Let's face it, poetry is not for everyone. Even after the Pass Reading strategies, a lot of these poems do not make as much sense to me as they should. After completing the poems for this week's reading, I am able to say that Edmund Spenser’s collection of sonnets really impacted me.
Why was it Spenser’s poems that reached me? Was it because they were short? Perhaps, but that’s only a part of it. In terms of poems, it comes down to the reader’s personality at the time what reaches them. The effectiveness of any given poem can vary for a person from day to day. A poem that a person loves today, they might not like it next week. A reader’s mood is what sets a poem up for failure or flight.
I would say that Spenser’s poems reached me this week because I felt that each sonnet had a short story behind it that I could relate to. The sonnets had its own themes or situations, each containing a different story that seemed to be written about different people. It almost reminded me of one of those movies with an all star cast, where all the different stories of love eventually intertwined.
The other thing that Spencer’s sonnets from Amoretti had in common was that they were about joyous love. This is where we can see firsthand that a poets’ life does come into play. Spencer had just married Elizabeth Boyle a year before he published these sonnets. The effectiveness of a poem really comes down to the reader. Spencer’s poems reached me because it was enjoyable reading and hearing other people’s descriptions of joyous love.
Another reason that these sonnets in particular may have effected some more than others were their concentration on the idea of love. It’s amazing how the idea of love, and what it means to feel it and hang onto, it hasn’t changed much. The idea of beauty and brains are talked about throughout Spencer’s poems. However, two of his sonnets contradict each other greatly. Sonnet 64 is a poem that creates vivid imagery for the reader. The poem describes a woman’s beauty is terms of flowers. It describes her lips, cheeks, eyes, neck, ect. in terms of various flowers. In Sonnet 79, Spencer writes about how physical beauty is not important and intelligence is what he looks for. The last line in this sonnet is actually, “All other fayre, lyke flowers, untimely fade (14)”. This is a very interesting last line.
These two poems show exactly how wonderful of a poet Edmund Spencer is. How one poet could write from the perspective of seemingly two completely different people. This brings us back to the point of how it may feel that all of his sonnets are telling the love of different people. The effectiveness of poems come from the eyes of the reader, and Spenser’s poems were the ones that reached me the most.
I agree that one of the best aspects of Spencer's poetry was his ability to keep it short. In doing so I felt he was able to maintain focus on his themes. The lack of wordiness allowed for the reader to really think about the themes, part of which if feel Spencer intended to do. I thought it was great how you were able to pinpoint your reason for enjoying the poems so much, and how Spencer's themes played a large part in that.
ReplyDeleteYou brought up an interesting point about the subjectivity of literary interpretation, especially with regard to poetry. Whether a person enjoys a poem or not is totally based on a person's outlook, mood, and the context in which he or she read it. Even what a person thinks a poem means is subjective. It would be hard to argue that any of the poems we read this week aren't about love, but they certainly all have nuanced meanings. A reader deep in love might read the poems from this week and see only the joy, or at least emphasize that element in his interpretation. A person who has just had his heart broken might read the poems as more about the pain of love.
ReplyDeleteI love that you just confessed what you've been feeling about the reading, when most of us, even if we didn't like it, wouldn't mention how nothing is making sense. I give you props for that. I, actually, didn't really liek Spensers. They didnt' speak to me as much as others, Mary (I forget her last name at the moment)'s sonnets. I felt Spenser's were too wordy and didn't make much sense. Mary's, on the other hand, spoke to me because they weren't about hopeless love, but were mostly about love that could be found again, or hope that could be found. They ended more hopeful then the other poets'.
ReplyDeleteI did find Spenser to be very courageous in the sens that he decided to focus his topic on having love. However, this subject matter may resonant to the few who are actually experiencing love. However, I found the line “All other fayre, lyke flowers, untimely fade (14)” to be very contradictory to Sonnet 64. It was a very melancholy line to end an otherwise joyous filled story. This interested me greatly and I decided to do some research on "Amoretti" and found that there are actually 90 sonnets. The last line of the full poem goes "My pining anguish to appease." http://theotherpages.org/poems/spenser3.html- This is the link to the rest of the poem. I feel that the Norton Book did a poor job of explaining this to the reader.
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