poetic justice
Both sonnets present religious doubt between the narrator and his relationship to God. Each poet uses imagery to his advantage to create feeling of desperateness. Both language and biblical metaphors give each sonnet a personality and a voice. Milton's sonnet is a dialogue in the form of a question and answer. It is divided into an octet, which introduces the problematic situation and leads to the question, and a sestet, which offers an answer to the problem. After posing the question, the he writes that he "fondly ask[s]," attempting to minimize damage he may have caused by questioning God. Since "fondly" denotes "thoughtlessly," he indicates that voicing his doubt was an attempt to negate the effects of questioning God, thus suggesting the question is a spontaneous, emotional explosion due to internal conflict of faith and doubt. In the earlier part of the octet, the narrator refers to the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25.14-30). He uses this allusion to achieve several things; the first is to compare himself with the man with one Talent, indirectly signifying that he feels God is a strict master. The narrator begins to doubt God "when [he] consider[s] how [his] light is spent" because he feels that God expects too much from
him. His heavily charged question, "Doth God exact day-labor, light denied," reveals his feeling that what God "exacts" is practically impossible because one needs light in order to perform day-labor. The poem does not end in despair however. The speaker leaves behind the fears inspired by his reflection on one sacrament - baptism - to find hope in the thought of another - the Lord's Supper. Having acknowledged the fiery guilt of his sins, the speaker prays: "Let their flames retire, / And burne me o Lord, with a fiery zeale / Of thee' and thy house, which doth in eating heale." The lines refer not only to the fires, which restore God's image in the poet, but also to the Eucharist, during which the zealous believer is healed and strengthened "in eating." The fire of the zeal consumes the poet; but more importantly the poet consumes the Lord, and it is this eating which heals him. Donne's concentration on the fire imagery redefines and transforms the sonnet. Its turn may be said to occur in line ten's desperate shift away from water imagery to that of fire; but the real turn does not take place until line twelve, when the speaker rejects the ailing fires of lust and envy and prays for restorative fire. In both sonnets the poet has a confrontation with God, but finds solutions within the elements of their analogies, making active use of the language, and giving sacramental form to the intangible. The sonnets world analogy is complete only when realizing that no lesser power can help with
Some common words found in the essay are:
Lord's Supper, Doth God, Milton's Milton's, , God Talent, Talents Matthew, John Donne's, Christians Flood, sonnet speaker, mild yoke, milton's sonnet, world drowned, donne's sonnet, questioning god, feels god, parable talents, earlier octet, question answer,
Approximate Word count = 1010
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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