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Sonnet 116 Analysis

Decent Essays

Once upon a time there was an English writer from the 1600s who wrote a collection of 154 poems called Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The poems reflect on love, time, beauty, and death. Throughout the sonnets, many different types of love can be deciphered. The Various ways to love can be seen in William Shakespeare’s poems, as proven by lust in “Sonnet 129,” the love of appearances in “Sonnet 130,” true love in “Sonnet 116,” and the elements of nature in contrast to love in “Sonnet 18,” proving that there can be many different aspects of love and how it is perceived.
The first poem, “Sonnet 129,” shows how one way that love can be portrayed is through lust. It describes how one is controlled by the impulses, experiences the joy, and is then mortified by the deed. Lust is irresistible and overwhelming and can cause emotions such as longing, blissful fulfillment, and unavoidable guilt, as described by Shakespeare in “Sonnet 129” (Fleischmann 115). Allowing physical desire to overpower reason is the root of sin that Shakespeare addresses in the sonnet. Even though the sonnet’s speaker knows that he should withstand the temptation, it is shown that resisting the urges may be all but impossible (Fleischmann 116). The reader can infer that lust is a desire experienced around the world, but not many people have the will to prevail over it: “Sonnet 129 depicts lust as a universal experience ‘the world knows well’ (11), even as only a few are able to overcome its temptations and resist its tumultuous highs and lows” (Fleischmann 116). This shows how widespread attraction of lust is. In addition to lust being irrepressible, once the act is fulfilled, it is almost always regretted: “As Shakespeare wrote, the world well knows that sexual intercourse without love is often a grave disappointment and can lead to torment in a wide variety of forms. Unfortunately, many people have to learn this truth by bitter experience” (Delaney 3). The only way that a person realizes how unpleasant lust is, is through experiencing it. The speaker makes a realization at the end of the poem that lust is only comprehended by looking at all its facets. He suggests that lust offers heaven while searching for it, but lust offers hell when it is

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