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Description of Different Feelings in Sonnets Essay

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Description of Different Feelings in Sonnets

In this essay, I am going to look in detail at three sonnets showing very different feelings. I will show all the main features and try to explain what the writers were trying to show and underline in there sonnets. Each of the three sonnets I have chosen are by different writers and also from different centuries, I have decided to look at ‘God’s Grandeur’ by G.M Hopkins, ‘Death be Not Proud’ by John Donne and also ‘Shall I Compare thee to a Summer’s Day’ by William Shakespeare. The reasons the poems were wrote and also the time is they were wrote is different but the range of emotions and feelings shown throughout is amazing; the sonnets have also been …show more content…

The earliest of my three sonnets ‘Shall I Compare thee to a summer’s Day’, by Shakespeare is written around 1599. The sonnet is addressed to a young boy as Shakespeare tries to compare the boy to summer. Shakespeare was asked to write the sonnet by the boy’s mother who wanted her son to be shown in the light that she seen him and also showed the love that the mother had for her son. The title of the sonnet is also the first line

“Shall I Compare thee to a Summer’s Day?”

It’s from here that Shakespeare goes on to try to answer this question and show that the comparison Shakespeare has made with the boy to the summer is relevant but by the second line we find Shakespeare contradicting himself by saying the boy is

“Thou art more lovely and more temperate:”

This suggests the boy is lovelier and more temperate than summer, so why compare the boy to summer. Shakespeare goes on from this to point even more bad points in summer and contradict himself as Shakespeare says in the fourth line summer as a season is

“And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:”

We later see Shakespeare go on to say

“But thy eternal summer shall not fade”

How can summer be both too short and everlasting or eternal? Throughout the sonnet Shakespeare makes these comparisons which he goes on to contradict but when doing so can

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