3. Glossary
care – worries/problems;
sable – black clothing/colour associated with
mourning and funerals;
languish – stuck in a weak or feeble position;
suffice – be enough;
scorn – look down upon someone as despicable or
worthless;
aggravate – make something worse;
in vain – without results/empty;
disdain – complete contempt or lack of respect.
4. Info:
Daniel was born in Somerset, England in 1562 and was the son
of a music-master. Unusually for a poet, Samuel David doesn’t
seem to have led a very interesting life. He came from a
respectable family, did well for himself throughout and didn’t
end up killing himself, losing out in love or wasting all his
money. He was one of the most successful and respected
writers in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I.
This poem comes from a sequence of sonnets called Delia
where, as usual, a guy is chasing a girl and moping about the
fact that she isn’t interested. This was Daniel’s first published
work and came out in 1592. It reads like it is following poetic
tradition rather than mirroring any great event or pain of the
poet’s life.
5. Themes & Tones
Tones: Misery, despair, desolation, anguish and
depression.
Themes: dark side of love, Unrequited love. Sleep and
death are seen as something that end with suffering
and troubles.
6. Literary Devices & Language Techniques
The association between Sleep, night and Death is established early
on in the poem. The fact that the poet longs for their embrace
suggests the deeply dark nature of his mood.
Although the poem doesn’t relate his suffering in relation to a
death, the link serves to exaggerate his lover’s melancholy into a
form of hyperbolic bereavement. This is further achieved with the
use of the funereal ‘mourn’ and ‘grief’ in the second and third four-
line made up stanzas.
I’d also comment on the oxymoronic plea for Sleep and its darkness
to ‘restore the light; With dark forgetting’. We have the contrast of
the physical darkness and the light mentality that the poetic voice
wants restored through a purging of his misery in the emptiness of
sleep.
7. Literary Devices & Language Techniques
Returning to the idea of this poem expressing hyperbolic level
of despair, he uses imagery of his ‘waking eyes’ being abused
and cruelly mistreated as they ‘wail their scorn’, which
represents his self-loathing and recognition of his
worthlessness as a result of his feelings being unrequited.
By the final couplet he now wants to be ’embraced by clouds
in vain’, implying sleep void of dreams, but takes this even
further to suggest he should ‘never wake’ . The clear
implication of a sleep that never ends is that he really wants
to be embraced by Death.
8. Intertextuality
“I Dream of You” Christina Rossetti
This poem by Rossetti is all around the story of her and
her loved one that is broken apart by the war. Rossetti
deals with the delicate pain of having suffered loss
after being with the one that she loved. What is more
grieving is the fact that she considers it all to be a big
dream because all her happiness seems to have Been
Lost or disappeared.
9. Essay Question:
Explore the ways in which the voice deals with unrequited love.
Explore the ways in which the voice wants to escape from the dark
side of love.
