In The World is Too Much With Us Wordsworth is lamenting societies need and greed for money and things.

The industrial age was bringing in steam locomotives, machines and factories. Hed lost both parents when he was young and remained close to his sister. He was caught in the middle of political upheavals of France and between France and England. His life by this time must have seemed very noisy and out of control. The World Is Too Much With Us The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune, It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. In the first lines we immediately see his complaint. The world if often used in writing to refer to the ways of the world or worldly. The words late and soon are part of a list continuing in the next line getting and spending. The line break is for the purpose of the structure of the sonnet. Late and soon refers to the fast pace of the age. Im always late but its much too soon for me is how I interpret these two words. I much prefer his brevity. Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! Here he makes a statement that has been the cry of many over the centuries. We let our progress take away the wonders of nature to the point we dont notice it. This does sound like a country boy. The word boon means advantage, or benefit. By putting the words sordid and boon together, he is plainly saying that it is a disgusting or distasteful benefit. These two words cancel out each other in a division which puts our hearts at risk of losing our love for the simple and natural. This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune, The above four lines emphasize his point. Up-gathered like sleeping flowers is an image he uses to make the point of how the winds that will be howling at all hours are internal noises, or the noise of industry at all hours. The noise could be either internal or external, but the simile of the upgathered flowers indicates that the hours (changes and fast pace) are stealing away harmonious unity with nature. It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; This is like an expletive. The above two lines are the venting of his anger. Hed rather be like a pagan, for instance believing in ancient Greek gods celebrating nature, than part of a world that is destroying natures beauty and calling itself Christian. He is not saying he doesnt believe in God. Instead he expresses his anger at the world to God and possibly even at God.

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

I can picture Wordsworth yelling these lines angrily standing on the shore and shaking a fist. He feels it would be so much simpler to go back the pagan beliefs of the Greeks of giving a sense of divine to all things of nature. Proteus was one of the mythological Greek gods of the sea, and Triton was the son of Poseidon and Aphrodite whose horn was a conch shell for calming or stirring the waters.

Even though Wordsworth felt the need for letting powerful emotions flow

spontaneously on to the page, he also held that poetry needed to have a poetic tone and form. The body of William Wordsworths works is vast. Many of his poems were published after his death; however, he did publish much during his life as well. He was well educated, traveled extensively, and often dedicated his poetry to people, places and events. Wordsworth was not the first poet or author to lament mans disrespect for nature. He appreciated the pastoral poem and introduced the age of the Romantic poets along with his friend and mentor Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth and Coleridge shared many ideas on poetry, nature, and published together. Wordsworths reputation grew in England throughout his life because of his many works and their quality. After Robert Southey died in 1846 Wordsworth was named poet Laureate of England, a high honor.

"To His Coy Mistress" is a very interesting poem. The main plot of the poem is about this guy that tries to pick up a girl for the night. The poem does not tell about the setting. I assumed that it was in a bar, because of the way he talked to her and that is where most guys go to pick up a girl for the evening. We see this poem through the eyes of the guy, by doing this Marvell gives a look into his mind and what he is thinking. This helps to bring the reader into the poem. It allows the reader to get into his mind as the poem goes along. We begin to see the guy develop his words more and more until eventually by the third stanza he is pretty desperate. In the first stanza we see the guy begin to make a move. He begins to tell her all these sweet lines about how he could spend eternity with her. For instance, he says on line 11, "My vegtable love should grow vastar than empires, and more slow;...." In these two lines he is trying to tell her how his love will grow more and more everytime he sees her. He will love her until the end of time. A few lines later he continues to talk about his everlasting love. He begins to divide his love up between her body parts. He promises to her that he will dedicate a hundred years to her eyes. Then he tells her that he would dedicate two hundred to each breasts. That last line about the breasts I thought was pretty funny. Here you begin to see how his mind begins to shift toward sex. He begins to shift his thoughts from her eyes to her body. He is very nonchalant about it. After the comment about her breasts he says and thirty to the rest. I can just see this guy talking to her. He puts a little emphasis on the breasts comment, and then I picture him mumbling, "oh yea....and thirty thousand to the rest." The guy is only out for one thing, and that is sex. He is trying to be smooth about it, but in the next stanza we begin to see his patience giving out. In the second stanza we begin to see the guy's personality shift. He goes from being the person that you could spend eternity with to a person whose time is coming to an end fast. He says that time's chariot is hurrying near. This line sets the standard for the next stanza. This stanza is a little faster, and you can see that the guy mdoes not put as much thought into what he is saying. He then proceeds to tell her that they have eternity to be together, but her beauty will not last forever. I am not a girl, but if I was, that guy would have just lost me. He is starting to become less and less patient. He then murmures that the worms are going to take her virginity, which is followed up by him saying that his lust is going to go to the grave with her. Now he is becoming pretty desperate. He has lost all his patience and any dignity that he had as a man. Marvell should have wrote a continuation to this poem from the woman's point of view, because I know right now she is trying to figure out how to get rid of this creep. In the third stanza the guy has lost all hope. He is now on the verge of total desperation. I picture him in this stanza down on his knees begging for her to go home with him. In this stanza he tells her straight up that their attraction is going to end one day, so they need to do it right now. The guy has lost all patience at this point. He is ready to go somewhere. He ends the stanza by saying that they cannot make the sun stand still, but they sure can make it run. This line wraps up the rest of the poem. In this line the guy tells her that the sun will be up soon, but we can make it run if we go now. Throughout this poem the guy loses his patience more and more, until eventually he is ready to go. His words go through a big change. They start out by being very compassionate at the beginning of the poem to being very anxious at the end. We do not know what happens at the end of this poem, Marvell leaves it to us to decide. I can say that the guy probably got slapped pretty hard.

Sonnet 29 shows the poet at his most insecure and troubled. He feels unlucky, shamed, and fiercely jealous of those around him. What causes the poet's anguish will remain a mystery; as will the answer to whether the sonnets are autobiographical. However, an examination of Shakespeares life around the time he wrote Sonnet 29 reveals two traumatic events that may have shaped the theme of the sonnet. In 1592 the London theatres closed due to a severe outbreak of plague. Although it is possible that Shakespeare toured the outlying areas of London, it is almost certain that he left the theatre entirely during this time to work on his sonnets and narrative poems. The closing of the playhouses made it hard for Shakespeare and other actors of the day to earn a living. With plague and poverty looming it is expected that he would feel "in disgrace with fortune" (1). Moreover, in 1592 there came a scathing attack on Shakespeare by dramatist Robert Greene, who, in a deathbed diary, warned three of his fellow university-educated playwrights: "There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you; and, beeing an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey."

One can only imagine what grief this assault this deathbed assault must have caused Shakespeare. Greene was nothing if not thorough: first, using a line from Shakespeares own 3 Henry VI (1.4.138), he describes Shakespeare as a pompous, scheming, vicious ingrate riding the coattails of better writers (no doubt Shakespeare performed in a play Greene had himself written; then he adds that Shakespeare is a conceited ("onely Shakescene") and insignificant jack of all trades (a "Johannes fac totum"). Greene lets even more insults fly as he continues: "O that I might intreat your rare wits to be imploied in more profitable courses: & let those Apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions." It seems very possible such events are connected to the poets distressed declaration in line 8: "With what I most enjoy contented least." All is not lost, however, for the sonnet ends with a positive affirmation that the poet can combat his anguish with the "sweet love" (13) of his dear friend. Sonnets 71-74 are typically analyzed as a group, linked by the poet's thoughts of his own mortality. However, Sonnet 73 contains many of the themes common throughout the entire body of sonnets, including the ravages of time on one's physical well-being and the mental anguish associated with moving further from youth and closer to death. Time's destruction of great monuments juxtaposed with the effects of age on human beings is a convention seen before, most notably in Sonnet 55. The poet is preparing his young friend, not for the approaching literal death of his body, but the metaphorical death of his youth and passion. The poet's deep insecurities swell irrepressibly as he concludes that the young man is now focused only on the signs of his aging -- as the poet surely is himself. This is illustrated by the linear development of the three quatrains. The first two quatrains establish what the poet perceives the young man now sees as he looks at the poet: those yellow leaves and bare boughs, and the faint afterglow of the fading sun. The third quatrain reveals that the poet is speaking not of his impending physical death, but the death of his youth and subsequently his youthful desires -- those very things which sustained his relationship with the young man. Throughout the 126 sonnets addressed to the young man the poet tries repeatedly to impart his wisdom of Time's wrath, and more specifically, the sad truth that time will have the same effects on the young man as it has upon the poet. And as we see in the concluding couplet of Sonnet 73, the poet has this time succeeded. The young man now understands the importance of his own youth, which he will be forced to 'leave ere long' (14). It must be reiterated that some critics assume the young man 'perceives' not the future loss of his own youth, but the approaching loss of the poet, his dear friend. This would then mean that the poet is speaking of his death in the literal sense. Feuillerat argues that Even if we make allowance for the exaggeration which is every poet's right, Shakespeare was not young when he wrote this sonnet. It is overcast by the shadow of death and belongs to a date perhaps not far from 1609. (The Composition of Shakespeare's Plays, 72) This interpretation is less popular because it is now generally accepted that all 154 sonnets were composed before 1600, so Shakespeare would have been no older than thirty-six. However, the sonnets were not initially printed in the order we now accept them, and an error in sequence is very possible. Sonnet 73 is one of Shakespeare's most famous works, but it has prompted both tremendous praise and sharp criticism. Included here are excerpts from commentaries by two noted Shakespearean scholars, John Barryman and John Crowe Ransom: The fundamental emotion [in Sonnet 73] is self-pity. Not an attractive emotion. What renders it pathetic, in the good instead of the bad sense, is the sinister diminution of the time concept, quatrain by quatrain. We have first a year, and the final season of it; then only a day, and the stretch of it; then just a fire, built for part of the day, and the final minutes of it; then -- entirely deprived of life, in prospect, and even now a merely objective "that," like a third-person corpse! -- the poet. The imagery begins and continues as visual -- yellow, sunset, glowing -- and one by one these are destroyed; but also in the first quatrain one heard sound, which disappears there; and from the couplet imagery of every kind is excluded, as if the sense were indeed dead, and only abstract, posthumous statement is possible. A year seems short enough; yet ironically the day, and then the fire, makes it in retrospect seem long, and the final immediate triumph of the poem's imagination is that in the last line about the year, line 4, an immense vista is indeed invoked -- that the desolate monasteries strewn over England, sacked in Henry's reign, where 'late' -- not so long ago! a terrible foreglance into the tiny coming times of the poem -- the choirs of monks lifted their little and brief voices, in ignorance of what was coming -- as the poet would be doing now, except that this poem knows. Instinct is here, after all, a kind of thought. This is one of the best poems in English. (John Berryman, The Sonnets) ***** The structure is good, the three quatrains offering distinct yet equivalent figures for the time of life of the unsuccessful and to-be-pitied lover. But the first quatrain is the boldest, and the effect of the whole is slightly anti-climactic. Within this quatrain I think I detect a thing which often characterizes Shakespeare's work within the metaphysical style: he is unwilling to renounce the benefit of his earlier style, which consisted in the breadth of the associations; that is, he will not quite risk the power of a single figure but compounds the figures. I refer to the two images about the boughs. It is one thing to have the boughs shaking against the cold, and in that capacity they carry very well the fact of the old rejected lover; it is another thing to represent them as ruined choirs where the birds no longer sing. The latter is a just representation of the lover too, and indeed a subtler and richer one, but the two images cannot, in logical rigor, co-exist. Therefore I deprecate shake against the cold. And I believe everybody will deprecate sweet. This term is not an objective image at all, but a term to be located at the subjective pole of the experience; it expects to

satisfy a feeling by naming it (this is, by just having it) and is a pure sentimentalism. (John Crowe Ransom, Shakespeare at Sonnets).

Sonnet 116 is about love in its most ideal form. It is praising the glories of lovers who have come to each other freely, and enter into a relationship based on trust and understanding. The first four lines reveal the poet's pleasure in love that is constant and strong, and will not "alter when it alteration finds." The following lines proclaim that true love is indeed an "ever-fix'd mark" which will survive any crisis. In lines 7-8, the poet claims that we may be able to measure love to some degree, but this does not mean we fully understand it. Love's actual worth cannot be known it remains a mystery. The remaining lines of the third quatrain (9-12), reaffirm the perfect nature of love that is unshakeable throughout time and remains so "ev'n to the edge of doom", or death. In the final couplet, the poet declares that, if he is mistaken about the constant, unmovable nature of perfect love, then he must take back all his writings on love, truth, and faith. Moreover, he adds that, if he has in fact judged love inappropriately, no man has ever really loved, in the ideal sense that the poet professes. The details of Sonnet 116 are best described by Tucker Brooke in his acclaimed edition of Shakespeare's poems: [In Sonnet 116] the chief pause in sense is after the twelfth line. Seventy-five per cent of the words are monosyllables; only three contain more syllables than two; none belong in any degree to the vocabulary of 'poetic' diction. There is nothing recondite, exotic, or metaphysical in the thought. There are three run-on lines, one pair of double-endings. There is nothing to remark about the rhyming except the happy blending of open and closed vowels, and of liquids, nasals, and stops; nothing to say about the harmony except to point out how the fluttering accents in the quatrains give place in the couplet to the emphatic march of the almost unrelieved iambic feet. In short, the poet has employed one hundred and ten of the simplest words in the language and the two simplest rhyme-schemes to produce a poem which has about it no strangeness whatever except the strangeness of perfection. (Brooke, 234)

SONNET 75 SPENSER This sonnet seems to be about the authors attempts to immortalize his wife or the love of his life. Spenser starts the poem with a quatrain recalling an incident that could have happened any summer day at the seaside. He writes his loves name in the sand at the beach, but the oceans waves wipe it away, just as time will destroy all manmade things. The next quatrain describes the womans reaction to the mans charming attempt to immortalize her. She claims that the mans attempts were in vain and that no mortal being can be immortalized due to the cruelness of time. The next quatrain represents a turning point in the poem and the author reveals that his wife will be eternally remembered in his poems and his verse. The final couplet at the end, Where whenas Death shall all the world subdue, Out love shall live, and later life renew, summarizes the theme of the poem by comparing the eternalness of love and death to the brevity of life and humanity.

Spenser uses the rhyme scheme of this poem to create a contrast between earthly ideas and objects that will eventually be destroyed and heavenly ones that will last forever. The first two quatrains focus on the authors vain attempts to write his wifes name. Time and nature are shown to destroy the authors manmade works and his attempts are thwarted. The author then switches gears and shows how he immortalized his wife in the very poem he is writing. Spenser uses a very melodic rhythm and iambic pentameter to create a calm and pleasant sounding poem. His frequent use of alliteration such as, die in dust and, verse in virtue helps to paint the complete picture of the poem and tie t he themes of the poem together.

In Song to Celia, Johnson demonstrates his skill of using his words to create emotion that exemplifies his love for a lady. His use of words were mesmerizing, especially lines three and four, Or leave a kiss but in the cup, and Ill not look for wine. His wording broug ht the meaning to a next level; John Addington Symonds called his poem a purely lyric composition.

"Song to Celia" Drink to me, only with thine eyes And I will pledge with mine; (Their intimacy can be shown through expression) Or leave a kiss but in the cup,

And I'll not look for wine. (Her love is stronger than any drink) The thirst that from the soul doth rise Doth ask a drink divine: (His soul only desires her love) But might I of Jove's nectar sup I would not change for thine. (He would not exchange his love for Joves nectar, which is a heavenly nectar drank by the gods.) I sent thee late a rosy wreath, Not so much honouring thee (He sent her a rose for a stronger purpose rather just for her beauty) As giving it a hope that there It could not withered be But thou thereon didst only breath And sent'st it back to me: (She rejected the rose, and sent it back to him.) Since, when it grows and smells, I swear, Not of itself but thee. (However, he kept it because of her scent that she placed on it.) In the context of literature, there are numerous devices seen throughout the poem such as the tone, mood, allusion, and alliteration. A rhyme scheme is also used, which is abcbabcb. All through the poem, the reader would feel that sense of affection and the act of receiving it back. Towards the end of the poem, the man ends up sending his lady flowers, but she returns it back. However, the man doesnt get rid of it; he holds onto it because it smells more like her than a flower, which sets the mood of true love. Also there is an example of alliteration as well, which is Doth ask a drink divine. This short poem brought much meaning and sentiment as a whole. Personally, I can apply this to my life by always being thankful for the people that love me. There is no greater love from God as well. In Romans 5:8, it says. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Ou t of everything, from the good to bad, all Christians should be grateful to have a God like Him.

Any poetry review of Holy Sonnet 14 by John Donne must surely mention the sixteenth century English poet's fixation with women and their faithfulness, or lack of it. Some readers will pick up in this metaphysical poem echoes of these fears of separation anxiety and rejection also in his relationship with God. Donne asks his three-in-one God to attack his heart using the word "batter" along with other language of force such as "overthrow," "bend," "burn," "lavish," "divorce," and "break." The language used in the poem could be seen to represent the degree of power that Donne believes will be needed by God in order to win back a sinner fallen so far from grace as the poet. It is almost as if John Donne believes that God just isn't trying hard enough to win a black heart like his a heart which has gone astray or become as disloyal as a town which, under siege, then promises its allegiance to another master. Donne had renounced his Roman Catholic faith in order to fall in with the new political pressures to become a protestant. His own brother had been imprisoned on suspicion of harbouring a Catholic priest. The priest himself was hanged, drawn and quartered. It is little wonder then, that in such times the language of violence was often evident also in poems of love - whether relating to God or womankind. It is not explicit in the poem whether Donne's feelings of guilt emanate from his dissociative religious actions but this would not be surprising to readers who were aware that Donne's own Catholic upbringing debarred him from gaining a university degree. Yet Holy Sonnet 14 also reflects the more Protestant idea that faith can come from God alone and must be asked, even begged for, as a fallen man can do no good on his own but must be saved from his own wickedness. Lack of salvation meant only one thing to the confused and theologically tortured Donne - the loneliness of separation from the God he loved and needed. Eternal damnation meant permanent exclusion from the warmth, security and protection of God's love. Therefore we have the language of separation also in this poem - "divorce," "cut," "break" and "untie" as Donne labours to be the good soul God wants him to be before he will take him under his wing.

The heavy, pleading, supplicant tone of the prayer sonnet is understandable given Donne's need for God's work in this matter to be done well without it there could be no redemption and, given his fear of death and separation from the love of God, this was unthinkable for John Donne. The poet's self-esteem seems low and, like a child chastised by its mother, he may feel unloved and undeserving of forgiveness and affection. He is frustrated also that the cold mathematical reason that helped him so much in his logic-based legal profession is now "'weak'n'd" and can't help him reconcile spiritual love with its more tempting physical secular version. In the images of the carpenter (door, wood and batter) we are reminded not only of Donne's suffering in this matter but also that of the Christ who himself died on the "tree" of self-sacrifice and suffering.

"To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" an analysis Herrick presents this poem through a lense of experience. The title itself provides evidence already of such a thought; the poem concerns "the Virgins" who, befit this title in that the experiences of life, in general, have yet to deprive them of their innocence and naivete. But the poem is not only an encouragement for those that are young to take advantage of their life but also a statement about the sorry state of senescence. Kerrick impresses at first that one ought to "gather ye rosebuds while ye may" for time is not one to slow down for them and is rather limited in its resource. Here, we might look into the "rosebuds" and use their meaning to extrapolate Herrick's meaning in the rest of the poem. When Herrick marks that the "same flower that smiles today / Tomorrow will be dying", we might ask ourselves why he would create an image as strange as a flower smiling. Although viable as a colorful use of personification, it is obvious that the flower serves to be a symbol. On one hand, the smiling flower might representative of love interests. Those same relationships that brush past us might be gone like the flowers that "Tomorrow will be dying". Herrick definitely asserts a philosophy of carpe diem. What is more, that same flower might any sort of opportunity, not just love interests. Herrick encourages the virgins to take advantage of every opportunity and seems to imply that those in their youth have access to plenty of them. In the flip side, one might figure that Herrick is implying that the old do not have access to myriad of chances to do things like they did in youth. Continuing in this vein, Herrick might have chosen to use "virgin": to accentuate that the qualities of innocence and inexperience are key to the opportunities available to the young. He implies that the old do not have access to these opportunities due to their personality which we might guess to be character traits such as cynicism and fatalistic views. The second stanza also adopts elements that further Herrick's views on youth and senescence. Herrick notes "The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun," and the fact that he approaches his pinnacle (noon) but, even as this happens, "sooner will his race be run, / And nearer he's to setting". Thus, we must treat the sun like the flower and relate it back to human existence. Just as how the sun rises and approaches the highest reaches of noon, it comes closer to its ultimate descent and setting just as the birth of a human already puts it on the path of destruction. Thus, even the prime of one's existence is not without worry seeing as it brings one closer to their decay and imminent ruin. Just by explaining this stanza, we get a better picture of Herrick's tone. One must remember that Herrick does this from a vantage point of experience, experience that he has discovered in his life, past his prime and thus like those approaching senescence filled with the cynicism that one knows are not associated with "the Virgins" of the poem. Herrick, in the third stanza, asserts that the best age is the one in which "youth and blood are warmer". He juxtaposes the youngest ages with the later ones and their successors and notes that this progression nothing but "the worse, and worst / Times". Again, the fatalistic nature of Herrick's tone is made evident in this passage with his no-love-lost attitude toward life after its prime. Herrick's whole poem seems to a lamentation about his own life. He continues in the last stanza and reiiterates his message when he states "having lost but once [one's] prime, [One] may forever tarry", almost saying that life past one's prime is a a waste of life. However, given the tremendous effort on the part of Herrick to tarnish the process of senescence, one might think that Herrick is overstating the arguments placed against old age and parodies those sentiments in his poem. In the end, Herrick's poem is not one just for "the Virgins" of the world but for all of those, whether close or not, to the dusk of their life.