Both sonnets present religious doubt between the narrator and his relationship to God. Each poet uses imagery to his advantage to create feeling of desperateness. Both language and biblical metaphors give each sonnet a personality and a voice. Milton’s sonnet is a dialogue in the form of a question and answer. It is divided into an octet, which introduces the problematic situation and leads to the question, and a sestet, which offers an answer …showed first 75 words of 1023 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1023 total…place until line twelve, when the speaker rejects the ailing fires of lust and envy and prays for restorative fire. In both sonnets the poet has a confrontation with God, but finds solutions within the elements of their analogies, making active use of the language, and giving sacramental form to the intangible. The sonnets world analogy is complete only when realizing that no lesser power can help with the struggle to understand God. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ **Bibliography**