LOST LOVE

     Love is defined as a powerful emotion felt for another person, manifesting itself in deep affection and devotion.  When love is real and solid, its presence can be easily detected.  As two people age together, their love for one another is supposed to grow and flourish.  In “Sonnet Reversed,” however love deteriorates instead of grows.

     The diction in this sonnet clearly illustrates the couple’s diminishing love.  In the couplet, words such as “trembling”(1) and “amazing”(1) are used to describe the emotions of the wedding ceremony.  A wedding ceremony is a chance for two people to show the world that they stand on a level of “supreme heights”(2) with their love for each other.

     Compared to “the delirious weeks of honeymoon”(3), life for the couple as they grow older is “daily”(8) and “really quite content”(9).  When they “settled at Balham”(5), the diction becomes very dull and colloquial.  Descriptive words such as “amazing lights”(1) and “strange adventures”(4), become “content”(9) and “abide”(8).  Jane, “the eldest”(12) child is simply “married”(12).  She does not seem to experience the “hand trembling towards hand”(1) or the “amazing lights of heart and eye”(1-2).  When her parents die they are without love; therefore Jane does not experience any love herself.  In the last quatrain no reference to love is made through diction.

     The tone of the sonnet like the diction, also changes with the change in love.  In the beginning, the tone is happy and youthful.  The words flow together through the description of the young love, therefore, the reader is allowed to experience and feel the love right along with the couple.  The tone begins to change near the end of the first quatrain.  When money takes precedence to love, the tone becomes ordinary.  The sentences and words become choppy and the flow is interrupted, causing changes in tone.  When the reader trips over words such as “Antofagastas”(7) and “B. Debentures”(6), the tone becomes mundane.  As the sonnet continues, the youthful love turns old and dies.  The tone is sad and depressing due to the disappearance of love.

     Structurally, this love song, like the title suggests, is reversed.  Instead of the couplet being at the end of the sonnet, it is at the beginning.  The couplet usually emphasizes the meaning and contains the most important point of the sonnet.  Because love is stressed at the beginning of the sonnet, in the couplet, the fourth quatrain becomes empty and dull.  The sonnet ends leaving the reader not thinking about love, but thinking about “Henry, a stock-broker doing well”(14).  This structural device shows how love is lost and accents the importance of this loss.

     In “Sonnet Reversed”, the couple’s love disappears throughout the course of their life.  When two people get married, their love is bonded together.  Sometimes however, the bond breaks.  When it does, a new bond must be formed, either with the same two people or by separate persons.  Love is a critical emotion and must not be taken for granted in life.  It must be cherished.