By: Sir Walter Raleigh
A Farewell to False Love by Sir Walter Raleigh is the best poem in the world. Raleigh writes his experience with love as terrible and unbearable; it was written in 1588 in an era where poets would typically write about the wonders of love, or write to a love. In Raleigh’s poem he contradicts this idea by writing a poem that states explicitly that love seems to be a lovely thing on the outside, but once you experience it, it is like a “poisoned serpent covered in flowers”. This poem contains many poetic elements including, elements of form, imagery, sound and sense, and theme. The writer uses all of these poetic elements to make this poem the best poem in the world. The structure of this poem is very common for the era that it was written. It is written in pentameter which is five pairs of strong and weak syllables. This makes the poem easy to read and it gives it a pleasant structure. It consists of five stanzas with 6 lines each including a rhyming couplet at the end of each stanza. Throughout the poem, each line finishes with a comma, except at the end of each stanza, they finish with a period. This is true for the first four stanzas, but the last one is different, the second last line finishes with a period. The way the author has written the end of the poem suggests that it should end with the second last line, but the is another line after it. The second last line starts with “False love”, part of the theme of the poem, and ends with “adieu”, the other part of the theme. Raleigh writes this way to symbolize the idea that no matter how much he thinks that love is a terrible thing, and he doesn’t want any part of it, he can never escape it; it is a part of everyone’s life. Although love is a part of everyone’s life and there is no escaping it, Raleigh uses a massive amount of imagery to explain who he perceives love. The entire poem is written in figurative language; the whole thing is a metaphor. Raleigh