AP Poem Essay

AP Poem Essay

Sir Phillip Sidney’s poem “Thou Blind Man’s Mark” focuses on a speaker who expresses a negative, sickened, and frustrated attitude toward the subject of desire.

In the first four lines, the speaker uses a parallel structure and numerous negative descriptions of desire to reinforce his repulsion of it: “blind man’s mark … fool’s self-chosen snare … scum … dregs … band of all evils” (lines 1-3). His repetitive, negative diction strengthens the idea that he is disgusted by desire. Such forcefulness through repetition shows that he has very strong feelings toward desire and his word choice filled with such terrible descriptions shows that his feelings toward desire are extremely poor. 

In the next four lines, the speaker mentions desire’s effect on him personally. He starts by directly addressing desire: “Desire, desire!” (line 5). Making desire into an apostrophe shows that the speaker views desire as an entity separate from himself and this entity is an adverse that has brought nothing but trouble to him: “I have too dearly bought / With price of mangled mind, thy worthless ware” (lines 5-6). In his personal experience with desire, he was forced to pay a great price and yet he received little reward for his efforts, which supports his attitude  because many would be upset by not receiving what they desire after putting so much effort into the cause. He continues by repeating the phrase “too long” (line 7) twice when describing how long desire has kept him in a sleep-like state, which also supports the idea that he put more effort into his desire than he should have in regards to what he gets from it. The speaker’s description of his experiences with desire and the repetition of “too long” both reinforce the fact that desire produces little reward and is therefore worthless, which he finds frustrating.

In the next three lines, the speaker repeats the phrase “in vain” (lines 9-11) three different times. The anaphora here strengthens the idea that all his efforts to obtain what he desired and all his suffering because of his desire were pointless and unsuccessful. The speaker sees his only outcome from desire as “ruin” (line 9). He becomes upset and frustrated that so much time and effort produced so little reward. 

The last three lines of the poem show a shift from condemning desire to praising virtue. The speaker stops his diatribe against desire and its results and focuses on the lessons that he learned from virtue. He has learned that “Within myself to seek my only hire” (line 13). The lesson means that he should not rely on desire to produce an outside form of reward, but instead he needs to seek his happiness from within himself. Learning this lesson shows that he has suffered so much pain and potentially even low self-esteem that he finds it necessary to completely abandon outside forms of rewards and happiness, which strengthens the fact that he is frustrated by desire’s lack of positive results and sickened by its negative ones. The last line concludes that from now on he will be “desiring naught but how to kill desire”  (line 14). The polyptoton used with “desire” as both a verb and a noun shows that he has been so negatively affected by desire that the only thing he wants is its destruction, which is also supported by the use of such a strong word as “kill.” The intensity in the last line with the words “desiring” and “kill” show that the speaker feels nothing but vehement feelings of frustration and sickness towards the subject of desire.

The speaker in Sir Philip Sydney’s poem “Thou Blind Man’s Mark” uses poetic devices such as repetition and anaphora, parallel structure, intense negative diction, apostrophe, and polyptoton to reinforce and emphasize his fierce attitudes of frustration and sickness towards desire. 

Analysis of Thomas Hardy’s “Hap”

Analysis of Thomas Hardy’s “Hap”

In the poem “Hap,” the speaker laments the loss of a loved one. The first stanza consists of him hoping that “some vengeful god” is the cause of the speaker’s pain. He imagines that the god would say that the speaker’s sorrow brings a perverted joy to the god: “thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!” The speaker describes his reaction to this revelation in the second stanza. He would “bear … clench … and die,” showing that his suffering would still continue and possibly even intensify. He is upset that the god would do this to him because he does not deserve this “ire unmerited.” However, the speaker also says he would be “half-eased, too” because there would have been no way to prevent the terrible fate that befell him since it was caused by a being “Powerfuller” than him. The speaker emits a sense of acceptance in the event that a god claims that he is the cause of the speaker’s suffering. However, no god claims to be the cause. Instead, the speaker is mournful about his fate. He describes his life, environment, and mindset as bleak and gloomy: “Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and the rain, / And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan….” The speaker comes to the conclusion that all the blissful things in his life are either pain in disguise or the source of future pain. 

The tone of the speaker is conflicted, pained, and melancholic. In the beginning when he ponders the idea of a god torturing him, the speaker is agitated and upset because an outside force in the one causing his suffering and he cannot do anything to prevent it. Simultaneously however, he also realizes that his fate is out of his control and it cannot be changed, prompting a sense of acceptance from him. This mixture of agitation and acceptance demonstrate the speaker’s conflicted feelings about a divine being meddling in his life. By the end of the poem however, the speaker relents that there is no god responsible for pain. Such a revelation eliminates the speaker’s half-easiness about the loss because he can no longer believe that a god “had willed and metered me the tears I shed.” His half-easiness is replaced by a bleak outlook on life, where the sun and rain are obscured and time moans. The speaker’s outlook causes him to become melancholic as he sufferers worsening emotional pain, so great that it makes him doubt all the good in life. 

Analysis of Thomas Carew’s “Ingrateful Beauty Threatened”

Analysis of Thomas Carew’s “Ingrateful Beauty Threatened” 

The speaker in this poem criticizes a woman named Celia for her pride. He claims that he is the reason she is famous: “I gave thee thy renown.” Without him and the poetry he wrote about her, she is just another unremarkable person in a crowd who “lived unknown.” He states that his verses about her “imp’d the wings of Fame,” which has a negative connotation since an imp means either a demon or urchin. He goes on to state that her “killing power” and her sweets and graces were given to her by him and they are therefore his, implying that he exaggerated her qualities when he wrote about her. He briefly praises her as his “star” but then returns to criticizing her when he states that she tried to “dart” from her “borrow’d sphere” that is his sky. He also repeats the word “my” in his metaphor, which enforces the idea that he created her and she is therefore his. However, he goes on to curse himself for making her famous in the first place: “Lightning on him that fix’d thee there.” He commands her to leave him alone or else he will make sure she is no longer renowned. His criticism continues when he state that only fools world adore her because he has seen what she is really like and it is nothing like in his poems. He concludes with the idea that poets exaggerate their subject’s better qualities and only the poets truly know what their subject is like afterwards when all people know of the subject is from a praising poem.  

The tone of the poem is commanding, critical, possessive, and somewhat jealous. The first word of the poem is a command to Celia and the final stanza also begins with a command. The first line of the poem shows how critical the speaker is of Celia because he coldly addresses her with a command followed by a callous remark about her pride. His criticalness is seen again later when he curses himself for making her famous because he believes that that was a bad decision on his part. Later, the criticalness comes up again when he states that he will know her in her “mortal state,” which implies that she is not as good as he writes her as being and thereby belittles her. Throughout the poem, the speaker emphasizes that he is the one who made Celia famous and he often repeats words like “my” and “mine.” This shows that he is possessive of both her and his work about her to the point where he condemns her for trying to leave her “borrow’d sphere.” This can also imply that he is somewhat jealous of her and her fame. He believes that the fame should be his since it is his poem and worries that she will still be successful without him. 

“Ingrateful Beauty Threatened” by Thomas Carew is about a speaker who, in a commanding, critical, possessive, and jealous tone, scorns a former subject of his poems because he believes that she is only famous because of him.