Comparing Fear In Tell Tale Heart And Sonnet 100
Nighttime and Fear, the inseparable peanut butter and jelly sandwich of literature, have always went to together, in different situations, often to establish a chilling and fearsome tone to the text. Both of these ideas are brought up by many different authors, including the most prestigious, such as Edgar Allan Poe with his horror story, Tell Tale Heart, as well as Lord Brooke Fulke Greville, with his short poem,Sonnet 100. Both passages support the theme of night time and fear creating an ominous mood to the story, but both authors do it in slightly different ways. Greville, with his short and ‘sweet’ poem, uses short phrases coupled with extensive vocabulary, while Poe integrates explaining more than vocabulary, and instead of shortening
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Tell Tale Heart is told in a story with a plot, while Sonnet 100 is shown as a poem, talking in a completely omniscient manner, with no plot elements at all. The poem simply gives information in a way that is art, and shows what the author believes. The story however, is given in a more entertaining format, in which most elements that the poem gives straight out must be inferred from the plot elements within the story. This is most clearly portrayed when Greville, the author of Sonnet 100, includes that in darkness, when evil is let to prosper, people show shadows of themselves “Which but expressions be of inward devils,”(14). In contrast however, with Tell Tale Heart, the author includes everything from the narrator’s point of view, making it so that you have to infer rather than read out, as a great chunk of the story is the man sneaking into the old man’s room on the eighth night, making a mistake, and then committing the murder on that night itself. By using the information that the man had committed a hasty murder, you can infer that in settings such as this, the “inward devils”(14), are shown in the narrator himself, who had committed murder for the outward appearance of the old man. This is one massive difference between the poem and the short story; show, not tell. However, this difference is purely in the way that the connection between nighttime and fear is made, but there is a big difference in how the authors relate nighttime and fear themselves! Poe prefers illustrating the two by emphasizing timestamps of which the narrator sneaks into the man's room, when he “kept quite still and said nothing. For a whole hour…”(2). Poe’s narrator, as time moves on because increasingly frenzied, because of seeing the man’s eye in the light, and ‘hearing’ the old
Tell Tale Heart is told in a story with a plot, while Sonnet 100 is shown as a poem, talking in a completely omniscient manner, with no plot elements at all. The poem simply gives information in a way that is art, and shows what the author believes. The story however, is given in a more entertaining format, in which most elements that the poem gives straight out must be inferred from the plot elements within the story. This is most clearly portrayed when Greville, the author of Sonnet 100, includes that in darkness, when evil is let to prosper, people show shadows of themselves “Which but expressions be of inward devils,”(14). In contrast however, with Tell Tale Heart, the author includes everything from the narrator’s point of view, making it so that you have to infer rather than read out, as a great chunk of the story is the man sneaking into the old man’s room on the eighth night, making a mistake, and then committing the murder on that night itself. By using the information that the man had committed a hasty murder, you can infer that in settings such as this, the “inward devils”(14), are shown in the narrator himself, who had committed murder for the outward appearance of the old man. This is one massive difference between the poem and the short story; show, not tell. However, this difference is purely in the way that the connection between nighttime and fear is made, but there is a big difference in how the authors relate nighttime and fear themselves! Poe prefers illustrating the two by emphasizing timestamps of which the narrator sneaks into the man's room, when he “kept quite still and said nothing. For a whole hour…”(2). Poe’s narrator, as time moves on because increasingly frenzied, because of seeing the man’s eye in the light, and ‘hearing’ the old