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Does Love Define Us?

Decent Essays
The self and fairytales have a major thing in common: love. Fairytales always have the same plot, love at first sight because of the characteristics one possesses. Everyone in the world has one goal in common, to find their “prince charming” or “snow white” with who they will spend the rest of their lives with, because they want to receive the happily ever after that is so often seen in fairy tales. It is hard to identify the self because many factors influence it, but a major influence over the self is love. In Sonnet 138, “When my love swears that she is made of truth,” Shakespeare uses a poet as the speaker and his lover as the audience in order to express the view that although not everyone claims to fall in love, love is what defines the self by allowing us to lie to ourselves about who we are, thus creating an illusion. In the content of Sonnet 138, the poet reveals both the nature of his relationship with his lover and the uncertainties he has about growing older, which lead him to adjust the self accordingly to his lovers standards. The speaker of Sonnet 138 is the poet, a hopeless romantic who believes that the best love is one that forgives and pretends as though everything is fine. Due to this perspective he forgives his lover for all the wrong that she has done to him. In order to forgive her he must change his standards, therefore changing himself. The lover is a female that cannot be committed to one man. Based on the way the poet passionately talks about
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