English or Italian?

"One short sleep passed, we wake eternally, / And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die" ("Death, be not proud," 13-14).

We've gooot another sonnet! This one is apparently both English and Italian, but I feel like it follows the English form more closely with respect to rhyme. Let me try this: abba abba cddc ee -- is that anything close to the rhyming scheme? If so, it ends in a rhyming couplet like the English sonnet. However, there's a shift in the nice abba pattern after eight lines which is deceptively Italian.

What about the thought process of the poem? Blistex addresses death in an apostrophe, personifying death as wrongly "proud" (1). It argues that death has no reason to be proud -- it's not "mighty and dreadful" (2) as some say, and even when people "die," they don't actually die. Headphones points out that death is associated with "rest and sleep" (5), both very peaceful things, and good men are always ready to embrace death. Then, we get to Lanyard, who says that death depends on "fate" and "chance" and is associated with things like "prison" and "war" (9-10).

I feel like there's no real shift in thought between lines eight and nine. The real shift comes between lines twelve and thirteen. The first twelve lines discuss why death should not be proud; then, the last two lines is a concluding defeat of death, as you will.

Therefore, I dub this poem an English sonnet which is also a tiny bit Italian. It's a little confused about its nationality.

Blistex, Headphones, and Lanyard

"This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong, / To love that well which thou must leave ere long" ("That time of year," 13-14).

Let's talk a little bit about the organization of this poem. This is a Shakespearean sonnet, which the introduction says "consists of three quatrains and a concluding couplet." In this case, the first three quatrains present three different images, and the concluding couplet presents a . . . conclusion. I don't want to keep calling the quatrains "quatrain one," "quatrain two," and "quatrain three," so I'll call them "Blistex," "Headphones," and "Lanyard," respectively.

Blistex introduces an image of autumn turning to winter -- "when yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang" (2). Headphones discusses the end of the day -- "after sunset fadeth in the west" (6) -- and refers to "death's second self" (8) which confuses me. Is "death's second self" the end of the day? Finally, Lanyard talks about a fire that burns life -- "the glowing of such fire, / That on the ashes of his youth doth lie" (9-10).

The images of Blistex, Headphones, and Lanyard all discuss the end to something usually regarded as beautiful (autumn, daytime, and life). They also all say something about how whomever the speaker is addressing sees those images in the speaker. Just looking at those three stanzas alone, the speaker seems to me like a person who destroys all life that crosses its path like a bulldozer, so I'm assuming I should try to understand the concluding couplet. I quoted it at the beginning of the post.

I'm not very good at paraphrasing Shakespeare. I'll try. "You see these images in me, so your love for me is growing stronger." And then there's a weird infinitive phrase, and I'm not sure how it fits with the other line. "To love aptly what you must leave before long." I suppose autumn, daytime, and life are all things we love but have to leave before long. I think the speaker is comparing his audience's (his love's?) views of him to how we view those three images; his love knows that he's not going to be around forever, so she loves him even more.