Poem #4

Forgive me for the multiple posts today but I have a feeling I'm going to be crazy busy from 1st Feb to 15th as I promised Dr S to submit 3 chapters by mid Feb. Here's the sonnet I wrote for Literature course. We had to write a Shakespearean sonnet and do an analysis. I put the analysis as well. 

Our lecturer was Mr Lajiman Janoory. Although he is not that chatty, he's very inquisitive, as every time we did presentation, he would listen attentively. I suppose we could expect that from a lecturer specializing in literary analysis. The last I heard about him was that he went abroad to do his PhD. Good for him. Any student would appreciate a lecturer who listens to his students.

A QUEST FOR YOU

I hate it when you walk passed me and ignore me,

I hate it when you never stop by even for a day,

I despise you because I’ve heard so much of this glee;

Those endless dreams of being spontaneously swept away,

By an angel whose wings will carry me to an unknown paradise?

Then I sigh and sigh and sigh till I tire to sigh any more,

Cautiously I try to live my lonely life in wise,

And thus avoid from being hurt and feeling sore,

But then one day you creep in on the sly;

Exactly when I have giving up in my quest for you;

I gaze in awe; I want to fly and fly and fly,

And ask myself a thousand of times if this is true,

With full of hopes and no time to waste,

I hold his hand, I thank you, and therefore I shall rest my case.

::azureus::

Sonnet analysis

This sonnet is written by someone who is in search of something vital in the life of a human, i.e.: ‘you’. The subject matter is about finding something divine and indescribable such as love, which here represented by the word ‘you’. The speaker would most probably be a woman because at the end of the sonnet, it is mentioned that the writer found what she was looking for and then held the hand of a male, i.e.: ‘I hold his hand…’. At the beginning of the sonnet, the poet describes her despair over her disability of capturing this element, love, i.e.: ‘I hate it when you never stop by even for a day’. She holds a hatred feeling towards love because she never experiences it, despite hearing about it all the time. She describes love as something that will take her away from all the misery, i.e.: ‘By an angel whose wings will carry me to an unknown paradise’. She gave up in her search but suddenly love came and gave her all that she wants i.e.: ‘Exactly when I have giving up in my quest for you’. At last, she did find love, and her quest is finally over when love came to her, ending all her loathing for love.  

This sonnet is written using the Shakespearean sonnet scheme, consisting of fourteen lines, with the rhyming scheme of ABABCDCDEFEFGG. The underlying theme of the sonnet is about a quest. This sonnet denotes a gloomy tone, where most of the words are about the despair of the writer in her quest for love, e.g.: ‘Then I sigh and sigh and sigh till I tire to sigh any more’. However, there is an interjection at near end of the sonnet which signifies hopefulness, i.e.: ‘But then one day you creep in on the sly’. The use of strong words such as ‘hate’ and ‘despise’ succeeded in making this sonnet sounds gloomy and depressing. Also, the repetition of words ‘sigh’, i.e.: ‘Then I sigh and sigh and sigh…’ adds a little effect to the hopefulness that the writer is trying to express. The language used in this sonnet is mostly moderate words that are usually used in everyday conversation. Some words such as ‘creep’ and ‘gaze’ give imagery to this sonnet, making the reader sense the intensity of the sonnet. The word ‘creep’, for instance, can make the imagination of a reader runs wild on how something appears slowly and unobvious.

From the beginning, there is a personification of the concept of ‘love’ as something that can move like a human such as the use of action verbs, e.g.: walk, ignore, stop and creep. These words personify love as something that moves like human do. The movements of love into the writer’s life is pictured as creeping cunningly, and appears when it is least expected. There is also the use of hyperbole by the exaggeration of the statement ‘By an angel whose wings will carry me to an unknown paradise’. The use of ‘angel’ here is considered as an overstatement because it compares the power of human to that of angel. The most important single word in this sonnet is the pronoun ‘you’, because this sonnet centres wholly on the search of ‘you’, the despair of writer towards it, and how the writer finally finds ‘you’.  

In all, this sonnet exploits human sense by providing another way to see the unseen things such as concepts, i.e.: love, in the same way as viewing the movements of living things. Also, the writer tries to make the reader feels that there’s always a silver lining at the end of cloud, because in this sonnet, the writer herself found what she’s been looking for, at the least expected time. There’s also another message that the writer tries to express in the sonnet that we should not giving up in whatever we do in our life, and that we should always keep reaching for our dreams.  

p/s: if you steal my poem, I might not know but my God does. And if you're agnostic, my God would still know.

p/ss: I could not believe that I already delved into conceptual metaphor when I wrote the analysis. I guess it's meant to be then.