During the Renaissance, many new styles of writing poetry emerged. Of those, love poetry was probably the most popular. The writers of that time used many different poetic devices to convey their message of love in their poems, and some of those devices were invented for the sole use of poetry writing. In John Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud” and Edmund Spenser’s “Sonnet 30,” the uses of imagery, paradox, and tone conveys the poets’ sensations of love in a realistic world.
“Death” uses the images of a mighty and dreadful person in the second line to show how Death can be very easy to fear. This imagery goes on with Death overthrowing the people who wish to cheat death. The beginning of this sonnet is very pessimistic, with statements of death everywhere and images of death are used to emphasize death’s morbidity. “Sonnet 30” uses the images of ice and fire to relate the hearts of two people to nature. In this sonnet, those images are further described in detail to show how ice and fire are not reacting with each other like they should and are probably not suited for each other. These images of morbid death and fire to ice are used to introduce the reader to the state of affairs at the beginning of the sonnets.
In “Death,” Donne states a paradox in the last line, “death, thou shalt die,” that is led to by the rest of the sonnet. This statement is a paradox because death does not die; people do, but if people realize the inevitability of death, then death leaves peoples’ minds, becomes harmless, and dies. In “Sonnet 30,” the majority of the sonnet alludes to the last couplet, “Such is the power of love in gentle mind/ that it can alter all the course of kind.” This statement explains the paradox of ice and fire, which is the fact that ice is not melted by fire but hardened, and fire is kindled by ice instead of put out. These paradoxes further emphasize the realistic parts of the world that the sonnets take place in.
“Death”‘s tone is a sense of dread at the beginning, but peace of mind at the end. The shift in tone conveys the idea of realism by showing the process of realization of the mind. The fact that a person can understand something and change it for the better is the tone focus at the end of “Death.” “Sonnet 30″‘s tone is very fiery; Donne describes the icy woman with intensity and also shows the fire within the man’s heart. However, this tone relaxes at the end to a gentler state and shows how a person’s moods can change in a realistic environment. These tones are used to show that the ideas of these poets can be found in everyday life.
The sonnets of John Donne and Edmund Spenser are just a portion of what came about during the love poetry era. Imagery, paradox, tone, and many other devices were invented by poets to convey their ideas to the readers. These poems will stay with us for a long time because of the appeal to the human being and because of the realism shown in them. The Renaissance brought about many things, with one being the great shift of literature styles.
