Blazon Poetry of Spenser and Shakespeare and the research assignment

[John Bailey]

Name: __________________

Blazon Poetry

Spenser And Shakespeare

In literature of the renaissance, the “blazon of the body” was the poets complete description of his beloved from head to toe. It became hackneyed and tired, but the principle was sound, because it allowed the writer to create an order for his/her description. Edmund Spenser's "Sonnet 64," from his sonnet sequence (that is, collection of fourteen-line poems in iambic pentameter), the Amoretti, written for his fiancee in the 1590s, is a good example of blazon poetry.  Note how the poet catalogues the virtues of the woman’s body parts.

Coming to kiss her lips, (such grace I found)
Me seemed I smelled a garden of sweet flowers:
That dainty odors from them threw around
For damsels fit to deck their lovers bowers.
Her lips did smell like unto Gilly flowers,
Her ruddy cheeks like unto Roses red:
Her snowy brows like budded Bellamoures,
Her lovely eyes like Pinks but newly spread.
Her goodly bosom like a Strawberry bed,
Her neck like to a bunch of Collambines:
Her brest like lillies, ere their leaves be shed,
Her nipples like young blossomed Jessamines.
Such fragrant flowers doe give most odorous smell
But her sweet odor did them all excell.

Here is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130. It  is in some ways an anti-blazon. Why?

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks,
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound. (continued...)
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare


Research:

Find your own example of Renaissance blazon poetry or a modern lyric (Hip Hop,  Pop, Jazz, Broadway tune, etc) and include it in your workbook/journal. You may write it out, or paste it in.  Underline at least 3 body parts that the poet/lyricist describes.