English 2307E Lecture Notes - Spondee, Enjambment, Sonnet 29

• School: Western University
• Department: English
• Course: English 2307E
• Professor: Peter Thoms

Document Summary

Sonnet: a form combining a variable number of units of rhymed lines to produce a fourteen-line poem, usually in rhyming iambic pentameter lines. Speaker encouraging his soul to take action. Sinful earth is a metaphor for the body. Sinful earth biblical idea of being made from earth and decaying back to earth in death (ashes to ashes, dust to dust); also a reference to original sin. Speaker encourages soul to escape its subservient position to the body and recognize its own power. Soul is the center of the sinful earth/body primary importance. But center has the other implication that the soul is entrapped/contained position of imprisonment that the speaker is urging it to escape. Poem uses terms of finance ( poor soul, cost, selling, rich, inheritors, etc. ) to imply that the individual has not invested wisely by focusing on adornment of the body instead of enrichment of the soul.