My Love Sent Me a List

“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.

The poem also works as an anti-love sonnet. The speaker specifies this right away, saying her “Love” “Did not compare me to a summer’s day / Wrote not the beauty of mine eyes” (Line 2-3). In Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18,” the poet begins by asking, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” (

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