wit—the creative, the unusual, the farfetched, the esoteric, and the shocking. Part of this wit was a love of intellectual

the specific genre of the poem, such as meditative lyric, sonnet, prayer, and such like.

Affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction. If a man carry treasure in bullion or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current moneys, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. Tribulation is treasure in

This is Milton’s reply to his friend who had criticized him for dreaming away his years “in the arms of a studious retirement.” Milton asserts that he is answerable to God for how he uses his time, and not to his friend.

Sequential structure. This refers to the organization of the poem as it progresses from beginning to end. Every poem has its own unique topical or imagistic units as it unfolds. The task of explication is to isolate the successive units and give them a name or label.

the occasion in life that gave rise to the poem and/or an implied situation within the poem

ending with a prayer (colloquy) addressed to God.

An Italian sonnet (also called Petrarchan sonnet, after the Italian poet Petrarch, who popularized it) consists of two units. The first eight lines have the fixed rhyme scheme of abba abba. This unit is called an octave and consists of such things as stating a doubt, asking a question, or delineating a problem—establishing something unsettling that

The essence of a meditative poem is that the speaker enacts a process of thinking on a subject.