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

The Speakers Role in Three Poems by Howard, Wyatt, and capital of North Carolina The speakers in Farewell, False Love, by Sir Walter Raleigh and My Lute, Awake by Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder have similar motivations, although the poems have differing constructs. Each speaker seeks to unleash his venomous emotions at a woman who has scorned him, by humiliating her through complicated revenge fantasies and savage metaphors. Through this invective, he hopes to convince us of this womans inward ugliness. Raleigh catalogues a long list of conceits for his false love she is every horrid thing from a siren song to an idle boy that sleeps in pleasures round. The overtone of Henry Howard, Earl of Surreys Alas So All Things Now Do Hold 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 absent love before us, his audience, of whom he seems only peripherally alert. He does not stir the object of his affections for not requiting his love, only regrets that she cannot be with him, drawing a contrast between his heavy inward emotional swings and the peaceful night which outwardly surrounds him. Several centuries after these poets lived, John Stuart Mill would write 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 person when the act 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 judgment 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, Awake takes a distinct pleasure in create up a future where his lover, not he, lies Plaining in vain unto the moon. Raleighs vehement yet affected language are e ntirely out of keeping with the innocent-schoolboy calculate 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 knowing he was rejected. These three poems, then, are written in the voice of the spurned 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 slight of him for his poor choice of women.