Analysing A Poem Is Easy....I Swear...

I know this looks complicated but it's not, bear with me!



 'Love That Doth Reign And Live Within My Thought' by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547).



This is an easy one to start with so lets get down to it:

Love that doth reign and live within my thought,
And built his seat within my captive breast,
Clad in the arms wherein with me he fought,
Oft in my face he doth his banner rest.
But she that taught me love and suffer pain,
My doubtful hope and eke my hot desire
With shamefast look to shadow and refrain,
Her smiling grace converteth straight to ire.
And coward love then to the heart apace
Taketh his flight, where he doth lurk and 'plain,
His purpose lost, and dare not show his face.
For my lord's guilt thus faultless bide I pain.
Yet from my lord shall not my foot remove.
Sweet is the death that taketh end by love.




Analysing the poem.
So. It's a Shakespearean sonnet (notice how it isn't divided like a Petrarchan, however it was translated by the author from a Petrarchan) containing both simple and complex declarative sentences, 6 sentences in total. The couplet at the end is epigrammatic, which means that it summarises the sonnet. The words, 'love' and 'remove' don't exactly rhyme, but it's his poetic license to try to make them. It is still a sonnet, and also it is written in the first person.

Archaisms: doth, oft, eke (to diminish or remove), shamefast, converteth, ire (anger), taketh, thus
Punctuation: commas, full stops, apostrophes
Oxymoron: 'doubtful hope'
Pre-modifiers: coward, hot, doubtful, captive, shamefast, smiling, sweet (post-modifier: faultless)
Semantic field: war/love/the body
Abstract noun: love, thought, pain, hope, desire, grace, ire, guilt
Caesuras: commas used
Enjambement: lines 6 and 9
Volta: happens between lines 12 and 13
Concrete nouns: breast, arms, face, banner, heart, my lord, foot, seat (Love becomes concrete on line 9)
Juxtaposition: 'death that taketh end by love'
Verbs: flight, lurk, apace, rest, built (Present continuous verb: smiling)
First Person: I, my, he, she etc.
Connectives: and, but, for

Love that doth reign and live within my thought,
And built his seat within my captive breast,
Clad in the arms wherein with me he fought,
Oft in my face he doth his banner rest.
But she that taught me love and suffer pain,
My doubtful hope and eke my hot desire
With shamefast look to shadow and refrain,
Her smiling grace converteth straight to ire.
And coward Love then to the heart apace
Taketh his flight, where he doth lurk and 'plain,
His purpose lost, and dare not show his face.
For my lord's guilt thus faultless bide I pain.
Yet from my lord shall not my foot remove.
Sweet is the death that taketh end by love.


What does it all mean?
The words, 'pain' and 'love' are repeated, so we know that Howard was showing how this love hurt him, and his entire body. It starts and ends with love, which shows that love is the main theme that follows this man throughout the circle of his life. Howard has personified love and called it a 'coward'. This would lead us to believe that he is angry about being in love.

Why would anyone be angry to be in love? Well. It seems that the 'he' of the poem, perhaps Henry Howard himself, told the 'she' of the poem that he loved her. She did not approve and responded with anger, thus making him ashamed of his 'cowardly' love that hid away again.