LCappellaro - The Fair Youth
[author: Lucia Cappellaro - postdate: 2007-12-26]

narcissu

 

Text: The Fair Youth
Task: Writing a Textual Analysis


The Fair Youth

The sonnet is organized into two quatrains and a rhyming couplet.

 

Denotation 

The speaking voice says that the object has got a woman's face when nature created him. The beauty of the

young man sums up  male and female traits. He has got a "woman's gentle heart", but he has got also a fragile

heart which is typical of young people. In addition he is not as false as women.

 

He has got a lot of positive qualities: he has  "an eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling", "gilding the objects whereupon it gazeth", "A man in hue, all hues in his controlling," "Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.".

All the second quatrain describes the fair youth with a lot of adjectives that explain what the fair youth is like: those adjectives are "more bright", "less false", "gilding", "all hues in his controlling" and "amazeth".

 

 All the adjectives describe the traits of the fair youth. In the end of the second quatrain the speaking voice says that "which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth" ; probably meaning that that he is able to attract men and women all the same. The point is stressed in the third quatrain when the speaking voice says that the Nature created him first as a woman but seeing the quality of its creation she fell in love with her creature and consequently decided to add him something for "woman's pleasure" so that women could love him for their pleasure and men for his beauty.