Analysis Since There's No Help

Reader-Response Criticism The sonnet “Since There's No Help” is a typical example of Michael Drayton's work, yet it has been considered the one sonnet responsible for plucking Drayton from the general obscurity of Elizabethan sonnet writers. Many are of the opinion it was his one and only sonnet that reached the highest level of poetic feeling and allowed the audience to suffer alongside the writer. This poem is written in traditional Shakespearian sonnet form, consisting of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is also consistent of a Shakespearean sonnet, yet some are of the opinion that this sonnet can be split into the traditional three quatrains and a rhyming couplet, as with other Shakespearean sonnets. However,
We, the reader, witness the final moments of this dying love, noting our author suffers the same fate many of us have when cast aside by a careless lover. “Readers persisting in regarding characters as more human than substantial hypothetical beings, more like friends or neighbors” give the sonnet a more powerful, emotional reading. (Keen, 2011, p. 295). We attest to the last gasp of their love as it dies. We remember painfully the moment we watched our own passion for another shudder with a death rattle. The author is helpless as he watches the faith and hope he had in their relationship fail him, falling short in his plan for happiness. He cannot pretend this is just for the best, that this ending will bring something anew. She has destroyed his innocence of love, ripping off his blinders and shown him the cruel death of love. Here we finally see our speaker’s true feelings of this ending relationship. He loves her, he wants this love to live and grow. The ending of this affair is too much for him and he feels, like many of us have, that he himself is dying with this
It is never too late because just one little word from her would bring his love for her back from the dead. We have all wanted a past love to change their mind, to realize the stupidity of their mistake and beg us to take them back. The same is true for our poor author; he hopes against hope she will see that she still loves him. She will see that he is a better choice than another. His love for her will not be so easily cast aside and forgotten. “Thinking about the words, you’re already unavoidably beginning to think about the poem as a whole and your own response to it” (Lynn, 2011, p.73). Many a reader can relate to dreaming about ‘the one that got away’ and we all have loves that, even though there was a lot of pain, we wish had never ended the way they