Raisa, Austin, and I chose this poem for it is seemingly unique in not directly referencing reproduction. We read the poem through Vendler’s categories of perception and philosophy. The speaker is particularly focused on “summer’s distillation” (9) and and “flower’s distilled” (13), calling to mind perfume. Yet, he seems to use sight and visualization as his main type of perception. He uses strong imagery in lines such as “sap checked with frost” (7) and “liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass” (10). This subtly forces the reader to continue think about physical beauty, even as the poem is ostensibly about essence. Similarly, Shakespeare questions the philosophy of reproduction in this poem by arguing that the poem itself is a way for this man to preserve his beauty, not reproduction. Shakespeare talks a lot in this poem of remembrance vs. forgetting, as well as preserving “substance” (14), and seems to use the poem in order to distill the man’s beauty and essence into 14 lines. Raisa and Austin, all yours!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Raisa, Austin, and I chose this poem for it is seemingly unique in not directly referencing reproduction. We read the poem through Vendler’s categories of perception and philosophy. The speaker is particularly focused on “summer’s distillation” (9) and and “flower’s distilled” (13), calling to mind perfume. Yet, he seems to use sight and visualization as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":419,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-romancing-the-sonnet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/419"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}