Sonnet Analysis the Quality of Beauty, Love,

Sonnet Analysis

The Quality of Beauty, Love, and Sonnets

Sir Thomas Wyatt's sonnet "How the Lover Perisheth in His Delight as the Fly in the Fire" describes how love, passion, and/or beauty can be all-consuming and self-destructive. The poet uses a long-running metaphor of birds as a substitute or symbol for male lovers generally and the speaker of the poem specifically, while the sun is the female lover and possessor of great beauty -- the source of the fire or passion, in some sense. It is the nature of the birds and their relationship to the sun that concern the speaker at first, however; he comments that some are able to shield their eyes from the sun's light, and that others only come out at night because the sun is simply too much for them to handle, but that many try to play in the sun but ultimately find themselves consumed by it's blaze. It is after describing this last type of bird that the speaker turns to a comment on himself and the reason behind the running metaphor -- he is one of the latter type of birds, drawn to his lover's flame (her beauty, perhaps, or perhaps just driven by the passion she kindles in him, though the two are essentially inseparable in such poetry) despite the fact that it will destroy him and with the added tragic element that he is well aware of his fate and is tortured by his lover's absence even while he reflects on the fact that his love and passion for her is destructive.

This sonnet is a decent example of its genre and period, but there are several features that make it less successful than other sonnets, especially some of Shakespeare's, Donne's, and the more modern lines of Edna St. Vincent Millay. One issue is the title, which gives away the poem's conceit before it is even read; though the traditional form of simply numbering sonnets rather than titling them need not be followed, the poem essentially describes in one simple sentence the metaphor that is explored and exposed in the poem. This makes for a less enjoyable experience with the poem, as the reader already knows where things are headed before arriving there. True, the symbol of the fly and the fire does not actually appear until the final line of the fire, and indeed the fly -- to which the speaker is comparing himself at this point -- is not named outside of the title, but the basic meaning and thrust of the poem is still revealed to early. Otherwise, this last line of the poem and the twist it implies is actually one of the more enjoyable moments in the sonnet, as it reduces the scale of the metaphor considerably and implies a certain degree of self-deprecation and perceived insignificance on the part of the speaker. To be sure, the speaker always sees himself as at least somewhat foolish, comparing himself to a bird that still pretends to be enjoying something that is in fact too bright for it and ultimately destructive, but the symbols of birds and especially of the sun make the entire scene larger than life and highly significant. Reducing the scale to that of a fly and a "glead" or live coal -- not even a full fire, but simply a hot and glowing lump -- makes the epic scale of the first quatrains seem almost humorous.