18 pages • 36 minutes read
Olena Kalytiak DavisA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“My Love Sent Me a List” reads like an homage to Shakespeare’s numerous love sonnets written in 1604. Shakespearean sonnets are 14 lines in length, written in iambic pentameter, and have a set rhyme scheme. Typically, Shakespeare’s love sonnets were written for an unnamed love interest, and many of them focus on the love interest’s physical beauty.
Davis’s poem reads as an homage because it utilizes Shakespeare’s format but inverts it for her own purposes. Davis has even said she wrote the poem after reading “thirty or so Shakespearean sonnets in a row” ("My Love Sent Me a List."). An homage is a writer’s attempt to write within another writer’s style to show appreciation for that writer. To fully understand the scope of Davis’s poem, it’s helpful to have some familiarity with Shakespeare’s sonnet format.