Seamus Heaney’s “Glanmore Sonnets” form the center of his 1979 collection Field Work. The sonnet series pose an interesting topic of study not only because they constitute a formalist move for a free verse poet, but also because of the way Heaney uses the sonnet form to demonstrate his view of time. In my examination of “Glanmore Sonnets,” I am interested in how Heaney fulfills and expands the traditional role of the sonnet.In this paper, I examine how Heaney’s “Glanmore Sonnets” both enact the sonnet’s traditional concern with immortality and time and expand the form to embody his view of the fluid nature of time and being.

A collection of poems based on Elizabeth Barrett-Browning's Sonnets From The Portuguese.

Throughout the procreation sonnets and those numerous sonnets that promise immortality through verse for Shakespeare's beloved young man, the poet personifies time as an agent of relentlessly destructive change. Yet Shakespeare's approach to the personification of time, as well as his reactions to time, changes over the course of the sequence. He transforms his fear of and obsession with time as a destroyer typical of most sonnets to an attitude of mastery over the once ominous force. The act of contemplating time's power by personification provides the speaker with a deeper awareness of time, love, and mutability that allows him to form several new philosophies which resolve his fear. By the end of the sequence, the poet no longer fortifies himself and the beloved against time's devastation because his new outlook fosters an acceptance of time that opposes and thus negates his previous contention with this force.

Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets have become the interest of several generations of Russian translators. Overall, after their first appearance in the middle of the nineteenth century, at least thirty-five Russian translations of the complete sonnet collection have been produced so far, though mostly during the last three decades. The overall objective of the present thesis is to examine the evolution of Russian translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets over the years. The thesis is novel in that it offers an analysis of specific linguistic, literary and cultural challenges the numerous Russian translators have dealt with while translating the sonnets, as well as the strategies adopted in an effort to resolve them. In order to achieve the study objectives, several individual sonnets and a number of their Russian translations have been selected as a sample representing challenging areas that have been more closely investigated in four articles. The method of cross comparison has been applied throughout the study. Both the introductory part and the articles address certain problematic translation issues, such as the sonnets’ formal structure, the pronouns of address, grammatical gender, bawdy language, sexual puns, culture-specific items, and metaphors. The results provide evidence for seeing translation as a multi-layered and ever-changing process, which, apart from the pure linguistic tasks, combines historical, political and ideological aspects. The findings of the study suggest that translation competence, namely deep understanding of the context and its fundamental cultural and social features, motivates the translator’s interpretation of the contradictions and uncertainties of Shakespeare’s poems. Those include the sonnets genre, relation to Shakespeare’s biography, the order of the poems in the first 1609 Quarto. The analysis also identifies the ways in which the target language’s social and historical context have had an impact on the choices made by the translators. On the whole, the study’s results do not contradict Mikhail Gasparov’s model describing the pendulum-like movement from “free” to “literal” approaches through the history of Russian literary translation.

The Baroque-era Spanish poet Luis de Góngora is renowned for his difficult syntax, and particularly for the literary device called hyperbaton, or the stylistic inversion of normal word order. While the elaborate gongorismo style has not gone unnoticed by linguists, classical analyses of the poet’s work typically view sentence structure as one-dimensional and characterize the force of a hyperbaton by the length of an interposed phrase. Taking the sonnets of Góngora as a data set, I invoke the theory of generative syntax to argue that this apparent interposition is actually multiple instances of raising, often into specifier positions, though typically for stylistic reasons rather than for the purpose of feature-checking. Esta tesis está escrita en español.

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

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Criticism on Donne???s Holy Sonnets has traditionally been concerned with trying to find an explanation for the doubt, anxiety, and despair that is often expressed by the speaker of those poems. In recent decades, critics have increasingly made recourse to Calvinist theology in an effort to explain these melancholy states of mind. The accounts that such critics provide of ???Calvinism,??? however, have been varied and largely inadequate, mainly because they fail to engage with Calvin???s work at the level it requires. My thesis seeks to correct such deficiencies by providing a detailed reading of Calvin???s view on salvation and the way in which it is received. Calvin argues that we obtain salvation through a firm and certain faith, a faith that is nevertheless attacked by the unbelief that still resides in the believer. In other words, there is a division between the flesh and the spirit within the soul of the believer, which means that he or she is never free (until death) from the sinful temptations of this life. This division, which Calvin invokes to reconcile the uncertainties of the Christian life with the assurance of faith, is dramatised in the Holy Sonnets. In the five poems that I analyse, the speaker is torn between a desire for righteousness and an inclination toward evil, a division that is also represented in the structural qualities of the text. The various temptations which the speaker registers and confronts (and often falls to) are, I believe, a demonstration of Calvin???s view that the regenerate person is in continuous warfare against the remnants of the flesh.

Th. : Harvard University. / Contient aussi un choix de poèmes en italien et en espagnol avec la trad. en anglais. Titre provenant de l'écran-titre. Ouvrage mis en ligne par eScholarship. Bibliogr.. Index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 233-243). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.