Question

Diffrence between whoso list to hunt and sonnet 30

Answer 1

In Wyatt's "Whoso list to hunt" sonnet, the speaker describes himself as a hunter pursuing a deer he has no hope of catching. That's a metaphoric way of describing his desire for a woman who isn't interested in him because she has already committed herself to another man. I'd say that the conflict in that poem is between the man's desire to win the woman and her desire not to be won. Without that conflict, there would be no poem. There's something similar going on in Spenser's Sonnet 30, which uses fire as a metaphor for a man's desire, and ice as a metaphor for a woman's resistance to his wooing. Since the poem is entirely about the conflict between those two opposites, there would be no poem without the conflict. Spenser's Sonnet 75, like Shakespeare's famous "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" sonnet, claims that a poet can use his art to make the one he loves immortal. You could say that the conflict here is between art and nature. Nature erases each human life as we disappear into death, like names written in the sand and quickly washed away by the ocean. But art seeks to leave a permanent record that someone has lived and loved. What would it mean for that conflict not to exist? Would it mean that we weren't mortal, that we didn't have to worry about dying and being forgotten? Or would it mean that we didn't care about immortality, that human beings felt no urge to create works of art that would live on after the artist's death?