feelings he himself expresses, to work upon the feelings, or upon the belief or the will of another when the expression of his emotions, or of his thoughts tinged ... ...women whom supposedly seduced them in their youthful naivete. The narrator of My Lute, on the alert takes a distinct pleasure in conjuring up a future where his lover, not he, lies Plaining in vain unto the moon. Raleighs vehemen t yet touch language are entirely out of keeping with the innocent-schoolboy image of himself he would have us believe. Surreys speaker does not need to protest that he was beguiled, nor make any excuse for his misplaced emotion, because he is not aware of our listening, and therefore can feel no embarrassment at our penetrative he was rejected. These three poems, then, are written in the voice of the freeze off lover. In two of them, this lover is cognizant of our presence and seeks to impress us with his impassivity but in the third, he pours out his sorrow and minds not whether we think the less of him for his poor choice of women.