Spenser's Sonnet 54?

Question

Does anyone know what literary elements are present in this Sonnet and what the theme is?

Sonnet 54
Of this worlds theatre in which we stay
My love like the spectator ydly sits
Beholding me that all the pageants play,
Disguysing diversly my troubled wits.
Sometimes I joy when glad occasion fits,
And mask in myrth lyke to a comedy:
Soone after when my joy to sorrow flits,
I waile and make my woes a tragedy.
Yet she, beholding me with constant eye,
Delights not in my merth nor rues my smart:
But when I laugh she mocks, and when I cry
She laughs and hardens evermore her heart.
What then can move her? if not merth nor mone,
She is no woman, but a sencelesse stone.

-Edmund Spenser

Answer 1

1. figures of speech:
(A) metaphor: poetry is this world's theatre (in which we, poets, stay);
(B) metaphor: the woman is a stone;
(C) oxymoron, "a rhetorical antithesis bringing together two contradictory terms" (Holman, 1971: 373): " a senseless stone";
(D) simile: the woman he loves is like the spectator of this world's theatre (= poetry) in which poets stay.

2. Rhetorical device: inversion (=in the order of the words for emphasis); for example, the first quatrain in its normal order should read as follows:

My love [like the spectator of this world's theatre in which we stay] sits idly, beholding me, who play all the pageants, disguising diversely my troubled wits.

3. Spenserian sonnet (a combination of the Italian and the Shakesperean forms): three quatrains [ABAB/BCBC/DEFE] with a rhymed couplet [GG];

4. Theme: the persona complains about the woman's detachment as she reads his poetry. No matter how attentively she reads ("Yet she, beholding me with constant eye"), she fails to understand what he writes about ("comedy" or "tragedy"), the hidden meanings ("disguysing diversly my troubled wits") and also the moods he tries to convey ("But when I laugh she mocks, and when I cry she laughs"). To him, she is no woman; she is as senseless as a stone.

Answer 2

Sonnet 54

Answer 3

1) Elizabeth Alice 1) Atticus Bran 2) Amelia Eleanor 2) Richard Andy 3) Juliet Portia 3) Octavius Adam