Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Death, be not proud. Questions

1) The author uses extended metaphors, the poem as a whole is an extended metaphor about death and sleep, and personifications, such as death, be not proud or mighty and dreadful, death itself cannot be any of these things.

2) Death shouldn’t be proud because it is a scary thing and people really don’t want to die. However the speaker compares death to sleep, which is supposed to ease ones mind about dieing, because sleep is peaceful, not scary. He also says we wake eternally, and death shall be no more; death, though shalt die, which means that even though you are dead you will actually “live” forever.

3) The man is trying to make death sound peaceful instead of scary. He tells us things such as death just being a short sleep and actually impersonates a death figure for him to talk to to make death less frightening for him.

4) The author mainly uses the Italian sonnet, however in the last couple lines he switches to the English or Shakespearean sonnet form. The switch between the two form breaks the rhyme scheme that was happening through the whole poem, which adds to the complexity of the poem and makes the last lines stand out and carry a lot of meaning.

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