Lovers’ Infiniteness 15.3.18
The title of the poem connotes that love has no boundaries. The poem throughout contains a lot of complaining and consistent arguments from the persona, they expand on the joys sides to love but also its complexities and insecurities. Tortured syntax portrays the persona’s distressed feelings. There are conditional clauses, for example ‘if yet’ and ‘if then’, on top of conjunctions such as ‘or’ at the beginning of the second stanza in the curtal sonnet, strengthen the persona’s feelings of suppositious nature throughout. The sonnet takes form of an iambic metre with its 8-10 syllabled lines in the stanzas. This creates a sense of passion from the persona as the poem forces the reader to speak in a moving voice. This then creates disconcerting tension for the reader as the syntax, perhaps portraying love in both a sensitive but loving way. All three stanzas end similarly showing a sense of harmony in the poem. Where the persona says ‘all’, at the end all each stanza, it conveys that however much he tries he will never have her whole heart, and only snippets. There are rhyming couplets within each stanza that convey the argument of passion in the persona’s voice once more.
The repeated use of the definite articles ‘thou’ and ‘thy’ suggest an intimate relationship between the two as the words suggest a familiarity with one another. The persona complains all the way through the poem that his mistress is not giving him all of her heart and love when he has given her everything that is expected of an old English gentleman. This is show in the poem when the persona says he have given ‘sighs, tears, and oaths, and letters I have spent’. As they list the things they have given the persona loudens the argument of the things he has given her and one for her, especially the use of the conjunction ‘and’ to keep the list going. In lines three and four the person seems agitated and mad. The language he uses display the signs of his great love for her. Words such as ‘purchase’, ‘treasure’, ‘bargain’ and ‘spent’ which is the pers...
