Sir Patrick Spens PDF

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Summary of the poem titled "Sir Patrick Spens" for Poetics 2156 with Patrick Jackson ...

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Hayley Maine Poetics Jackson 10/2/2017 Sir Patrick Spens Makeup Assignment “Sir Patrick Spens” is an amazing poem discussing the tale of a talented sailor. Sir Patrick Spens receives the letter commanding him to captain the king’s ship without room for refusal. He must board the king’s ship, ride out to fetch whatever the king wants in a torrential storm, and somehow return. That is how his life has to go, because that is his fate. Because of this, the overall theme of “Sir Patrick Spens” is the inevitability of fate. Sir Patrick Spens is never given the option to refuse, and neither is his crew. They are all destined to die on the ship sent out by their king. That’s why one of the major subjects in “Sir Patrick Spens” is death. Death is at hand all throughout this poem. There is a subtle nod to it when the king is mentioned to be drinking blood red wine, and again when Sir Patrick Spens cries after reading the command. He knows he’s destined to die the second he sets out to sea. It was a suicide mission from the start. One of Sir Patrick Spen’s crewmembers even said, “And I fear, I fear, my dear master, That we will come to harm," (103). Death also hangs over the living left behind. We also see their widowed women, seated, obliviously waiting for their men to return. When time has passed they grow concerned and stand in an attempt to see over the churning horizon.

This entire woeful tale is told using ballad form. It was meant to be sung to hear the unique shifts in emotion within “Sir Patrick Spens” which coincided with the changing events. “Sir Patrick Spens” was written in the Middle English era of literature, and there’s plenty of evidence to show that. It’s written in ballad meter, which means it has four line stanzas, making it quatrain, with a typical rhyme scheme of a-b-c-b. For example: “The king has written a braid? Letter (A) And signed it wi' his hand, (B) And sent it to Sir Patrick Spens, (C) Was walking on the sand.” (B) It’s first and third lines are written in iambic tetrameter while the second and fourth lines are written in trimester. It’s also a Narrative Folk Verse, something commonly used during the Middle English era along with ballads. This simply means that “Sir Patrick Spens” is telling us a story using a bit of drama and variation in meter. Narrative Folk Verse includes ballads in its definition because it’s saying what type of ballad the poem is. However, Narrative Folk Verse universally tells a story by a specific theme no matter what kind of poem it is attached to. In our case, the theme was inevitability of fate....