No, Thank You, John Literary Elements

The speaker is an unnamed woman turning down the advances of a man.

This is a dramatic monologue made of eight quatrains. It is written in an iambic meter and includes iambic tetrameter, pentameter, and trimeter. It has an ABAB rhyme scheme.

The speaker uses a simile to describe John's bizarre attitude: “Why will you haunt me with a face as wan / As shows an hour-old ghost?” She also uses the (conventionalized) metaphor "I have no heart" to describe her own apparent emotionlessness. She uses the short flights of songbirds as a metaphorical representation of the ephemerality of life and youth.

Alliteration appears in the W sounds of "And wax a weariness to think upon," and the M sounds of "I dare say Meg or Moll would take." Instances of assonance occur in the O sounds of "what I have not got" and the E sounds of "No more, no less: and friendship's good."

The speaker is superficially positioned as a powerful player with the ability to determine John's fate, but more power ultimately lies with John, who is able to control a great deal of the speaker's day-to-day life.

Dramatic Monologue

The poem does not specify the time or location, but does allude to social and sexual norms in Rossetti's Victorian world.

Tongue-in-cheek; Accusatory; Conciliatory

The protagonist of the poem is the unnamed woman refusing the man’s advances. The antagonist is John.

The speaker harbors no romantic feelings for John, who refuses to accept her rejection and continues to pursue her.

The poem's climax is the transition following the fifth stanza, in which the speaker changes tactics and attempts to compromise with John.

The poem's first line, in which the speaker revisits her past interactions with John and argues that she never pledged to love him, foreshadows her continued uninterest in him romantically.

The word "untruth" is an understatement, in which the speaker opts for a softer and more ambiguous word than "lie" in order to come to a compromise with John.

The poem alludes generally to patriarchal structures surrounding gender relations and courtship in Victorian England.

The word “treaty” metonymically refers to friendship and the conditions upon which it is based.

N/A

The statement “I'd rather answer "No" to fifty Johns / Than answer "Yes" to you” is a hyperbolic hypothetical to deter any further advances from John.

The word "shuffling" is onomatopoetic.