Sir Walter Raleigh’s Poetic Reflection on Life as a Play
Sir Walter Raleigh wrote this poem in 1612 while imprisoned, accused of treason, and awaiting execution. Years later, he was executed after being held in the Tower of London.
The author compares life to a theatrical play. This poem explores themes of life and death.
Raleigh employs a series of metaphors and similes to construct the poem, comparing life to a play. He transitions from birth to death using a continuous structure of images.
In the first line, answering the rhetorical question ‘What is our life?’ the author suggests that our lives are like a play, specifically a ‘play of passion,’ referencing medieval plays about Christ’s life before his crucifixion. In the second verse, he compares the womb, the place where we prepare to enter the world, to the moment when actors prepare and dress before going on stage to perform this ‘short Comedy,’ which he likens to our earthly lives. He then uses a religious connotation, personifying heaven and giving it the role of a spectator, implying that God is watching those who act wrongly in the world. In the following two verses, he uses a simile to compare death to the end of a performance. The graves are the tenors, related to the drawing curtains that signal the end of the performance. The ground connects the tenor and vehicle, representing the darkness when we are buried and when the curtains are down. The final line is crucial, as Raleigh brings us to reality, clarifying that he is discussing the inevitability of death and that we are merely actors in earthly life. The poem’s rhyme scheme is AABBCCDDEE. Except for the first two lines, the entire poem rhymes in couplets, linking the images. The stress falls on the last vowel and syllable of the line. This is a masculine rhyme, while the first verses use a feminine rhyme because the last two syllables rhyme. This simple rhyme scheme reflects the brevity of life and existence, always leading to the same end. The meter consists of one stanza with ten lines, primarily in iambic pentameter, although there is a trochee at the beginning (‘What is’) and in line 5 (‘Heaven’), creating a descending rhythm that aligns with the theme of death.
The voice is that of the author himself. Although the main theme is death, the tone at the beginning of the poem is not sad or dark; it could even be considered humorous (‘…graves that hide us from the searching sun’). It is in the last lines that Raleigh acknowledges that we are all going to die, and the poem becomes depressing and melancholic. The enjambment on line 7, where the tone of the poem shifts, implies the quick passage of time. Similarly, the lack of punctuation encourages faster reading, while the caesura in the last line ensures that we recognize the final scene as final and inevitable. Furthermore, there are several alliterations, such as the ‘m’ sound in line 2 and the ‘sh’ sound in lines 5 and 7, which can be interpreted as the music that sounds in the interlude of a play.
In conclusion, the techniques that Raleigh uses serve to reflect the message he wants to convey: that in a play, we can act several times, while in our short lives, we only have one chance.