The actual sub genre 1

I Live, I Die, I Burn, I Drown
Louise Labe

I live, I die, I burn, I drown
I endure at once chill and cold
Life is at once too soft and too hard
I have sore troubles mingled with joys

Suddenly I laugh and at the same time cry
And in pleasure many a grief endure
My happiness wanes and yet it lasts unchanged
All at once I dry up and grow green

Thus I suffer love's inconstancies
And when I think the pain is most intense
Without thinking, it is gone again.

Then when I feel my joys certain
And my hour of greatest delight arrived
I find my pain beginning all over once again.

When I do Count the Clock that Tells the Time
William Shakespeare

When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silver’d o’er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;
And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.


One of the most obvious differences in these poems are Shakespeare’s lack of stanzas. Louise is able to convey precisely what she is feeling through these stanzas, as she perfectly separates different ideas into them. Shakespeare is quite a bit more basic in his structure, simply having a block of text with a basic 1 2 1 2 3 4 3 4 scheme with the final two lines breaking the rhythm. Shakespeare uses a lot of metaphor in his piece, the most significant of which being Time’s scythe, alluding to Time being a reaper of beauty. Louise, however, settles for a lot of concrete language, which allows her to get her point across efficiently without much need for vagueness or fancy wording. She settles for the simple consonance “I live, I die, I burn, I drown” to simply convey her feelings.