Shakespeare's Sonnets 18, 73, 97
Poets have often looked to nature for inspiration and as a vehicle for self-expression. Throughout his lifetime, William Shakespeare is known to have written 154 sonnets, which cover various topics such as love, mortality, and the passage of time. Of these sonnets, sonnet numbers 18, 73, and 97 incorporate seasonal symbols that allow Shakespeare to express his love, the passage of time and its effect on him, and serve as a metaphor for the intense desolation he feels when he is away from the person he loves.
Sonnet 18, more commonly known by its opening line of "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," utilizes seasonal symbols as a measure of beauty. In this sonnet, Shakespeare considers nature to be beautiful, however, he points out its cyclical nature and argues that his beloved's beauty, unlike nature's, is constant. He begins, "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 all too short a date," which point to a measurement of time (line 1-4). Through these lines, Shakespeare comments on the length of a summer day, and the entire summer itself, which he believes his beloved's beauty outlasts. Shakespeare proceeds to comment on actual summer days, noting how temperatures rise and fall, and how intermittent clouds can dim the world, yet despite these solar changes, his beloved's beauty remains constant. He explains, "Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,/And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;/And every fair from fair sometime declines,/By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd" (5-8). While Shakespeare continues to use seasonal symbolism...
Shakespeare, Sonnet 57 A Reading of William Shakespeare's Sonnet 57 Shakespeare's Sonnet 57 begins with a striking metaphor: "being your slave." Shakespeare does not soften the image by using a simile to suggest he is "like a slave" -- he is already a slave because he is in love. Structurally any Shakespeare sonnet consists of three quatrains and a concluding couplet, in which the quatrains in some way speak to each other,
The ironic twist is the play of what is to be expected to be said and what is actually said (or, going back to the argument, what is expected from love and what actually occurs): It begins: "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; / Coral is far more red than her lips' red" From here the sonnet continues with a much less pleasing list of the qualities about
Of all Shakepeare's works, sonnets seem best to portray this word marriage from past and present. Not only do the words and style of the sonnet show this transition of time, but the era in which it was created was a great transitory time as well. Gutenberg had invented the printing press over a hundred years previous, but the full benefits of that marvelous invention had just begun to be felt
Shakespeare Sonnets In both Sonnet 71 and in Sonnet 73, the narrator contemplates old age and death. Both poems use rich and dark imagery to convey the theme of human mortality, although Sonnet 73 is more filled with metaphor than 71. However, both poems are composed according to the strict rules of the poetic form: in iambic pentameter with fourteen lines organized into three quatrains and a final couplet. Iambic pentameter
Sonnet 165 by Shakespeare focuses on a young lover, whose emotions are deeply connected with whatever his sweetheart says to him. Thus, the entire poem relates the effects of the words "I hate" on the young speaker. The poem is addressed to the reader, and not to a specific listener. The speaker is asking for sympathy, as he evoked sympathy from his lady. The poem thus basically focuses on the fact
" Again, the poet employs repetition (of the word "fair") to emphasize his point. Moreover, "chance" and "changing" provide some alliteration, which is otherwise rare in this particular Shakespeare sonnet. Line nine begins with the word "But," to herald a shift in tone: the speaker went from listing summer's deficiencies to pointing out the particular qualities of his lover that make her superior. The speaker focuses almost exclusively on her "eternal
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