John Milton knows that God has called him to be a poet ('that one talent which is death to hide') - but now he finds that he is blind.

Blindness is particularly difficult for a poet - as deafness is for a composer. So Milton asks God: 'You have just made Your chosen poet blind. What were you thinking?'

But Milton learned to work around his blindness.

When Beethoven lost his hearing, he learned to work around that.

In Shakespeare's England, a year was taken to commence around the 25th of March. Its four seasons started with Spring (a period of birth and growth), followed by Summer (a period of warmth, mature splendor and vitality), Autumn (transition, decline and a yielding up of Summer's riches) and Winter (coldness, sparsity and death).

It was also then common to compare the stages of a person's life to the above four seasons. When Shakespeare said "thy eternal summer shall not fade" he was saying that the glory of his subject's summer - that time when he was at the peak of his powers and attractiveness - would never decline. In his Sonnet 18 he goes on to explain that that this described glory would be preserved through the sonnet living on in the minds of men - far beyond the deaths of both poet and subject.

yes

Penta refers to five... like in pentagon and other words

Pentameter refers to the meter of a poem in which there are five feet per line. The foot is the unit of rhythm--usually two and sometimes three syllables. Iambic refers to the type of foot used. It is rising, meaning the feet have an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable.


For example the couplet in Shakespeare's sonnet 29 exaggerated:


for THY/ sweet LOVE/ reMEM/bered SUCH/ wealth BRINGS
that THEN/ i SCORN/ to CHANGE/ my STATE/ with KINGS

because he is renissance

A sonnet is a poetic form which originated in Italy. It becomes second person when the main character is referred to personal pronouns such as "you".

it is a verse that is blank

Holy Sonnet X' is the name of a poem. This is the tenth poem found in John Donne's 'Holy Sonnets.'

This is called a Personification.

trochaic

three quatrains and a heroic couplet, with the rhyme scheme abab bcbc cdcd ee

ABAB BCBC CDCD EE - Spenserian sonnet

An Italian sonnet is made of 14 lines: two tercets (three lines each) and two quartains (4 lines each)

1

blindness

It refers to a poem by William Shakespeare:

Love is too young to know what conscience is;Yet who knows not conscience is born of love?Then, gentle cheater, urge not my amiss,Lest guilty of my faults thy sweet self prove:For, thou betraying me, I do betrayMy nobler part to my gross body's treason;My soul doth tell my body that he mayTriumph in love; flesh stays no father reason;But, rising at thy name, doth point out theeAs his triumphant prize. Proud of this pride,He is contented thy poor drudge to be,To stand in thy affairs, fall by thy side.No want of conscience hold it that I callHer 'love' for whose dear love I rise and fall.

The tone of Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 is both

It means that if you really love someone, you do not stop because their love for you changes. If you do stop loving someone who stops loving you back, then your love is not really love.