Please paraphrase the earl of Surrey, Henry Howard's poem, "Alas! So All Things Now Do Hold Their Peace."Alas, so all things now do hold their...

A summary is required before you can properly understand a
paraphrase of this sonnet. It is a lament that the quietude and peace of night displayed
by "Heaven and earth" does not carry over to the poet/sonneteer. Nonetheless, sometimes
his "sweet thoughts" do bring the moment of illusionary quietude when he thinks of his
beloved. This illusion is shattered, though, when his heart-pain reminds him that he has
been rejected. Remember that paraphrases take many more words than compressed poetry
with its metonymy, metaphor, allusion, analogy and figures of
speech.

PARAPHRASE

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With woe I notice that all things in nature hold
their peace and are quiet.
Neither heaven nor earth have anything
stirring.
The animals, the winds, the birds, all are quiet; there is no song
anywhere.
The night sky swirls the stars past in orderly
rotation.

The sea is calm; the waves work less and less in the
lowering tide.
I am not like the sea; I grow not quieter, I who love does
woefully pain.
Love brings me the image of the one I love that causes me to
both weep and sing.

In both joy and sorrow, love brings me double
feelings.
My loving thoughts sometimes give me pleasure
Until the
cause of my woe returns to my thoughts
Causing me an inward pang of stinging
pain.

This is because I again think of what grief I have
In
living when I lack the returned love that would rid me of my
pain.

This sonnet is written
in three quatrains with an ending couplet. Sonnets are 14 lines, and Surrey experimented
with different forms derived from the original Petrarchan sonnet. This one is divided
into three quatrains of four lines each plus an ending couplet of two lines; couplets,
of course, always rhyme. The value of separating a sonnet into quatrains, sestets (six
lines) or octaves (eight lines) is that the topics falling under the sonnet's subject
matter (the effects of his love that is rejected) may be switched or paradoxes may be
described or resolutions to problems may be introduced.

In
this sonnet, Surrey covers three topics and introduces a paradox in the couplet
resolution that explains his lament ("Alas! ... and woe"). The topics are (a) the
quietude of night (1-5); (b) his disquietude and woe (6-9); (c) his unrequited love
"disease" (10-12). Lines 13-14 explain his lament of "woe" and "grief": he lives without
the love that would still his pain; his love is unrequited (unreturned).

The turn from one topic to the next, called the "volta,"
occurs at the first line of the next quatrain. In other words, Surrey uses the last line
of a topic as the bridge into the next topic. For example, the quiet of night is the
topic of the first quatrain yet the calm sea is the first line of the second quatrain;
it acts as a bridge to the topic of his own feelings and pushes the turn, or volta, from
line five to line six. Thus the two voltas, turning to the new topics (b) and (c), are
placed experimentally at lines 6 and 10 instead of at the expected lines 5 and 9. Each
quatrain has the same abab rhyme scheme, while the couplet is
cc.