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Portrayal of Love in Sonnet 18, The Sun Rising and To His Coy Mistress

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Portrayal of Love in Sonnet 18, The Sun Rising and To His Coy Mistress

The three poems studied for this, all contain material describing love for a woman. Among this theme are other underlying messages being projected to attentive readers but the theme which will most probably be initially remarked upon or noticed by someone reading these poems for the first time will be their dedication to the female form.

Sonnet 18 by Shakespeare begins with what seems like an ode to a special person, we can assume is a women. Shakespeare uses terms such as "lovely" and "darling" in order to describe the image which he wants to portray of this particular person. These descriptions initially seem entirely …show more content…

The poem seems to change into a darker tone afterwards with the phrase "Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines" this shows us that Shakespeare seems to be thinking that even good things can become unbearable and unpleasant in excessive quantities. This contradicts his thoughts on summer seeming too short as he states that one can have too much of a good thing. He continues this sentiment with "often is his gold complexion dimm'd", gold being one of the most precious and beautiful substances on earth has an amazing lustre. Here Shakespeare describes the subject as having a complexion of one of the most beautiful substances but which doesn't live up to its beauty and is therefore 'dimmed'.

Throughout the sonnet the words "lease", "fair" and "owe" crop up. These words seem to imply that the subject of the poem owes their beauty to something, in my opinion, the divine sun and the summer.

The last two lines of the poem, "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this and this gives life to thee.", seem to imply again that the subject owes their beauty to something other than what they have been born with. The vocabulary used is somewhat uncomplementary in the way that Shakespeare uses words such as "fade": to lose colour, "dim": to become darker, "decline": to become worse. These words give a sense of something beautiful and wonderful

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