Evaluate the poem "The Anniversary" with its appreciation.
Ans.“The Anniversary" is a poem written by John Donne. This poem talks about the anniversary of Donne and his love. The Anniversary is one of John Donne's early love poetries. The purpose of his love poetries are to focus on how important he sees his love and to show how much he treasures his times with his loved one. The Anniversary is not different as it takes a focus upon the longevity of the love between him and his lover. In this poem, Donne uses poetic devices such as alliteration, consistent rhyme scheme, variation from the iambic pentameter and imperative opening to accumulate his ideas and so to add emphasis to them. Unlike much other poetry by Donne,
The Anniversary does not have a conceit, but rather than using a conceit to hyperbolise key ideas, Donne uses very grand comparisons to do so. The Anniversary is structured by three stanzus, each following the rhyming scheme of aabbccdddd. The structure shows the confidence and a lack of doubt in his argument. His argument being his love for his partner is stronger and grander than the royalties, that even the sun will age but their love will not. We as readers also see continuous build up i. his confidence within his argument. This is shown by the accumulation of syllables through any of the stanzas. For example, throughout the first stanza, the number of syllables in each line builds in this way 8, 9, 10, 10, 10, 10 - then it goes back down to 8 when he speaks of "Only our love hath no decay" - which may show that he is less sure about this statement, but with its short length, the emphasis becomes bigger, so the accumulation is not broken. The number of syllables continues to be in the form of the iambic pentameter until the last line where he is most sure about himself - where there are 12 syllables. The other two stanzas follow a similar pattern. The argument that Donne attempts to build is, no doubt, their love will not decay. He compares their love wvith the sun, which represents time in the first stanza. He says that time is now a vear older from when the lovers first met, but their love has never deteriorated even whilst everything draws to their destruction as time pašses. There is also a use of paradox in the first stanza and along with inversion. The paradox is as seen in "Running it never runs from us away" which also contains the use of inversion to emphasise the 'us' in the line.
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