How Everest Lewin Presents Conflicting Emotions in "Sonnet" Amelie Maurice-Jones 12th Grade

In "Sonnet," Lewin uses the traditionally romantic sonnet form in aptly named poem Sonnet to explore a speaker’s conflicted feelings for his beloved. The poem might be read as a devoted deceleration of the speaker’s love for the addressee, and yet upon further analysis it seems that the emotions of the speaker are riddled with both contradiction and doubt.

In Sonnet, Lewin presents a speaker evidently besotted with his beloved, proven by the extensive focus on the woman throughout the poem. Such is immediately demonstrated by the sonnet form in which the poem is written: as a form traditionally aligned with romantic passions, the form immediately alludes to the speaker’s deep feelings of admiration for the addressee. The personal pronoun ‘You’ pervades the majority of the poem’s lines, which creates a sense of a love so deep that it overpowers all other elements of the speaker’s life. Indeed, the pronoun starts four of the six lines in the poem’s sestet, perhaps suggesting that all significant factors of the speaker’s life begin with consideration of his partner. The poet claims that the location in which ‘I met you and I loved you, is forgot.’ and the non-standard standard syntax employed here suggests that the love shared by...