A Song By Thomas Carew Essay

A Song by Thomas Carew (1595-1640)
Themes:
Love, romance, nature and beauty.
This whole poem is a tribute to the beauty and brilliance of one mystery lady, which uses the most transcendent beauty of the natural world to flatter his subject.
It celebrates the possibility of beauty and immortality.
Content:
Each stanza begins with the phrase ‘ask me no more’, which indicates that the poet is not feeling complicated anymore.
To begin with, the first question posed is of what Jove –the Roman God- does with the rose as summer ends, for which the answer is that he contains its beauty within the partner of Carew. He compares her beauty to the deep sunrise when flowers sleep.
In the second stanza, the comparison goes on about both her and her physical attitude, her hair, to golden atoms. Within this stanza and the previous, the reader starts to form an image of her physical appearance, which is also connected with heaven, meaning that her beauty is divine or angelic.
Then, the poet, apart from the appearance, unfolds information on her voice which is compared to a nightingale which is considered to be also a very peaceful sound. Traditionally, the nightingale was thought to be the female calling to the male and thus the nightingale is a common association with a desirable woman.
In the fourth stanza, he associates shooting starts, which shine brightly and shimmer as they descend with the sparkle in her eye. When he says ‘fixéd become, as in there sphere’ he simply means that these stars become a permanent presence in her eyes as they were previously in the night sky.
Finally, Carew uses the phoenix, a mythical bird that builds its nest and then burns itself before being reborn, as to equate with her fragrant.

Techniques and Analysis:
The poem has an Eastern quality as it is rich in imagery, suggesting that one should visualise the images of that orient. (soft + tender beauty, exotic qualities) When one reads the poem, it comes to mind that it is a eulogy of a beloved in an indirect and strongly rhetorical manner.
In stanza one: the poet uses internal rhyme (‘J’) which acts as assonance, making the words both powerful and enhancing their sharpness when one forms the powerful image that is well conveyed through the diction.
In stanza two: the enjambment, forms an intense effect of movement of the atoms streaming.
In stanza three: the nightingale ‘keeps warm her note’ during this absence in the throat of our love, almost like a pleasant and comfortable place to hibernate. ‘Sweet-dividing’ is meant to refer to the lyrical beauty the poet hears in the voice of his partner. One could argue that the writer deliberately used a hyphen, in order to show an ambiguity of splendours in her.
In stanza four: Elizabethans considered stars sacred, as they believed on them, therefore this comparison with her eyes and the stars, reassure to one how much Carew must be in love. Additionally, the caesuras in conjunction with the enjambment, are to create or reinforce the idea of permanence and alliteration of ‘d’ (line fifteen), suggests descend.
In the last stanza: the writer uses the literacy technique of alliteration of ‘ph’ which highlights both her feminine and the phoenix. At the same time, there is incremental repetition for which it can be argued that she finds her true grace changes in the last line to signal this fantastic and fabulous redrafting of the phoenix legend- within her form.
Structure: The poem is written in iambic tetrameter, which is a light metre and it is totally suitable to the contemptuous imagery.