He then proceeds to bombard us with images of natural nuisances such as windy days that "…shake the darling buds of May," hot weather magnified because it is coming from heaven, and changing seasons. Shakespeare has taken the idea of a warm breezy summer day and twisted it into a sweltering day with the sun beating down on us. However, in the lines after the destruction of a nice day, he makes us smile by the comments he showers on his love. He tells us that his love’s beauty shall remain…
Shakespeare uses two powerful metaphors in line five and in line six to compare the summer's imperfections to the perfection of the beloved. In line five he uses a metaphor "Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines" to describe that in the summer the sun gets to hot and this is yet another imperfection of a summer day which the beloved is superior to. Although some may compare there beloveds eyes with the glow or beauty of "the eye of heaven" here the speaker has chosen to claim the opposite saying…
Sonnet 75 as well as sonnet 18 displays a dialogue that discusses the issue of immortality. While sonnet 18 describes the persona's internal debate on how is the best way to immortalize his beautiful lover, sonnet 75 by Spenser, reproduces an internal debate, conversation, between the persona and his lady. The dialog in sonnet 75 is no more than a literary convention, an artifice that permits the poet a clever exposition of the central subject of the sonnet; immortality through the readers/ auditors…
differs from shake spear's attitude because she is cynical about love but Shakespeare is more romantic. At the beginning of Valentine it is similar to Sonnet 18 because she decides not to give her lover a traditional Valentine gift because she feels it doesn't show him how she loves him and she wants him to think about their relationship so she decides she will give him an onion. This is similar to sonnet 18 because Shakespeare decides not to do that traditional comparison to describe his lover…
Although Shakespeare appears to be conforming, he still elevates his work above the exhausted conventions of other Elizabethan sonneteers. Instead of objectifying his lover through trite comparisons, he declares that she is too beautiful and pleasant to be compared even to a day of the most enjoyable season of the year. While most consider the realm of nature to be eternal and that of humans to be transitory, Shakespeare accentuates the death of a season and imbues his sweetheart with everlasting…
Right through this sonnet Shakespeare keeps picking and making fun of every aspect of his wife’s looks. The way in which this is done by Shakespeare is by firstly mentioning something that is of natural beauty and then saying that his wife is the complete opposite. An example in which Shakespeare does this is when he says ‘if snow be white, why then her breasts are dun’. He is saying that his mistress’s breasts are far from being snow white. Shakespeare carries on with this negative imagery…
introduced as hopelessness in the survival of beauty. True to sonnet form, the second quatrain confirms the previously presented argument, and poses a similar question as the anguish of the speaker and the dilemma of time’s progression are heightened. Line 5 starts with “O,” eliciting the speaker’s great anguish at the predicament of time and it is accented, breaking the traditional iambic pentameter meter in which Shakespeare writes: O, how shall summer’s honey breath…
sun (Ray, 10). Once Shakespeare concludes speaking about the Summer metaphor, he begins the third stanza with a contradiction to support the fact that the woman is not as temporary as a Summer’s day or even as a mortal human. Widening the scope of the sonnet from "day" to "Summer" and now to "Death" (Vendler, 120), he purports that her "eternal Summer shall not fade…Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade"—she will continue to be "fair" and young. Shakespeare continues the metaphor of…
he will live again. Although it was common to compare a beloved's beauty to the beauty seen in nature, it was not common for the object of the male writer's affection to be another male. Shakespeare will never be just another poet because of his originality and honesty when describing his romances. In sonnet 130, he wrote honestly about the beauty of the woman he desired. The differences regarding his physical attractions to his two loves, the fair man and now the dark woman, are astounding. "…
the fire that kept him alive, only withered away his youth into ash. Consumed as it was by the fire, and forever to stay as ash, on the very deathbed he had made. A deathbed he can’t escape, since his youth has become ashes. What is it then that Shakespeare saying? It must mean for people not to take life lightly, instead we must understand life to its fullest. We must then care for what we have, love what we have, and hold on to what we have. Can we then believe we can hold onto someone forever? With…
Love lasts longer and Shakespeare again uses imagery to demonstrate this in line four: "And summer's lease hath all too short a date." The speaker believes that the love he feels is not leased for a limited time. Shakespeare emphasizes with imagery that the speaker's love is eternal: "But thy eternal summer shall not fade." This line of the sonnet also indicates the turn. It gives a similarity towards nature and love. Though with the summer only occupying a short term of time this reinforces that…
The mysterious dedication of Shakespeare’s sonnets has confused critics and readers. Some of them are addressed to a patron of letter who is also addressed as a friend and the latter ones to an imaginary and conventional mistress. But some of them are also philosophical in Nature and not addressed to any particular person. In some the theme of Carpe Diem has been emphasized, like in sonnet 123 “NO, Time thou shalt not boast that I do change.” Shakespeare has stated explicitly that the essence of…
It disputes whether Shakespeare himself wrote the plays and sonnets or if it was someone else writing under a pseudonym. There are countless theories of who the writer might actually be but the main suspects are Shakespeare himself, Edward de Vere, Sir Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, William Stanley, Roger Manners, Sir Walter Raleigh and Mary Sidney Herbert (Pressley). The first to be presumed the writer is Shakespeare himself. Many theorists believe it wasn’t Shakespeare due to the fact that…
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…
Similar to the metaphor is the simile. Shakespeare makes a powerful comparison to man as a developing plant. "That men as plants increase ... Cheered and Checked even by the self-same sky" (Shakespeare, lines 5-6). Like plants, men develop, grow, as well as multiply. Both are weathered by the same conditions, and energized by the same source. Again, this comparison allows us to see the simplicity of a plant, and relate it to the complexity of man. By Shakespeare making the relation on a smaller scale…
Shakespeare begins with, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? / Thou art more lovely and temperate: / Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, / And summer's lease hath too short a date . . ."(I-4). In sonnet 73, Shakespeare writes, "That time of year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, / Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang," (1-4). Shakespeare wrote two different sonnets that referred to…
by 1597, Shakespeare had the second largest house in Stratford, called the New House. By 1599, Shakespeare and the Chamberlain's Men had built their own theater, called the Globe, in which many of his most famous plays were performed for the first time. In 1609, publisher Thomas Thorpe had printed a collection of 154 of Shakespeare's sonnets. In 1611, Shakespeare left London and moved back to Stratford, where his wife lived. Eventually on his 52nd birthday, on April 23, 1616, Shakespeare died to an…
In reference to this repeated theme, in the introduction to the Penguin Classics printing of the Sonnets (though in reference specifically to sonnet 84), editor John Kerrigan concludes: '"Which hyperbolic poet", Shakespeare asks, "which most-sayer, can exceed this sublime truism, that 'you alone are you'. For you comprise the only things which, in honesty, you can be compared with"'. This sonnet serves to invoke a strong sense of realism in love, arguing that as strong an intensity of emotion…
The question of whether Shakespeare was a bi-sexual has never been answered. Shakespeare uses very emotive words in his sonnets, which captures you amongst the words and involves the readers mind, body and soul. For instance in his famous sonnet "Shall I compare thee…?", Shakespeare compares someone to the beauty of nature, thus his first line and the title of the sonnet. He uses a rhetorical question to inhibit the fact that he knows the answer himself and needs no one to confirm it.…
Sonnet CXXX is written by Shakespeare, were like all the other typical courtly love poems in base to its structure of how it hath been written. In based to its structure it follows that usual structure of Shakespearean sonnets which mostly it has been written in iambic pentameter, ten syllables per line. The rhyme scheme of this sonnet is ababcdcdefefgg. The two lines are being intended with the rhyming couplets “And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare- As any she belied with false compare”…
Petrarch’s Sonnet is an expression of his love for his mistress; he describes her as attractive and sublime. This love may be seen as superficial. Another renowned poet and playwright of Elizabethan times was William Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s one hundred thirtieth sonnet introduced a new era of sonnets. Far more different from traditional sonnets of the 1600’s, Sonnet 130 has also been recognized as ‘Anti-Petrachian’. In comparison Sonnet 130 by William Shakespeare has the…
In Sonnet 43, Shakespeare writes that his love has great powers, to make the world transform from darkness to light. The days are dark and sad until he saw her, but his nights are always bright from sight of her in his dreams: "All days are nights to see till I see thee,/ All nights bright days when dreams do show thee me." In the sonnet that follows, he extends this idea by saying, "If the dull substance of my flesh were thought,/ Injurious distance should not stop my way." Here, Shakespeare wishes…
nor no man ever lov'd (Shakespeare 343)." This line is especially effective because they are the words of Shakespeare, who wrote more about love than anything else. Shakespeare is really saying that if he is wrong about love, then he has written nothing at all, which is obviously not true! The second way in which these sonnets are similar is in the way they all contain a very strong love theme. In "Sonnet 116", this theme is expressed as a definition of love. Shakespeare defines love as something…
Marvell does this to put her under pressure to have sex with him; this is a fear tactic and a persuasive technique. He also associates the passing of time with her beauty fading, to make her more self conscious and see that she should have sex with him beauty fades and she becomes ugly, then nobody will have sex with her. He uses fear tactics throughout the poem to persuade her to have sex with him; this affects the mood of the poem making it more threatening and tenser. For example; ‘To…
In Shakespeare' case, with all the talk about him and young men, he could be writing about any one of the Earls that he was "involved" with. Another interpretation of Sonnet #73 is that instead of the Sonnet focusing on death, the theme of the Sonnet is the passing of youth. The Sonnet also twists in its view at the couplet, it goes from being about the speaker's life to the addressee's life. This interpretation is from a note in the June 1948 Explicator. In the article R.M. Lumiansky argues…
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…
second quatrain Shakespeare uses strong imagery of war and destructiveness. He says that no war or physical damage to the world will erase the memory of the poem. Nothing will ruin “the living record of [his] memory” (Shakespeare line 8). In the third quatrain he reiterates the idea of immortality and image of destruction and waste is continued. Shakespeare writes, “’gainst death and all-oblivious enmity/ shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room” (Shakespeare lines 9-10).…
calculable measure but the "worth" is "unknown." Shakespeare repeats words to strengthen his proclamation of the immutability of true love. In lines 2-3, "Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds," is echoed in line 11, "Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks." The word bends in line 4 recurs later in the "bending sickle" of Time, and the image is so clear of the flower-like charm being struck down by Time. Time, says Shakespeare, cannot injure true love, although it does ravish…
who left Stratford and became a Jesuit, eventually rising to the office of Grand Penitentiary (Mabillard). Shakespeare would have been raised among very theological and religious teachings while learning his literary skills. Shakespeare's literary approach in this sonnet may be more that of a spiritual abstract than that of a plain forward love triangle. By viewing Shakespeare's sonnet 144 with a bias religiosity we can view an interpretation that creates a picture of human struggle that is very…
The poet is speaking to the young man mentioned in his previous sonnets. Lines 2 and 3 speak of hearing the bells toll, which announce a death of a member of the church, and of how the man should inform the world of the poet’s death (Shakespeare 71.2-3). Also, the bells will take part in announcing to the world the passing. Line 4 states, “From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell” (Shakespeare 71.4). Shakespeare’s description of the world as vile leads me to believe that he viewed the…
between men were usually openly affectionate, Sonnet 20 reveals a homosexual desire that the poet seems to be obsessed with. The Shakespearean sonnet does not follow the ideal form of an iambic pentameter. Shakespeare plays with this poem and deliberately stretches each line so that all fourteen lines end with an eleventh syllable. The feet have been marked and each line is left with an extra syllable at the end. Shakespeare was well-aware of the iambic pentameter…
For Petrarch, the sonnet sequence consisted of a series of love poems written by an adoring lover to an unattainable lady of unsurpassed beauty and grace. The love in his sonnets was elaborate and artificial. The unattainable love object of Petrarch inspired many English poets. By Shakespeare's time, the sonnet sequence and its subject matter, was a well established convention. (Moulton, 561) The English altered the sonnet into three quatrains and a concluding couplet.The Petrarchan…
One of the sonnets written by Petrarch is called “Soleasi Nel Mio Cor”. Translated by Thomas Higginson the octet tells of the death a beautiful woman he loved. She was ‘a noble lady who ruled his humble heart.’ ‘She ruled in beauty o'er this heart of mine, A noble lady in a humble home.’ The rest of the octet tells us in impersonal terms that she has died and how love is overcome with grief and no words can be found for their sorrow. ‘And love whose light no more on earth finds room…
Shakespeare himself became a master of the sonnet, having written a total of 154. Like Petrarch, his subject matter was love, but Shakespeare was an innovative with the sonnet as he was with his plays. He wrote of the relationship between the intensity of love and its emphemerality, as in Sonnet 73, quoted above, and of the reality rather than the the reality of the sonnet lady, as in Sonnet 130: "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun." Clearly, then, his decision to evoke the sonnet and then…
sickles compass come” Shakespeare comments on the blindness of this ideal love (Ln: 9-10). Time, although it may be able to fade someone’s physical appearance, cannot touch love. Love is immortal and unchanging regardless of any effect time would have on ones physical appearance. The couplet changes in tone from the rest of the sonnet. In contrast to the descriptive images used to catalogue the virtues of love, the couplet is a stern straightforward set of words. Sonnet one hundred thirty describes…
in this sonnet 'love alters not with breefe houres and weekes'. All three of the poems attempt to defy time through love, although they do this in very different ways. Shakespeare is almost trying to teach a lesson to the society of that time, a lesson that is still relevant today. Due to the lesson being on love and marriage it adds to the religious element within this poem. Also due to the large volume of hyperbolic language, it seems as though Shakespeare is religiously…
this metaphor to underline that true feelings does not fade away even after a breakup. The author starts off by saying what love is not, before he says what love is. Shakespeare is using this approach to state that love is an unbreakable feeling and it can survive through changes. In the first three lines of his sonnet Shakespeare maintains the repletion of such words as “love” and “love”, “alters” and “alteration”, “remover” and “remove”. This way he underlies the consistency of feelings that…
Shakespeare uses lines five through eight of the sonnet to describe the closing of a day, and the onset of night: In me thou seest the twilight of such day, As after Sunset fadeth in the West, Which by and by black night doth take away, Death's second self that seals up all in rest. Like the season of Fall, the twilight of a day is a metaphor for the passing of time. Each new day can be seen as a life itself. Each morning and afternoon -- when the day…
Trisomy 18 cannot be cured because you cannot fix chromosomes but only can fix the defects that occur because of the chromosomal disorder. This disorder is a problem with the number of chromosomes a person is born with. The 18th chromosome is half duplicated causing birth defects and problems in their development, also allowing only for a short lifespan. This disorder is not inherited, but instead happens randomly when the chromosomes of the mother and father combine and a third chromosome 18 is formed…
In case the traditional view is not familiar, I'll review it briefly here. It states that William Shakespeare was born in 1654 in Stratford-upon-Avon, a small town near London. He married at age 18, had three children, and died in 1616. In that time, he penned at least 154 sonnets and 37 plays. He lived a commoner's life and was an actor with the Globe Theater in London. His death sparked no comment anywhere. This much is generally agreed upon. To our detriment, very few documents exist pertaining…
Loss has been experienced over centuries and many poets have written on the subject. William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30 and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam are two poems from different eras that express the idea of loss. Both were written after the loss of a close male friend, and both are only one poem from a series of poems. Shakespeare lived in England where he was born in 1564 and died in 1616 and Tennyson also lived in England where he was born in 1809 and died in 1892, the poems being written…
Each poem reflects the emotions that Shakespeare experiences with the duality of his love. Although each of these poems only show one half of this duality, "Sonnet 144" expresses both while giving a further basis for the understanding of "Sonnet 116" and "Sonnet 147." "Sonnet 144" opens with the line "Two loves I have of comfort and despair," (1). When used as a foundation, this opening line reveals that the reader can expect one of the two sonnets to deal with the comfort of love while the other…
A typical rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet would be that of ABABCDCDEFEFGG. Spenserian sonnets combine both the Shakespearean and Italian forms. Just like the Shakespearean form it uses 3 quatrains followed by a couplet. However the rhyme scheme is like the Italian, linking all stanzas together ABABBCBCCDCDEE. An essential element of all three types of sonnets is that of the volta which is used to signify a change in subject matter, for example in the Italian form the volta normally…
speaks of broken marble, neglected tombs, war, fire, and the greatest challenge, time, but, through it all, his love will live on in the eyes of the future. In his elaborate comparisons, Shakespeare uses extensive imagery along with personification and analogies from the very beginning of the 18th sonnet where he characterizes the admired one as a summer’s day. His descriptions of “besmeared” tombs and the fiery wars described in the 55th pull the reader in and force a vision of impending doom…
The Sonnets published under Shakespeare’s name added up to a total of one hundred and fifty-four, delivered in a numerical order, and all of them in the traditional format of a sonnet, save number one twenty-six. Of the one hundred and fifty-four sonnets, it is theorized that one hundred and twenty-six of these were written to a “young man,” while several more were written to a mysterious “dark lady” (a third subject is thought to be a “rival poet”, to which references are scattered throughout the…
reciprocated, without additional information. The meanings of the poem's brilliantly varied iambic lines revolve around love's one fixed star, extending this image to the whole sonnet. Quatrain 1 begins with the unusual scansion of spondee, trochaic, iambic, pyrrhic, and spondee. No matter how unusual the situation, Shakespeare will not object to mutual love between honest people. Furthermore, their love should not depend on circumstances or people's opinions. The iambic foot of "Which alters" links…
minds” (1) just as the sonnet commences allows the topic of the poem to be introduced quickly into the reader’s mind. Shakespeare uses the common phrase often heard in weddings “to make an explicit equation of love and marriage,” (Livingston) and this allusion, too, gives him another opportunity to support his opinion that marriage ought to be the completion of love, as it stretches for an eternity. His point is further made through his adamant language, “Let me not” (Shakespeare 1). There, “the prevalence…
it is set at 18 people make their own choices of whether to drink or not. It is also evident that setting the drinking age at 21 against 18 does not eliminate teenage drinking problems; instead it just keeps them on hold until the teens get to 21 years of age. In some cases keeping the minimum drinking age at 21 encourages teens to drink more. Hence drinking age should be set at the age of 18. Here are some of the reasons why. Why the drinking age should be lowered to 18 Turning 18 years means…
The first stage is saying if we had enough time, I could spend all the ages of this world loving you and flattering you until you were content. I would spend all my life giving you everything you deserve and you could be in one place and me in another, but it wouldn't matter as time will never run out and we will always be in love. Marvell then goes on to say that he would have loved her before God sent the flood and that she could refuse him forever if that was what she…
encounter occurs. It is quite obvious that she has the power to rekindle and reconnect this relationship, if she should choose to do so. A Petrarchan sonnet, such as this one, is divided into two main parts, called the octave and the sestet. The octave is the first eight lines long of the sonnet. The sestet occupies the remaining six lines of the sonnet. Between the octave and the sestet, an imperative change takes place within the poem. The…