Pity Me Not (Sonnet 29) Literary Elements

The speaker is an unidentified person, implied to be a woman, who is recovering from the end of a love affair.

The poem is a traditional Shakespearian sonnet written in iambic pentameter, with an ABAB CDCD EFEF GG rhyme scheme.

The speaker compares love to various objects in nature with the simile “love is no more/Than the wide blossom which the wind assails,/Than the great tide that treads the shifting shore,/Strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales.”

The speaker uses alliterative L's in her revelation “And you no longer look with love on me" and evokes the sound of waves with alliterative SH sounds in the line "Than the great tide that treads the shifting shore." Meanwhile, assonant E sounds appear in the line "Strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales" (which also features alliterative G's).

Ironically, while the speaker attempts to minimize and rationalize her suffering, this rationalization only leads her to suffer further, causing her to feel upset when she fails to rationalize her feelings fully. A further irony is that, while she accepts that her lover cannot force himself to love her, she cannot accept the same lack of control over her own feelings.

Sonnet

Unidentified, though the poem is full of allusions to pastoral settings.

Melancholic, conflicted

The protagonist is the speaker—who is also the antagonist, since she struggles to fight her own feelings and reactions.

The conflict in this poem is not between the speaker and the lover, but rather between the speaker's simultaneous impulses to rationalize and to feel her emotions.

The climax occurs at the volta after line twelve, when the speaker reveals the true conflict at hand and exposes her heartbreak fully.

The repeated phrase "pity me not because" foreshadows the poem's final lines, in which the speaker reveals the true reason why she wishes to be pitied.

At the start of the poem, the speaker subtly compares her own pain to various serene, melancholic natural scenes. In doing so she understates the intensity of her feelings.

“This love I have known always” alludes to the speaker experiencing a series of disappointing romantic relationships in which love always comes to a premature end.

That the “heart is slow to learn/What the swift mind beholds” is an example of metonymy, in which the heart and the mind respectively represent emotions and intellect.

Nature is constantly personified, with the day described as walking, wind assailing, and the tide treading the shore. Collectively, these help to make the speaker's internal conflicts and emotions more vivid.

The generalization that "the swift mind beholds at every turn" is hyperbolic.

The word "hush" is onomatopoetic.