O my black soul!
- Created by: eleanorfarnold
- Created on: 14-04-15 15:20
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- Holy Sonnet IV (O my black soul!)
- O my black soul! Now thou art summoned/ By sickness, death's herald, and champion;
- fear for self reaches panic.
- innevitability - death is a ruler (he's a subject)
- interesting that death isn't capitalised...
- Thou art like a pilgrim which abroad hath done/Treason and durst not turn to whence he's fled,
- religious images
- travelling towards redemption irony that this itself has been turned into a sin
- he's come from heaven - fear that he has to return. separation of body and soul.
- quite an extreme image - defying your ruler as well as origins. brings the structure of jacobeian life heavily into question.
- Or like a thief, which till death's doom be read,/ Wisheth himself delivered from prison,
- he will be delivered from prison but not to where he wants to go...
- doom = domesday
- soul doesn't want to be stuck in the body
- But damned and haled to execution,/ Wisheth that still he might be' imprisoned.
- sinner who begins to love hi s prison because it represents safety in comparison to finality
- deep ironies and confusions
- Yet grace, if thou repent, thou canst not lack;/But who shall give thee that grace to begin?
- God's grace = forgiveness
- catharsis - purification of emotions
- again symmetry adds a sense of unanswerableness
- O make thyself with Holy mourning black,/ And red with blushing, as thou art with sin;
- he begins the process of redemption in a similar way visually as he started
- highlights that these are colours of violence and of salvation - he reimagines himself
- Or wash thee is Christ's blood, which hath this might,/ That it being red, it dyes red souls to white.
- again duality of sinfulness, passion/ strength and redemption.
- Martz: by setting his deathbed as a "scene of legal trial" he engages us is dramatic action.
- O my black soul! Now thou art summoned/ By sickness, death's herald, and champion;
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