71 No longer mourn for me when I am dead

Question 1

Summarise sonnet 71s:

1 quatrain

2 quatrain

3 quatrain

Couplet

Answer 1

1. Don’t mourn for me any longer than I have been buried in the ground, it’s futile
2. If you read this line, don’t remember ‘the hand’ that wrote it; I’d rather be forgotten than remembered and make you sad
3. Seriously, don’t. Let your love for me even with my life decay
4. Lest the wise world should look into your moan

And mock you with me after I am gone.

Question 2

Analyse quatrain 1 of sonnet 71

Answer 2

• Straight in with death and non-mourning
  
  • Subverts expectations, inverse of immortalising sonnets
  • About poet, and about forgetting
• Alliterative ‘l’ with sibillance - death knell, dejected mood
• ‘Vile’ - repetition suggests no change, no point in mourning - all earthly

Question 3

Analyse quatrain 2 of sonnet 71

Answer 3

• ‘Hand’ - forget the physical
• ‘this line’
  
  • Subverts expectations, opposite of immortalising sonnet when mentions ‘line’, draws attention to ‘this’ particular sonnet as a material object
• Materiality and death, futility

Question 4

Analyse quatrain 3 of sonnet 71

Answer 4

• ‘verse’
  
  • Again rejects immortalising poetry
• ‘my poor name rehearse’
  
  • Acting, artifice
  • Physical world = hollow
  • Remembrance would be following convention, not truthful
• ‘Compounded am with clay’ - hard consonants - emphasising physicality, death, the end
• ‘Love with my life decay’ - incorporeal becoming corporeal - their love only existant on earth in physicality - inevitability of decay

Question 5

Analyse couplet of sonnet 71 ‘no longer mourn for me when I am dead’

Answer 5

‘Wise world’ - spondee - alliteration - scorn?

Question 6

Conclusion?

Answer 6

Better off forgotten, because ‘mock you with me’ - ghost, rehearsal, nothing comes close to the real him. Earthly world = hollow.