Rather than a poem reflecting her enjoyment of her lover, as would have been typical of an English sonnet, this poem is about the speaker reflecting on the fact that her lover will have to die. The opening octet seems to describe all of the features of the lover and how they will al fade away in death. The sestet puts a sudden shift in the poem, however, using lighter imagery though not taking a lighter tone, and possibly indicating that the speaker is lamenting their own death, and referring to their own body in the first half. The shift in a sonnet is called the volta, and is another standard feature of the sonnet (Baldick, 1990). Usually in an Italian sonnet, however, the octet presents a problem or question, and the sestet solves or answers it. In this poem, the sestet adds a complication to the problem set in...
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