Sonnet 30 Essay

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stoicSonnet 30 tells us that the speaker is a person who has long been disspationate , whose tears have for a long time been unused to flow. In the situation sketched in the poem, he begins by deliberately and habitually making these tears flow again; he willingly--for the sake of an enlivened emotional selfhood--calls up the griefs of the past. In receding order, before the weeping "now", there was the "recent" dry-eyed stoicism; "before that," the frequent be-moanèd moan of repeated grief; "further back in the past," the original loss so often mourned; and "in the remote past", a time of achieved happiness, or at least neutrality, before the loss. This time-line is laid out with respect to various lacks, grievances, and costs, as we track the emotional history of the speaker's responses to losses and sorrows. The initial, habitual "now" of weeping, is at the end surprisingly transformed into a final, actual "now", which resembles the remote happy past when one had love, precious friends, and the full enjoyment of those vanished sights, before sorrow entered, extended itself in mourning moans, and (even worse) hardened the soul into stoicism. The act described in the sonnet--a deliberate, willed, and habitual turn from the stoic back to mourning--is the only way the speaker has found to reconstitute the pre-stoical feeling self. However, this technique turns out to be a dangerous one. In line 12, we see the speaker not self-consciously remourning a woe that he knows to be an old one, but pitched, beyond his original intention, into a grief that no longer is aestheticized, but rather seems rawly new, original, horrible: "I new pay as if not paid before." The pay / not paid locution cancels out the previous locutions in which the second use of a verb or noun positively intensifies the first one, as in "grieve at grievances" or "fore-bemoaned moan." It is this
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