Power and Love through Sonnet Moira Anne Bender College

The relationship between power and love brims with conflict. Introducing a dominant and a surrendering role within the interactions of men and women unequivocally creates opposition between the two. In three different sonnets by Sir Thomas Wyatt, Edmund Spenser, and W. B. Yeats display the conflicting dynamic between men and women in different situations depicting one as more powerful than the other. In Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “Whoso list to honte I know where is an hind”, the metaphor of a hunter unable to catch a fleeting and already claimed hind, or deer, describes the love of a man for an unattainable woman. Next, Edmund Spenser’s similar poem “Sonnet LXVII” details a deer allowing a hunter to obtain her. Lastly, W. B. Yeats’s poem “Leda and the Swan” discusses the Greek myth of Zeus’s rape of Leda in swan form and its subsequent results. Using varied approaches to the traditional conventions of the sonnet, as well as copious literary techniques, Wyatt, Spenser, and Yeats each clearly present three different arguments on the nature of power in love.

Firstly, Sir Thomas Wyatt’s warning sonnet, “Whoso list to honte I know where is an hind” argues that above all the magnitude of power determines love. Honouring the original theme...