Symbols, Imagery, Wordplay
Welcome to the land of symbols, imagery, and wordplay. Before you travel any further, please know that there may be some thorny academic terminology ahead. Never fear, Shmoop is here. Check out our...
Form and Meter
The Petrarchan or Italian sonnet is divided into two parts. The first part has eight lines and is called an octet. The second part has six lines and is called a sextet. The division between these t...
Speaker
Sometimes in movies and cartoons, a character will have some kind of electronic gizmo or she'll be riding in a plane or car, and there will be a "little red button." You don't know what the little...
Setting
You can't fit a round peg into a square hole. Except in this poem, where you can fit a "round earth" in the "imagined corners." These corners are like those of a map or a giant room. From the corne...
Sound Check
The first line of the poem sounds like the start of a race: "Take your mark, get set, GO!" vs. "At the round earth's imagined corners, BLOW!" Clearly Donne could not have intended this parallel, bu...
What's Up with the Title?
"At the round earth's imagined corners" doesn't have a regular title, because it wasn't customary for English poets to give titles to the individual works in a sonnet sequence. The poem is one of n...
Calling Card
Poor Petrarch. The guy practically invented the sonnet form, and the first great sonnets were in Italian. Nowadays, school kids hear sonnet and think "Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare." Fortun...
Tough-O-Meter
In this poem, you have to look at the big picture. In the first eight lines of the poem, the speaker calls for the Last Judgment. In the last six lines, he changes his mind and decides to repent in...
Brain Snacks
Sex Rating
There's not any sex in Holy Sonnet 7. We have a list of different kinds of death, a pardon signed with blood, and a man trying to repent for his sins, but there is absolutely no mention of sex.
Shout Outs
Revelation 7 (line 1)Revelation 8 (line 2)The Biblical Flood (line 5)