Poetry Annotations: Spenser, Cavalier, and Pastoral

Spenser sonnets are very similar to Shakespearian sonnets, but they often have a very different tone. Where Shakespeare wrote often about passionate love and beauty, Spenser wrote about the unattainable and fleeting love and beauty. He often wrote about the love he could never seem to have. You can see in the poem below that we annotated as a class that he writes about love fading as time passes and how he tries to resist the inevitable.



Pastoral poems focused mainly on the beauty of idealized rural life. It relied predominately on imagery to convey its theme. The metaphors and similes we see frequently in sonnets are replaced by these descriptions of scenes of nature. This nature serves as a symbol of love and passion as you can see in the poem below. However, notice how most of these gifts the shepherd seeks to give are short-lived and rather impractical.



Cavalier poetry was mostly written around the thematic subject of carpe diem, or "seize the day." It is about living life while you can and seizing opportunities for pleasure or fun. Cavalier poetry often had a somewhat reckless or urgent tone, pushing the reader to make the most of limited time. It often referenced the passage of time using metaphors about nature.