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Sonnet 138 Deception

Decent Essays

Love in Deception
William Shakespeare’s sonnet 138, is centered on the poet and his compelling love for his mistress. It is a love poem where the reader is offered a bewildering viewpoint. Stylistic rhetorical tools are used to its advantages serving as a framework for describing the poems emotionally enthralling love story. Sonnet 138 emphasizes the artificial affection and faith between the poet and his mistress, who both equally approve that their relationship is based on deception. Both the poet, and his supposed mistress, decide never to reveal the reality about how their relationship is on terms of unspoken truths. Though the majority of the poem is about the constraints of the poet and his mistress’s outlandish relationship, it also …show more content…

Throughout the sonnet, the connotations of the word “truth” manipulate the perceptions of the relationship. In the first quatrain, the poet’s love “swears that she is made of truth,” (1). Immediately, the reader speculates upon the meaning of truth. It could mean that the narrator's love swears she is honest with him or the word “truth” can also be seen to suggest fidelity. Through the second quatrain, the poet exaggerates upon “truth” (fidelity) in the relationship through two other connotations of the word. The narrator suggests that the woman’s affectionate external affairs are truths, and the narrator's hidden knowledge of this fact is another truth. Through the three truths, a paradox is created: “simple truth,” (8) is “suppressed,” (8) to preserve the truth of fidelity. In the third quatrain, the narrator further solidifies the paradox by labeling …show more content…

When analyzing the sonnet further one can say that Shakespeare purposely personifies the speaker’s mentality as a woman to identify his own uneasiness towards old age. The speaker’s mentality can be referred to as a woman because women tend to be more self-conscious of their age: “And wherefore say not I that I am old?”(10).Within this statement the speaker can’t admit that he is old. That is why his mentality can be referred to the woman that he loves. The “woman” keeps his way of thinking young. He doesn’t consider himself to be old, even though he knows it. Personification in the poem reflects the mentality that women and men feel when they get to a certain age. This helps one understand and wonder if Shakespeare feared of getting

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