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Shakespeare Ebooks Shakespeare - A Lover's Complaint
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Shakespeare - A Lover's Complaint |
This poem was published, along with his sonnets, without WS's permission. It takes the form of the Elizabethan poetic genre, the "complaint", in which typically there is a pastoral setting, rustic shepherds and shepherdesses, plaintive laments of deserted or unrequited lovers, etc. These complaints often bewailed moralistically the hazards of blind passion and might have been used didactically. This poem presents multiple points of view: the poet-narrator, the spurned maiden, the old shepherd, and the male wooer. It portrays in rich metaphorical language the tense and bitter struggle between the sexes also seen in the "Dark Lady" sonnets.
Opening Verses:
FROM off a hill whose concave womb reworded
A plaintful story from a sistering vale,
My spirits to attend this double voice accorded,
And down I laid to list the sad-tuned tale;
Ere long espied a fickle maid full pale,
Tearing of papers, breaking rings a-twain,
Storming her world with sorrow's wind and rain.
Upon her head a platted hive of straw,
Which fortified her visage from the sun,
Whereon the thought might think sometime it saw
The carcass of beauty spent and done:
Time had not scythed all that youth begun,
Nor youth all quit; but, spite of heaven's fell rage,
Some beauty peep'd through lattice of sear'd age.
(the poem is about 47 verses in total) |
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| DETAILS |
| Format: | PDF
| Allows Print: | YES |
| FileSize: | 13Kb | | |
| Pages: | 9 | | |
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