Sestet

written in iambic pentameter. Wordsworth's poem consists of one octave and a sestet. The speaker’s tone is the most dynamic and prominent during the octave. His tone first comes across as stern when his opening lines consist of antitheses. The speaker says, “late and soon,” and “Getting and spending,” showing that the world is too focused on consumerism presently, just like it had been previously and most likely in…

The poem “Death, Be Not Proud”, by John Donne, is a Petrarchan sonnet, which is divided to an octave (the first eight lines) and a sestet (the last six lines). In the octave we are exposed to the speaker who seems to be a simple man who does not like Death (maybe from a personal experience, but we cannot know for sure), and probably religious. We can assume he is religious by the belief of “soul’s delivery” (8) and eternal life after death, as stated in line 13. The speaker addresses Death, and…

The carrier’s hatred is reciprocated as the snake hisses upon locating the carrier. The violent nature of the carrier is exemplified as he shoots the snake twice despite the fact that the snake most likely died within the first shot. Within the sestet, the speaker carefully observes the snake. Described to be “long and evil” (Line 10), the snake is portrayed in a negative light and, to the speaker, deserves to be killed. The hostility against the snake is developed with the speaker’s…

breaks into two parts and the first part is the octave which is the first eight lines and they rhyme “abbaabba” (Meyer 778). Then the second half and final six lines is the sestet which has varying rhyme schemes but commonly “cdecde, cdcdcd, and cdccdc” (Meyer 778). The octave of the poem sets the mood and situation while the sestet resolves it. An English sonnet is organized into three quatrains and a couplet. The English sonnet…

The Petrarchan sonnet “Hap,” by Thomas Hardy, is an exploration of how life is controlled and can be explained. In the poem’s octave, the speaker envisions a life under the power of a vengeful god who……, but concludes in the sestet that in reality, life is not controlled by higher powers, malicious or not. The speaker searches for an explanation that would give purpose to his pain, but failing to find one, laments the reality of his situation, where suffering can only be explained by chance. In…

Also reflecting standard practice within Petrarchan poetry, Longfellow’s octave utilizes an a b b a, a b b a rhyme scheme and his sestet adopts a c d c, d c d pattern (Mason and Nims 312). The octave’s unified structure and rhyme scheme strike a contrast with Keats’s introductory quatrains. While Keats frames these quatrains as subordinate clauses, preempting a resolution to the…

first impressions (Freedman). Shelley is hesitant to take the statue of Ozymandias, nor the telling of it, at face value. He takes until the last lines to give more than a hint of the poem’s meaning, and even postpones the volta from the start of the sestet to the twelfth line in order to achieve…

a series of sestets and octaves. Upon further analysis I discovered that the eight-line octaves, which appear twice in the song, could be broken down into two separate quatrains. After reviewing the lyrics, I found…

A tree metaphor instead of a resolution prevails in the sestet, which later transitions to the season “summer [that] sang in [her]” (Millay 13). Schurer states: “the last two [lines may be] a mock allusion to the Shakespearean sonnet” (Schurer 96), agreeing with the sestets’ similarity. Millay is “the lonely tree” (Millay 9) in winter that has empty branches with no birds. The birds refer to her lovers who have “vanished…

Paper 2: Explication of Glory of Women The poem “Glory of Women” written by Siegfried Sassoon can best be described as a direct address to women during the time of WWI. The title, “Glory of Women,” is quite ironic seeing as though the term “glory” carries a great religious affiliation. The word itself refers to praise, honor, and distinction, words generally not synonymous with Sassoon’s tone throughout the poem. Additionally, another irony present is Sassoon’s utilization of sonnet form for…