Elizabeth Woodruff
English 221, Friday 2:00 Section
Professor Bovilsky and Lizzy LeRud
Close Reading Assignment
2/3/2015
The sin of self-love possesses his eyes, soul, and every part. the eyes indicate how self-love controls the way he sees himself in relation to the world around him. By saying it possesses his soul, he is showing how thorough self-love influences him--so that he accepts it as part of his inner core. Every part emphasizes further how complete the self-love is a connected to him. By saying self-love is grounded in his heat, the speaker is claiming that self-love is so intertwined in himself there is no distinction between himself and his self-love.
The first quatrain neither assigns nor absolves responsibility for the sin of self-love. Possesseth is meant to show the powerlessness of the speaker to resist the self-love. This does not mean the speaker feels completely comfortable with the self-love, as he does refer to it as sin.
The tone is matter of fact on the surface. It is relating unavoidable, if unfortunate facts about the speaker, Though he does refer to it as a sin, any shame or desire to change is not focused on in these
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The speaker feels it destroyed his mental and emotional well-being, and even uses figurative language to link it to physical destruction. This is meant to give a sense of how love changes this person. The speaker, in a moment of presumed self-awareness, is bitter about the change he has experienced due to love. Though the beloved character is mentioned, he or she is not seen as the cause, or even the object of this bitterness. It is the condition of being in love the speaker finds abhorrent, because it degrades the speaker, and fills him with regret and disgust. He splits the condition of being love into various progressive states, each being worse than the last, and uses various structures of the poem, such as verb tense and strong language to mimic these