English Experience of Love Essay 29th January 2011 In love poetry, a ubiquitous theme is whether the love in the poem is painful or happy. In Sonnet 116 and to some extent in La Belle Dame Sans Merci, love is happy. In the Sonnet, the happiness is conveyed through several mediums- punctuation-wise, the small number of full stops gives the poem a calm tone, and the absence of hyphens and question marks shows the lack of anguish. The enjambment, on the whole, gives the poem a smooth feeling. The lexical choice of marriage in the first line is important, as, at the time (the 17th Century), marriage was expected to last a long time, and so true love should last forever. The simple and regular rhyme scheme illustrates the happiness and stability of the love and the rhyming couplet at the end, (a hallmark of sonnets) is a metaphor for the two lovers, intrinsically linked. Most importantly, sonnets are romantic! There are very few sonnets about unhappy love. The happiness in La Belle Dame Sans Merci is confined to the seventh stanza, wherein the knightat-arms receives relish, honey and manna-a pleasant and sacred gift from God. However short-lived, this shows the sweet and satisfying sort of love which appears in the Sonnet. However, in Song. A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, Woman's Constancy My Last Duchess, and La Belle Dame Sans Merci, love is painful. In Song, the pain is illustrated by the bitter tone and the phrase Envy's stinging in line six. The lexical choice of stinging shows how painful the envy is. In Woman's Constancy, the title itself is a picture of painful, bitter love, when juxtaposed to the subject matter. The legal lexis scattered around the poem gives a cold, faceless tone. In line fourteen, the narrator of the poem apostrophically cries, Vain lunatic..., showing the anger and pain that he is enduring. A Valediction: Fobidding Mourning